Forged by Fire: The Story of Ukrainian Entrepreneur Salome Mikadze-Struk

Salome Mikadze-Struk is no stranger to adversity. The daughter of refugees, she founded a software development company as an undergraduate during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — and kept it running after war broke out in her home country of Ukraine. Today, she channels those experiences into work as a tech startup mentor and public speaker, advocating for the central role of resilience in entrepreneurship.

An Early Emphasis on Education

Mikadze-Struk's parents were forced to flee their home in the Abkhazia region of Georgia during the early-1990s conflict there, eventually settling in Ukraine. "They left everything behind," she says. "You can zoom in on Google Maps and find their house — it's rubble now."

Despite that background, Mikadze-Struk says she and her sisters had a fairly ordinary middle-class childhood in Kyiv. Her father ran a small shop and her mother was a homemaker, but both placed a strong emphasis on education, encouraging their daughters to excel academically and participate in extracurricular science programs such as the Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

"They weren't wealthy, so they understood that the way for us to get ahead in life wasn't through investment — it was through earned achievement," she says.

At 14, her family discovered Ukraine Global Scholars, a nonprofit that helps talented students secure scholarships to study abroad. Through the program, she won a full scholarship to Emma Willard School, a private all-girls high school in Troy, New York.

Stepping Into Tech Entrepreneurship

After graduating in 2018, Mikadze-Struk enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., majoring in business administration. But the experience that truly set her career direction came outside the classroom: she won a startup competition with a medical device concept developed for a school project. Although that venture never materialized, it ignited her passion for entrepreneurship.

Ukraine's software industry was booming at the time, and before starting university she had begun attending startup events and competitions back home, where she met her future co-founder, Nor Newman.

Both were just 18, but they spotted a gap in the market: many founders had compelling ideas but lacked the technical capability to execute them, while talented engineering students struggled to find hands-on experience. Newman had initially been connecting startups with university classmates on an informal basis, but the two quickly recognized the commercial potential. "We realized we could actually build our own startup studio — working with startups as a team rather than just making introductions," Mikadze-Struk says.

When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, Mikadze-Struk was in the second semester of her sophomore year. Travel restrictions and lockdowns complicated daily life, but they also generated a surge of demand from businesses seeking to move their operations online. "COVID really turbocharged everything we were doing," she says.

Seizing the moment, Mikadze-Struk and Newman formally incorporated Movadex in Ukraine in early 2020. From the outset, they decided to offer more than engineering talent — they would help startups with product development end-to-end, recognizing that founders' visions for software often diverge sharply from actual user needs. "What really helped us grow wasn't just engineering capability or code quality — it was looking at the product holistically and truly understanding how users think," she says.

Persevering Through Adversity

Back in Ukraine, Mikadze-Struk had to manage a thriving company while attending classes remotely — studying at night and working during the day. Exhausting as it was, she could apply classroom lessons directly to her startup in real time, with each reinforcing the other.

Having navigated the pandemic, she soon faced another unexpected blow. In early 2022, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine upended her life once more. For her family, the trauma was particularly acute — they had already been forced from their home by the war in Georgia, and now history was repeating itself.

"Watching my parents see their daughters go through what they went through — that was truly heartbreaking," she says. "But at the same time, because I grew up hearing stories of their resilience, I had an inner strength that kept me from completely falling apart."

On the day of the invasion, the two co-founders told their employees to take time off and sent emails to clients warning of potential service disruptions. In the days that followed, they checked in on each team member's safety and worked to relocate as many staff as possible to the company's headquarters in Lviv, in western Ukraine.

By the following Monday, the company had resumed normal operations. In the weeks after, they partnered with the Lviv IT Cluster — a business association and nonprofit — to help place refugees displaced from heavily bombed areas in eastern Ukraine and assist them in finding employment. Throughout this period, Mikadze-Struk was simultaneously completing her final year at Georgetown remotely. "I spent about half of my senior year in air raid shelters," she says.

Championing Entrepreneurial Resilience

That summer, Mikadze-Struk completed her Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and learned she had been accepted into Stanford University's MBA program. In 2023, she temporarily stepped back from Movadex to study in California, and in 2024 welcomed the birth of her daughter.

Balancing graduate school and new motherhood, she continued to engage with the startup ecosystem as a mentor and public speaker. Now, having completed her Stanford MBA, she is returning to a more active leadership role at Movadex, with the goal of driving U.S. market expansion and helping clients understand and implement AI in their businesses.

As a Senior Member of the IEEE, Mikadze-Struk is fundamentally optimistic about the impact of AI. "AI has made the barrier to building software and prototyping dramatically lower — it's genuinely awe-inspiring," she says.

However, she notes that this requires engineers — especially entry-level developers entering the job market — to make a significant mindset shift. They need to "fall in love with AI" and embrace it as a powerful collaborative tool. And as AI increasingly handles the foundational work of writing code, engineers will need to cultivate higher-order skills such as systems thinking and architectural design.

Above all, in the face of rapid technological change, she argues that engineers must build their own adaptability and resilience. "It's exciting and unsettling at the same time, because you don't know what tomorrow will bring."

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