ByMartina Di Licosa,
Forbes Staff.
A
nton Pavlovsky, the 40-year-old Ukrainian entrepreneur and founder of Headway Inc, which develops gamified educational apps, was in London when the war in his homeland began in February 2022. By that point, Headway was already taking off, having reached 20 million users since its founding in 2019, and Pavlovsky was taking a tour of the new UK office. When he heard the Russian army had invaded his homebase of Kyiv—where the company’s headquarters and 150 of its employees were located—his first thought was for the safety of his team. “I didn’t want to leave them,” he says, “I came back willingly.”
He left the UK within hours, flying first to Lublin, Poland, and then to Romania, where he trekked on foot to reach Ukraine's southwestern border. Pavlovsky’s father, a 60-year-old former army commander—immediately re-enlisted and met his son at the border.
