Life story

I grew up in a small village near an industrial town in Kazakhstan. My dad, who workes as a train engineer, bought a computer in 2008, a year before I was born. I’ve been glued to computers for as long as I can remember. I started out gaming and eventually played Fortnite and osu! at a pro level.

At 9, I saw an opportunity in the Counter-Strike asset market and made my first $100 by building a trading platform for it. I bought myself a bike with that money. To grow the business, I taught myself to code during my daily two-hour bus commute to school.

Later, I got into competitive programming and math, eventually competing internationally. Around that time, life forced me to take things into my own hands. I landed my first job at 14 as a frontend engineer (no AI IDEs back then!). It didn’t last long: I left after a month and a half when a few of my friends invited me to join them and start a game studio. The job was super boring, and I felt like my crazy energy was going nowhere - even though the pay was crazy.

A few failures later, we ended up building a game that reached 12m users and, later, an ad platform for it that generated 6 figure GMV. Both were growing so fast that I had to work 14 hours a day to scale them, so I dropped out of high school.

Last summer, I built TabAI to solve a problem of my own: staying focused while it took care of repetitive tasks for me. It was the first time I really got to know what Silicon Valley was like: I met one of my future angels, and he opened up a whole new world for me. (I hadn’t even watched The Social Network until I got to SF, haha.)

After that, moving there became my dream. I started scaling TabAI like crazy, ended up signing the first SAFEs of my life, and actually moved to San Francisco at the end of May 2026.

Ever since I started coding, I’ve been thinking about the future of human-computer interaction. What will the next generation of phones and computers look like, especially with AI moving this fast?

Most of what I’ve built recently has revolved around that: using AI to improve everyday life so you can be more present and productive.

But I kept running into the same bottleneck: AI still struggles to use GUIs built for humans. That’s the gap people are trying to close with computer-use models.

After spending time in SF, I decided to help solve the computer-use problem by fueling research with the best possible data. Now I’m building Heka to be a catalyst for the next generation of human-computer interaction. Got some cool angels too.

Yet I won’t tell you why most people call me Igor Blink.