Dmytro Horilyk

Dmytro Horilyk began his career as a process engineer and later became a lead quality engineer at Arterium, one of Ukraine's leading pharmaceutical manufacturers. His work focused on quality assurance, regulatory compliance, computerized system validation, and data integrity, giving him firsthand insight into the inefficiencies of pharmacovigilance workflows.

Recognizing that pharmaceutical companies were still manually reviewing thousands of medical publications each week for potential drug safety issues, Dmytro joined forces with his brother, Artem Horilyk, and software engineer Myroslav Demchun to build DrugCard. Their goal was to use technology and artificial intelligence to automate one of the industry's most repetitive and compliance-critical processes.

Although technically skilled, Dmytro had little experience in sales, marketing, or company management. As CEO, he learned these disciplines from scratch, openly admitting what he didn't know and using customer conversations to shape the product. This humility became one of DrugCard's competitive strengths and helped build trust with early customers.

Under his leadership, DrugCard evolved from a simple literature-screening tool into a comprehensive AI-powered pharmacovigilance platform serving customers in 138 countries. The company expanded its capabilities to include AI-assisted case intake, regulatory intelligence, and adverse event management, reducing some workflows from approximately 20 minutes to just 90 seconds.

DrugCard attracted investment from Farmak, Think Bigger Capital, New Nordic Ventures, and angel investor Petro Chernyshov. In 2026, the company surpassed $1 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and completed its first acquisition by purchasing SIA OOM, a pharmacovigilance agency in Latvia, marking the beginning of its strategy to build an integrated European pharmacovigilance infrastructure.

Beyond business growth, Dmytro emphasizes continuous learning, honest leadership, and building organizations that can thrive beyond their founders. He credits much of DrugCard's success to listening carefully to customers, embracing unfamiliar challenges, and remaining willing to learn every step of the journey.