Who We Are
Ethora is a team of passionate Computer Science and Software Development professionals brought together by a joint mission of delivering the infrastructure of a future internet.
It is our understanding that the technologies of internet communication, programmable money (web3) and AI, are converging together during the 2020s - 2030s, resulting in a paradigm shift leading to the new ways people and businesses are going to be present “online”, and further diffusing the border between our physical and digital capabilities.
We have embarked on a mission to ensure this shift happens in a sustainable way, creating value for society and ecosystems worldwide. We are here to bridge the gaps and lend a helping hand with our technology products and consulting, to ensure that communities and businesses can fully benefit from the new technology, whilst preserving and reinforcing their uniqueness, their culture and their ideas.
Read further below on the history behind Ethora, our Mission and what we do to achieve it. Also, get in touch to find out how you could benefit from what we do and how to join this exciting journey.
History behind Ethora
“It's been a long road
Getting from there to here”
“Faith of the heart” by Diane Warren
The background history behind Ethora is relatively long. Compared to high-octane VC funded tech startups, we have taken a long time to get here. We bootstrapped, experimented, pivoted, made some bets that didn’t work, but avoided betting too much and generally, we persevered.
This also means, of course, that you are getting a time-tested, organic product, with an experienced and determined team behind it.
You can be sure we are here to support you in the long run.
So here is our history for those who might be interested in it.
Our history
2004-2007: Research in AI and Information Retrieval
Ethora’s founder, Taras Filatov, is a technology entrepreneur originally from Kharkiv, Ukraine who resides in London, UK. His core ability of foreseeing the technology trends and harnessing newest developments in Computer Science to build the innovative solutions for the emerging markets, has been pivotal during the formation of what is now called Ethora.
Taras obtained his PhD in Computer Science in the United Kingdom in 2007, where he focused on Information Retrieval, Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning in his research. The result of his research was not just a PhD thesis, but also a working software demonstrator called “Self-Organising Web Portal”.
The system basically did the following: crawl and index a website, then convert the indexed web pages into vector space using tf.idf metric. Afterwards, Taras would manually convert the high-dimensional vector space corpus into lower dimensional (compressed representation) using PCA (mathematical approach) or Kohonen’s SOM (Self Organizing Map artificial neural network). The compress vector space would then be used as a database behind the Self-Organising Web Portal web application which: (1) visualised the knowledge of the system and (2) used an evolutionary algorithm to provide an adaptive navigation over the indexed knowledge.
2008-2010: iPhone apps boom
In 2008, back in Kharkiv Ukraine, Taras founded a successful mobile apps development software company which was one of the first worldwide to provide professional iPhone apps development services.
The team worked with clients globally building innovative applications for prominent industries and causes such as Hollywood movie launches (including Avatar movie), healthcare, educational gaming and so on.
The young business didn’t have funds to purchase iPhones and Macbooks initially, so they would rely on a bunch of “lifehacks” until they became successful and started to make decent income. First apps were built using the iPhone simulator, then a used iPhone 3G was purchased, but the development has continued on “Hackintoshes”. Hackintosh was an Intel-based PC that allowed, albeit with difficulty, to launch MacOS on it, thus avoiding the higher costs of Apple computers.
2009-2011: Backend-as-a-Service product
By 2009, the business was going well and the company had been building a lot of iPhone apps and started working on Android applications too. The apps started to become more complex, requiring a server-side logic (backend) and an API. This all required certain infrastructure, maintenance, created overhead and was less fun since the team loved to spend time building mobile apps for the customers, focusing more on the frontend and creating great user experiences.
Aiming to solve this pain, Taras created a simple backend-as-a-service engine with its first version coded in PHP. The purpose of this engine was to productize the backend and infrastructure part of mobile applications development so that developers don’t have to manage the servers and server-side logic, and can focus on building great mobile apps.
The product was initially open-source, hosted on Google Code. Initially it had a limited feature set such as user accounts and profiles management, a leaderboard API and files storage API.
While being busy with the SaaS product, Taras didn’t fully abandon his interests in the Machine Learning and AI field. Co-authored with brother Dmytro Filatov, he published a paper on the importance of vector space mapping for knowledge representation systems.
N.B. This will echo back 10 years later when Ethora embraces LLMs, vector embeddings and RAG - keep reading!
2013-2018: Focus on chat and instant messaging
In 2010, Taras permanently relocated to London, UK, and continued developing both the apps building business as well as the backend-as-a-service product. Driven by customers' demand, the product has obtained new functionalities including the chat server which was an important moment as the product, rebranded and improved, has focused on communication-as-a-service space and has eventually become the driving force of the business.
During this period, Taras and team have gained deep understanding of technologies such as chat & messaging, XMPP messaging protocol, SIP, WebRTC video calling and so on. The team has gained experience in building a high-load infrastructure, provisioning both multi-tenant setup for thousands of active applications and hundreds of dedicated servers for enterprise customers, helping to power thousands of apps and support the business of major FTSE500 enterprises.
2018-2020: Web3 backend platform (“Dappros”)
In 2018, having exited the business, Taras founded Dappros with an aim to repeat the previous success and build a “picks and shovels” platform bridging the gap between the traditional businesses are not tech savvy, and the newly emerging technology wave of blockchain, web3, smart contracts and, DeFi.
Dappros Platform has emerged as a server-side infrastructure combining backend-as-a-service and blockchain-as-a-service features. The features introduced were: API layer allowing businesses to track transactions, supply chain events and document signing on immutable ledger via EVM (Ethereum-based) public or private blockchain(s), own L2 blockchain infrastructure, tokenization an API layer and interfaces.
2020-2022: Smart contracts for real-world problems
During 2020 - 2023, Dappros developed its web3 infrastructure platform without gaining significant traction, probably due to the substantial gap between blockchain technologies and the needs of the enterprise sector.
Despite the challenging market, Dappros has successfully developed and helped launch multiple projects with web3, DAO, tokenization components within real estate, finance, and sports verticals, and contributed to European Commission research on utilization of blockchain in the carbon credits market and general business applications.
2021-2023: Communication technology is back
In parallel, Dappros/Ethora has extended its focus to becoming a universal backend infrastructure platform to power powerful B2B applications, at the same time benefitting from the modern technology stack. During this period we have also added chat / instant messaging capability. Based on their existing vast domain expertise, the team has decided to implement the architecture using XMPP protocol and an Erlang based Ejabberd chat server, the most reliable and scalable communication technology out there.
There have been a number of fascinating projects and applications, leveraging the updated universal infrastructure, including, for example, a technology allowing a sports team, artist or celebrity to issue NFT-based digital collectibles in a chat room, where the visitors can engage with them in a group chat, purchase or collect these digital art items into their digital wallet etc. The work on the chat infrastructure has continued in future phases including the Ethora chat bots framework and NPM chat component.
In 2023, Ethora became one of the finalists selected for the AWS B2B SaaS Accelerator cohort. As a result, we have received super valuable feedback and support from AWS London and a global team of experts. Most importantly, this allowed Ethora to become more aligned with the AWS ecosystem, improve its use of AWS infrastructure and pass on these improvements to our customers and users.
2022-2023: Open-source client & web3 bots framework
During 2022-2023, Dappros has also introduced a mobile app and later a web app component of the platform, realizing that typical real-world use cases often require a ready client-side application (frontend), an easy interface for interacting with end users. Without the client-side component, any backend-as-a-service platform is not a full cycle solution and still requires weeks if not months of client-side development. With ready client-side app engines providing full support of Web, desktop, iOS and Android platforms, Dappros / Ethora has become a full cycle backend and frontend platform universally applicable to dozens of real-world use cases.
In parallel, the team has developed and released a web3 powered chat bots framework. In addition to standard chat bots functionality, leveraging Ethora infrastructure, each bot has its own digital wallet and can interact with smart contracts. This has enabled multiple functionalities implemented in a number of innovative projects in the areas of sports (fans connect, digital collectibles) and enterprise (on-chain documents tracking, carbon accounting etc).
2024: Polished communications product
By late 2024, Ethora client engines (Web, iOS, Android) have matured and received a “face lift” - a new professional design. This has been backed by further improvements of Ethora chat protocol, bots framework, API layer, documentation, and admin panel.
Ethora engine and our team have helped to launch multiple projects enabling instant messaging, documents wallet, and AI bots functionalities for such business verticals as healthcare, legal, insurance and education.
We have successfully navigated industry specific and project specific challenges including HIPAA and SOC2 compliance, provisioning of embedded chat UI within legacy web portals, enabling better backend-to-backend and API layer integrations to support successful strategic launches for our customers.
2025: AI chapter: Leveraging Information Retrieval and LLMs
The latest advancements of AI, especially the emergence of publicly accessible Large Language Models (LLMs), unlocked new opportunities for the Ethora platform.
Ethora bots framework now includes LLM-powered AI chat bots, and Ethora platform has been extended with new capabilities and sub-products such as embeddable AI Chat Widget powered with RAG. Using their information retrieval experience and the deep understanding of Machine Learning and vector space representation of human knowledge, Taras Filatov and Ethora R&D team have been able to quickly deliver the business-friendly AI assistant and chat AI widget products that allow businesses to fully leverage the latest advancements in the foundational models and in the field of the applicable AI.
We continue our research and improvements of Ethora infrastructure to help you deliver the projects of your dreams.
Ethora now and our Mission
Our team and our platform’s “raison d'être” is our vision of the future internet and the future of our society and our culture. Our understanding is that we are capable and therefore responsible for making it better.
In our opinion, the internet, AI, decentralized economy and the societies of the future converge to form the future of abundance, cultural and scientific development, and opportunities.
We can’t even easily explain what that future is. In Plato’s philosophy, we can only grasp some reflections of that ideal world. We can try implementing it in our texts, in our work, in our art, in our communications, and we may never reach that ideal. But, with our customers, with our team, we will make sure that we stay closer to it, and that we are the first to find out, to experiment with, and to implement the technologies and ways of thinking that bring us closer to that brighter version of our future, to have fun and to enjoy the ride!
Core principles:
- Complex advanced technologies should be packaged and easy to use. Let individuals and businesses express themselves, do business with each other and make new connections without distracting them from what they are best at. Thus, offer no-code and low-code solutions that can run in production in minutes
- At the same time, remain open to experimentation, customization, and in-depth exploration for those who need it. Offer easy guides, demos, and explainer materials allowing individuals and businesses to experiment with complex technology in new ways applicable to their domains
- Open-source but security first and enterprise friendly. All client-side code for Ethora client apps, chat bots etc is open-source and publicly available on Github. Server-side code is available in cloud or self-hosting modes, and is enterprise-grade secure
- Opportunities for all. Ethora platform and technology should enable the future internet where an individual or a self-funded startup can express themselves and do business side-by-side with large corporations. Provide everyone with technology leverage, promote healthy competition, leading to better products and services, for the benefit of all
Join our journey
If our values resonate with you and you’d like to explore how we can build the future together, we’d love to hear from you.