From a Ukrainian orphanage to an engine that builds whole companies.
“I am a simple man with complex ambitions.”
A boy who survived by building learned one lesson early: take something hard and make it feel effortless. Everything I make today — from AI platforms to spectroscopy training — is that same lesson at scale.
I never set out to build a company. I set out to survive, and survival taught me to build. This is the story of how that one instinct carried me from an orphanage in Ukraine to an engine that now launches whole AI businesses — and why none of it was ever really a pivot.
Follow the journey ↓My first shipped product, 2009 — rebuilt from the real screenshots. Survey software collected over wireless, in the field, into a database. The full 20-year track record →
“I wish I had all that knowledge about starting and running the business, intellectual property protections, finances — earlier.” — the regret from my first startup that became the product I build today.
Vitaly Kirkpatrick
Raised in a Ukrainian orphanage and foster care until 18, Vitaly arrived in the United States in 2005 with little but resolve. He rebuilt from the ground up — engineering, software, and an MBA; a hardware startup; two published books; and now an AI platform studio. The throughline never changed: make powerful things genuinely usable.
The journey — one instinct, seven chapters
Scroll to follow it. The honest version: milestones, not mythology.
The boy nobody was building for
I was born in Ukraine and grew up in an orphanage and foster care until I turned eighteen. When no one is building a future for you, you learn to build one yourself — quietly, with whatever is in front of you. That was my first system: survival, designed from scratch.
The instinct behind every product I ship started here — if the tool you need doesn't exist, you build it. “Resilience is just engineering applied to a hard life.”Learning how things work
I earned a degree in electronics and electrical engineering at Chernivtsi National University. For the first time, the world stopped being something that happened to me and became something I could take apart and understand. Circuits, signals, cause and effect — it felt like permission to think.
Engineering taught me systems thinking — the same mental model that became the backbone of how I architect software. “Every problem is inputs, transforms, and outputs.”Arriving with almost nothing
In 2005 I arrived in the United States with close to nothing in my pocket and no safety net waiting. I started over the way I always had. Within a few years I had added a computer science degree, and later an MBA — building on two continents because stopping was never an option.
Reinvention under constraint is a startup skill before it's a personal one. “Reinvention is a startup skill before it's a personal one.”CloviFi — make the hard thing effortless
The idea came at a gym: I wanted to keep hearing the TV as I moved between machines without bothering anyone. So I built CloviFi, a transmitter that streams TV audio privately to your phone and headphones. It became a CES 2018 Innovation Awards Honoree and a Commercial Integrator BEST Award winner — aimed at the 360 million people worldwide living with hearing loss.
CloviFi taught me my real craft, and the realization that the goal isn't one product — it's the ability to build whole businesses. “Take something hard and make it feel effortless.”
The real CloviFi WiFi HD audio transmitter — CES 2018 Honoree.
The storyteller chapter
I wrote my memoir, A Story of Vitaly — the misadventurous journey of a Ukrainian orphan past communism to self-independence — and later a love story, Finding Home in Love's Echo. Building tools and telling stories turned out to be the same impulse: give people something that works and makes them feel seen.
The same human-voice AI narration that reads my chapters aloud now powers training videos and publishing tools. “Storytelling and engineering, running on one engine.”Building a course, discovering a factory
In mid-2025, as a near-infrared technology consultant and trainer with 10+ years in food and agriculture, I set out to build a 32-lesson spectroscopy course — asking myself how to make learning genuinely easy and engaging for my students. I reached for my first AI agents, reused and rebuilt old code, and fought through tools that wouldn't follow instructions (early image trials ignored me; today I can edit any image surgically). I built the whole thing from scratch — narration, slide images, video assembly, autopublishing. Halfway through I realized I hadn't built a course. I'd built a factory.
Every capability I made for one course was secretly a standalone product — the seed of the entire CloviTek fleet. “Every capability for one course was secretly a standalone product.”One engine, a whole portfolio
CloviTek is that factory turned into a company: a single white-label AI engine that produces and runs a fleet of around 34 branded platforms — content, media, automation, legal, accessibility, security, leadgen, publishing and more — each launched under its customer's own brand and domain. It's the orphanage instinct grown up: if the tool doesn't exist, build the thing that builds the tools.
Systems thinking at its highest altitude — not one app, but the machine that manufactures apps. “Not one app, but the machine that manufactures apps.”Then & now ✦ for investors
Same founder, same instinct — but look at what producing media took then versus what the CloviTek engine produces now. The visual capability is part of the product.
What took weeks and a design budget then, the CloviTek engine produces in minutes now — for any of the ~34 brands it runs.
Founder's books ✦ ManuscriptSmith
Vitaly is also a published author. This shelf — covers, details, and a free in-browser reader — is the exact experience CloviTek can build for any author. We built it for ourselves first.
We don't just build it — we use it
Every element on this page is a reusable CloviTek capability. Here are a few you can put to work in your own site, store, course, or campaign.
Book & course reader ✦
Feature-rich catalog + flip-book reader + audiobook player — for authors, educators, and publishers.
AI narration ✦
Turn any text into natural narration — the same engine that voices SpectroScience lessons.
Video & deck assembly ✦
Slides → narrated video, automatically. Built from scratch for our own courses.
Site & page builder ✦
Prompt-to-site generation with a shared design system — the connective tissue of the suite.
Lead capture & funnels ✦
Forms, freebie hooks, and outreach — the same funnel we run on our own pages.
Story & journey blocks ✦
The very animated journey above — a reusable block for any “About” or launch page.
What's coming
We build in the open — each card is a chapter already in motion.
Launch under your own brand
Spin up a fully branded AI platform on your own domain, built by the same engine that runs our fleet.
A growing fleet of capabilities
Content, media, automation, legal, accessibility, security, leadgen and publishing — composable, and expanding.
Effortless by design
The CloviFi lesson, scaled: hard problems handled underneath, so the person on the other side just feels it work.
Software at the speed of an idea
What used to take a team a year now starts with a single decision. The factory is open.
Make the hard thing effortless — at scale.
From an orphanage in Ukraine to an engine that launches branded AI platforms, the throughline never changed. If you want software that used to take a team a year, this is where it starts.
Explore the CloviTek fleet →