Anton Pavlovsky, the 40-year-old Ukrainian entrepreneur and founder of Headway Inc., a company that develops gamified educational applications, was in London when the war began in his native country in February 2022. By then, Headway was already taking off, having reached 20 million users since its founding in 2019, and Pavlovsky was visiting the new office in the United Kingdom. When he learned that the Russian military had invaded his base of operations in kyiv—where the company’s headquarters and 150 of its employees were located—his first concern was the safety of his team. “I didn’t want to leave them,” he says, “I returned voluntarily.”
He left the UK within hours, flying first to Lublin, Poland, and then to Romania, where he walked on foot to Ukraine’s southwestern border. Pavlovsky’s father, a 60-year-old former army commander, immediately enlisted and joined his son at the border.
Together, they took Headway employees and hundreds of their family members out of the country, taking them to Warsaw, Poland, where the company set up a temporary office. Some decided to stay.
The year he founded Headway, Pavlovsky was 34 and a product manager at another startup, IT firm Genesis Tech, and devastated by the end of his five-year marriage. “It was difficult,” he tells Forbes “but it took me on a journey of self-discovery and self-reflection. I devoured books on psychology, interpersonal skills, mindfulness, and that stress rekindled my love of reading.” The books finally gave Pavlovsky the strength to move forward with his life. “After understanding, I realized. Most people are not lucky enough to go through this journey,” he says. “As much as I like to read, not everyone does.”
He still remembers the exact moment he decided to turn that revelation into a business. He was reading a blog by business author Lex Sisney, who specializes in organizational structure and business growth, when a profound question struck him. “What would you do if you knew that success was guaranteed?” Pavlovsky recalls. “It surprised me because I always asked myself: ‘What should I do to have a high probability of success?’ And here it was the other way around,” he continues, “I just wanted to convey to people the ability to learn and study.”
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Pavlovsky approached Genesis with the idea of an educational app based on extracting knowledge from books, and the company invested $5 million over time in exchange for a minority stake in Headway. “I was lucky because often people have to pitch their project to hundreds of investors, and I basically pitched one,” he says.
Headway Inc. (not to be confused with the American mental health company of the same name) launched four weeks later. Currently, it has 160 million users in its portfolio of five products. Forbes estimates Headway Inc.’s revenue at $160 million and values it at $720 million. The company currently employs around 450 people and has five offices spread across four countries in Eastern Europe.
Designed to keep users from getting lost in social media, the Headway app is a library of 15-minute book summaries on topics ranging from self-improvement to business. In 2021, Headway added Impulse, the brain game app, to its catalog. Impulse focuses more on self-discovery, offering quizzes and puzzles to help people determine their IQ, personality type, and other abilities.
All content in Headway’s portfolio is produced by its employees with limited AI assistance. “We’re old school in that,” says Pavlovsky, CEO and largest individual shareholder, with an estimated 33% stake in the company.
Headway monetizes its portfolio through three main revenue streams, the largest of which is subscriptions. It uses a very dynamic pricing strategy to squeeze the most money out of each user. By downloading a Headway app, users get prices up to $7.99 per week (more than $400 annually), but discounted packages and surprise gift offers can reduce the price to $19.99 annually or less, depending on the app. The company complements this with paid features, such as illustrations for lessons. It also limits advertising and earns commissions on Amazon book sales that originate in the app through affiliate links. Pavlovsky says Headway has been profitable since 2020 and has continued to grow during the war in Ukraine. Revenue grew 90% in the first year of the full-scale conflict in 2022 and has since tripled.
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“No one wanted to lower the bar,” says Headway chief of staff Oleksandr Yaroshenko. “Anton always maintained an open and very transparent dialogue.” Yaroshenko explains that Headway had set aside an emergency fund and was able to cover employee relocation expenses without affecting the 2022 bottom line.
That same year, Headway launched a new product, Nibble, an app aimed at older adults that offers in-depth lessons in STEM and humanities, and which already has 6 million users. It also found a new source of income by selling B2B subscriptions, gaining 500 corporate clients.
“At one point, we talked about combining the apps into one super app,” says Yaroshenko. But Pavlovsky remained firm in his “house brand” strategy. “When you go to a very elegant restaurant, they give you three forks, three knives and there is a special knife for butter,” explains Yaroshenko. “I wanted to be very specific about the tools that would be used to achieve a specific goal for each customer segment.”
Headway continued to launch new products. First, in 2023, the personal coaching platform AddMile, followed by the social skills learning app Skillsta in 2024. But most of the company’s growth was due to the expansion of Impulse and the Headway app, which went from having 20 million users in 2022 to 150 million today. Together, both apps represent more than 90% of Headway’s user base.
Pavlovsky attributes this drastic growth to using AI tools like Midjourney and HeyGen to optimize their advertising strategy. These tools generate a high volume of images and videos, respectively, which can then be used to flood Instagram, TikTok, and other social platforms with endless ad iterations that are constantly tested and improved. Headway is also not afraid to be provocative with its marketing. A recent ad on Instagram reads: “Yes, AI will take your job. Evolve with Headway. Keep your position.
Ironically, AI helped create that ad.
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In 2024, Headway Inc. ads racked up more than 7 billion impressions, attracting 46 million new users. The company estimates that AI tools increased its return on ad spend by 40% for video ads. Currently, AI-enabled static ads drive 20% of new signups, and the United States accounts for more than 50% of Headway’s revenue.
The company also expanded the language options in its English-only apps to 21 languages on Impulse and 6 on Headway (where, interestingly, Ukrainian is not an option), allowing it to expand to more countries.
Headway Inc. is currently developing a B2B learning platform designed to help businesses train their employees and intends to continue launching a new product each year.
Despite its growth, educational scientists are skeptical of Headway’s approach of reducing learning to bite-sized chunks. “Educational technology always reflects our cultural anxieties. And I think that, in this case, this anxiety has to do with time,” says Ioana Literat, director of the Technology, Media and Learning program at Teachers College, Columbia University. “There’s this idea that we can compress knowledge into smaller and smaller units; that we can somehow outsmart time itself. But, as learning scientists know, true learning actually requires slowness.” Her colleague, Cognitive Science Professor Lin Xiaodong, sees value in Headway apps, calling them “excellent entry points” to deeper learning. Still, he warns that “there is no substitute for immersing yourself in the entire story arc of a book.”
Pavlovsky agrees. He reads about 70 books a year, according to several of his employees. His office is full of books, as is the reading room he set up for employees. “Books and reading are very important to me, but we know that not everyone likes them that much,” he says. “We offer learning that adapts to the world we live in.”
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And Pavlovsky expects the growth to continue. In July, Headway announced a “strategic investment” from Bullhound Capital, a Luxembourg-based venture capital firm. “(Headway) reminds me of previous investments we’ve made, like Spotify and Slack, where I think the founders had very ambitious visions and built companies bigger than the industry they came from,” says Per Roman, founding partner at Bullhound. He met Pavlovsky at an event in Marbella, Spain, in 2023. “I found him to be a very special person… a person who is hard not to like,” says Roman, who connected with Pavlovsky over their shared passion for learning.
Pavlovsky expects Headway to reach $1 billion in annual revenue by 2029, at which time he plans to list the company on the New York Stock Exchange. And he is already preparing his ground. Earlier this month, he visited New York City, where he will open an office in January 2026. “We want to be closer to our clients, to our market,” he says.
As for life in Ukraine, while the war continues, the vast majority of Headway employees have already returned home, and the company has just moved to a much larger, four-story office in kyiv to accommodate its expansion. “The people here are extremely talented, extremely resilient, and very eager to succeed,” Pavlovsky says.
It certainly is.
When the air raid alarm sounded in the middle of his video interview with Forbes he shrugged it off and continued talking. And when a more serious threat forced him and his team to take shelter in the office’s underground parking lot, he didn’t suspend operations.
Instead, he set up a bunker with Wi-Fi and a bar.
This article was originally published by Forbes US
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