Nazar Kuzmenko

Nazar Kuzmenko

Founder of Qlane · Bratislava · @Leestex

I started writing code at 13, on a phone with a 130×130 screen. Now I'm building Qlane, an autonomous QA team for web apps.

Previously at

How I started

I made my first money in middle school. I rewrote school notes to make them simple, added diagrams, printed them as small books and sold them to classmates for about two dollars each.

At 13 I started coding. I had no computer, only a Siemens C65 phone. On its 130×130 screen I made small WAP sites and forums, mostly at night. We talked about politics and technology there.

Pixel drawing of a small WAP forum page on a 130 by 130 phone screen
130 × 130 pixels. The screen I wrote my first code on.

Later I got a computer, but no internet. The local library had free internet for one hour a day. I downloaded programming books there and took them home on a floppy disk. Then I made a website for the library, and they let me use the internet as much as I wanted.

At 15 I worked as an admin in an internet café after school and took my first freelance jobs. I studied law at university for three years, but I could not do both, so I chose work.

What I did

  1. 2013–2016

    My software company Founder

    At 20 I was a senior developer with a good salary. I had more freelance clients than I could handle, so I left the job, started a company that built software for clients, and hired a team.

    15–20 people at the peak

  2. 2018–2019

    NovaPay Head of Engineering

    NovaPay is the payments company of Nova Poshta, the largest delivery company in Ukraine. Their payment provider lost its license, and the company had a hard deadline to replace it. The team was stuck, with about 40 code changes waiting for review. I set clear priorities and connected the engineers with the business. In September 2018 we launched in every Nova Poshta branch.

    2,000 operations per minute

  3. 2021–2023

    Shopmonkey Engineering Lead

    A US software company for auto repair shops. I built and led the performance team.

  4. 2022

    I moved from Ukraine, first to Cyprus, then to Slovakia.

    Ukraine → Cyprus → Slovakia

  5. 2024–2025

    FIZ CTO

    Free invoicing for freelancers in Lisbon, certified by the Portuguese tax authority.

  6. 2026

    Qlane Founder

    What I build now.

Now

Qlane is an autonomous QA team for web apps. On every pull request, 12 specialized AI agents read the change, plan the tests and run them in parallel in real browsers, on a full copy of the app in an isolated sandbox. Every bug is verified before it's reported, with screenshots and console, network and server logs. The test library grows with each merge. It works in GitHub, GitLab and in coding agents via MCP.

It's built for teams that ship fast with AI coding tools but have few QA engineers, and for regulated companies that keep their code in their own network. I built most of it myself.

  1. 01 Reads the pull request and plans the tests
  2. 02 Runs them in real browsers on a sandboxed copy of the app
  3. 03 Verifies each bug before reporting it
Qlane demo video

qlane.ai

Qlane isn't the end goal, though. For years I've wanted to build a European technology company that people use every day. Europe and Ukraine still don't have one.

Outside work

Outside work I read a lot about physics, as an amateur. Right now I'm stuck on dark matter. About 85% of the matter in the universe is something we cannot see. My own guess: maybe it is in a fourth spatial dimension, and we only feel its gravity. I don't know if this makes sense, but I keep thinking about it.

  • Matter we can see · 15%
  • Dark matter · 85%

Another idea I come back to: after biological intelligence comes artificial intelligence, and it may leave the physical world. Then a planet with very advanced intelligence would look empty to anyone who looks at it.

// In 2013 my CV was a JavaScript object.
const nazar = {
  firstDevice: 'Siemens C65, 130×130',
  cv2013: 'web.archive.org/web/2013/leestex.com',
  cvToday: 'cv.leestex.com',
};