La startup ucraina rende Starlink più mobile

‘It has saved many lives’

Ukrainian entrepreneur Anton Sadykov spent nearly two decades organizing team-building events and other activities for corporate customers, a business that suffered with the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Around that time, as Ukrainian soldiers urgently needed a way to secure internet access on the battlefield, their civilian compatriots turned to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network to stay connected. A friend told Sadykov about a prominent international photojournalist with a Starlink terminal mounted to his car.

Making that sort of adaptation, though, involved cutting the terminal down to a partial circuit board, a risky proposition. “You could tear off a finger trying it and break the Starlink dish, which thousands of people actually did,” he told me in a recent interview.

Instead, Sadykov and his business partner Mykola Kalinichenko thought they could come up with a better way. They co-founded Adaptis, which specializes in adapting Starlink terminals for all types of vehicles, and thus joined what’s now a thriving community of self-trained techies focused on Starlink.

Why not just bolt a standard receiver to the car roof?

“Because it’s extremely visible to the enemy,” said Sadykov, 39. “Imagine driving near the frontline with a regular Starlink terminal on your car roof. It looks like a target: It is visible, it signals that you have money, that you apparently belong to the military, maybe an officer. You become target Number One.”

Standard Starlink terminals were also fragile and frequently failed under field conditions. The valuable equipment would then be “a brick,” Sadykov said.

Instead, the custom solution he and Kalinichenko developed made the Starlink nearly invisible and more resilient. They encased and waterproofed it, reduced its height and added durable mounting legs.

The duo initially thought they’d sell around 200 units in 2023. Instead, they sold more than five times that. In 2024, sales jumped to 5,200 units. They’ve already shipped 6,300 so far this year.

Sadykov says that he initially didn’t have big plans for the startup.

“My main goal was to help somehow our troops, since I am not fighting myself,” he said. “Then it turned out everyone liked it, and soon our customers started recommending it to each other.”

As demand has grown, Adaptis has hired about 40 people and operates a production site of more than 600 square meters (more than 6,400 square feet) in Kyiv. “Now it is definitely a profitable business,” Sadykov said.

The company counts among its clients the United Nations and a foreign army which he can’t disclose. Adaptis has opened a US office and has plans for one in Estonia to target European Union customers.

“Customers keep coming and saying it has saved many lives.”