Before founding Smartcat, Smolnikov was a physicist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he researched fiber optics materials. After two years in the lab, Smolnikov decided to try his hand at entrepreneurship, founding the language services company ABBYY LS.
It’s at ABBYY where Smolnikov incubated Smartcat, in fact, which spun out as an independent entity in 2016. Smolnikov left ABBYY, where he was a board member at the time, the same year.