Paweł Tańasiuk
Paweł Tańasiuk is a Ukrainian-British technology entrepreneur, founder and CEO of the private UK-Ukraine startup Spacebit, and a blockchain technology researcher.
Place of Birth. Education. Paweł Tańasiuk was born in August 1980 in Zhytomyr. Since childhood, he dreamed of space, built telescopes in school and attended astronomy classes. He graduated from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv with a degree in economics.
At the age of 19, he founded a tourism and educational company with friends, organizing educational trips and language courses. According to Paweł Tańasiuk, the company employed 60 people, and in a few years, they managed to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In 2005, he moved to London. From 2006 to 2008, he studied at the London School of Economics, graduating with a master's degree in management and information systems.
From 2009 to 2010, he studied at Cambridge Judge Business School, graduating with a master's in technology. He also participated in educational programs at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and Stanford.
Career. After completing his studies, Paweł Tańasiuk remained in England and worked as a financial consultant.
In recent years,
- 'Our task is to colonize other planets.' An interview with Spacebit founder Paweł Tańasiuk
At the end of the 2000s, together with Yuriy Chayko, he founded the MoneXy payment system, which became the first officially licensed electronic payment system on the Ukrainian market. In 2015, the partners successfully sold MoneXy to Fidobank.
In 2011, Paweł Tańasiuk established an IT consulting company, Cambridge Method Ltd, of which he is still the director.
In 2014, he declared himself an expert in blockchain by founding and leading the startup BlockVerify, which fought against counterfeits in supply chains using blockchain technology. The project's idea was to track goods through supply chains, record ownership rights, and confirm their location. The startup successfully secured funding of $52,000 from three investors, but its website is currently inactive.
Spacebit. With the funds raised from the sale of MoneXy, Paweł Tańasiuk had enough to launch the private space startup Spacebit. The company was founded on June 16, 2014, under the name SPACE2020 LTD, and was later renamed to SPACEBIT TECHNOLOGIES LTD. Since 2019, there are the companies SPACEBIT GLOBAL LTD and SPACEBIT EXPLORATION LTD, all registered in London.
Spacebit presents itself as a private British company specializing in tools for analyzing space data and robotic concepts for space exploration, including artificial intelligence and advanced microrobots, developing space robotics technology for lunar missions and planetary missions.
Over the six years, Tańasiuk has raised about $10 million in angel investments for the project from several private investors. The company, with offices in Ukraine, the UK, the USA, Japan, and Luxembourg, employs 25 people.
In October 2017, Spacebit signed a cooperation agreement with Kyiv Polytechnic Institute regarding the PolyITAN 3, 4, and 5 satellites. In 2018, Paweł Tańasiuk presented plans for financing decentralized space research at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In this context, he proposed launching a proprietary cryptocurrency and a crowdfunding platform that would allow someone to finance space projects.
In 2018 (Bremen) and 2019 (Washington), Paweł Tańasiuk presented papers at international astronautical congresses.
In the first half of 2022, Spacebit plans its first UK-Ukrainian lunar mission (Mission One Spacebit), which will involve sending its lunar rover Asagumo (meaning 'morning white cloud' in Japanese) to explore lava tubes using temperature, radiation, laser sensors, and a video camera. Scientific tools were developed in Ukraine. On the Ukrainian side, the involved parties are the South Design Office, the Science-Production Enterprise 'Meridian' named after Korolev, and the enterprises 'EkoTest' and 'TitanEra'. The mission is divided into two parts: first, a sensor, radiation sensor, and video camera (Ukrainian part), and then the rover itself (British part).
In September 2019, the American company Astrobotic Technology and Spacebit announced an agreement as part of a mission to deliver a lunar rover weighing 1.3 kg to the Earth's satellite in 2022. Asagumo was presented by Tańasiuk in December 2019 in Japan during the third international Moon Village exhibition. Instead of wheels, it has four legs, resembling a spider; Paweł Tańasiuk personally tested it in the caves of Mount Fuji.
Asagumo will be placed in the lunar lander Peregrine, developed by Astrobotic Technology. The means of delivering Peregrine to space is the American heavy launch vehicle Vulcan Centaur, which has been worked on by United Launch Alliance (ULA) since 2014.
The launch of Peregrine is supported by NASA under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. CLPS aims to enable commercial companies in the spaceflight industry to commercialize services for delivering small robotic devices to the Moon for exploration.