APEK.AI

Leading innovative tech company. APEK is a Virginia-based AI engineering and automation firm, specializing in the design, development, and deployment of advanced AI agents and enterprise automation solutions. With over 20 years of expertise, APEK empowers organizations and government agencies to transform operations, streamline workflows, and achieve measurable impact through custom AI systems and strategic advisory services.

CEO, Managing Partner

Voice2Me.ai

Voice2Me - owned by APEK.AI. Leading enterprise-grade AI voice technology innovation to transform customer experiences at scale. Pioneering multi-model AI architecture that delivers human-like conversations while handling thousands of concurrent interactions. Helping organizations reduce operational costs while enhancing customer satisfaction through voice intelligence solutions that bridge technology and humanity.

CEO, Chief AI Officer

Vector7.ai

As a founding council member of Vector7, I help shape an elite executive network uniting global leaders in AI, business, and policy. Vector7 provides a private, trusted arena where decision-makers exchange foresight, build influence, and remain relevant in the AI era.

Founding Council (Board Member)

The One 23 Group

Led post-M&A transformation and restructuring of government services platform company. Orchestrated migration to new ERP system in under 5 months while establishing GAAP and DCAA compliant business practices. Directed M&A due diligence activities and financial operations oversight.

Executive Vice President

Virtana Corp.

Driving operational transformation and strategic growth initiatives that resulted in 30% OPEX and 120% EBITDA improvement. Leading cross-functional teams to streamline business processes, establish corporate KPIs, and implement go-to-market strategies that improved ARR by 20%.

Executive Vice President of Operations

Siemens Government Technologies

Oversaw operational health of $500M+ federal IT portfolio serving USAF, DOD & DOE. Led execution excellence and compliance while building high-performing teams and establishing strategic partnerships.

Executive Director of Operations

General Dynamics Information Technology

Managed performance of $400M+ international portfolio across 50+ countries for USCIS. Built effective customer relationships while ensuring operational excellence and compliance in complex global environments.

Senior Director of Revenue Operations

Global Linguist Solutions, LLC

Led business account managers and program analysts overseeing $4.9 billion INSCOM international projects portfolio in the Middle East. Managed CONUS and OCONUS program functions and reporting.

Senior Operations & Strategy Advisor

Deltek

Led global SaaS software sales operations, driving team performance and quarterly target achievement through effective coaching and mentoring while growing company reputation through industry events.

Director of Sales Operations

Managed financial planning, compliance, and operational oversight for government contracting programs. Ensured contract compliance with federal regulations while optimizing program financial performance. Developed standardized reporting processes and implemented financial controls that improved program visibility and accountability across international operations.

International Program Coordinator

At 19, I left home and moved to another country with no money, no safety net, and no plan - just the belief that I was meant for more.

Since then, I’ve walked through fire more than once: divorces, parenting alone, financial struggles, personal losses, and making bold moves of leaving a successful corporate career, to rebuild my life totally from scratch…

Each chapter of this journey was not easy and sometimes terrifying, yet it became important stepping stones of who I am today.

It is what allows me to do what I do best - 
help leaders and organizations evolve through change with clarity, courage, and connection.

⭐️ Who I Am

I help organizations bridge human intelligence and artificial intelligence through agentic voice technologies, leadership enablement, and transformation strategy.

My mission: make AI adoption feel human, effortless, and profitable.

I’m CEO of APEK.ai, leading teams that build secure Agentic AI & Voice Solutions for Enterprise - helping organizations modernize operations and humanize their communication through intelligent automation.

With over 20 years in enterprise transformation, leadership strategy, and reinvention, I blend AI innovation with human insight to help people and businesses grow from the inside out.


⁉️Who I Help

	•	Enterprises ready to evolve beyond legacy systems and embrace secure, human-centric AI.
	•	Executives and founders navigating reinvention, burnout, or uncertainty about their next chapter.
	•	Leaders in transition who look successful on paper but quietly ask, “What’s next for me?”

When People Come to Me (and my team)

They come when success feels heavy, change feels impossible, or they’ve outgrown the version of themselves they used to be.
They come when transformation stops being a concept - and becomes personal.

💡 My Belief

True reinvention happens when technology and humanity evolve together.

That’s why my mission is to help people and organizations:
	•	Adopt AI intelligently.
	•	Reinvent fearlessly.
	•	Lead with voice, not noise.


Eva Karnaukh

One of the hardest lessons adulthood teaches you is this:

Not everything in your life deserves an audience.

👉 Privacy is power.
👉 Not secrecy.
👉 Not isolation.

Just the awareness that some things thrive when they’re protected, not publicized.

Here are a few things wise people keep quiet:

1️⃣ Your exact income or savings
👉 Not everyone needs access to your numbers

2️⃣ Your next big move
👉 Work in silence. Let results introduce you.

3️⃣ Your family issues
👉 Healing happens in safe spaces, not public conversations.

4️⃣ Your insecurities
👉 Share them with people who help you grow, not those who weaponize them.

5️⃣ Your money struggles
👉 Many will judge before they understand. Protect your peace while you rebuild.

6️⃣ Others’ secrets
👉 If someone trusted you, honor that trust - it says more about you than them.

The older I get, the more I see that maturity isn’t about being open with everything…
It’s about being intentional.

Your life elevates the moment you stop oversharing and start curating who gets access to you.

What’s one thing you’ve learned to keep private?

Follow Eva Karnaukh for more posts like this.

CEO APEK.ai | AI and Human Dynamics | Guiding leaders to align tech, people and decisions to elevate performance and reinvent in the AI era

Fractional CFO | Helping Founders Scale Beyond $2M ARR with Strategic Finance & OKRs | Founder @ FounderFirst

I didn’t grow up pitching VCs or building apps.

I grew up in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria, where I didn’t speak a word of English and didn’t know anyone in tech.
But I knew how to spot opportunity, adapt quickly, and keep going.

At 17, I taught myself English. At 19, I earned a scholarship to study in the U.S. 
I came with a suitcase, less than $300, no backup plan, and did whatever scrappy thing it took to stay afloat.

Then on April 15, 2015, something clicked.
The startup world found me. And for the first time, I felt like I fit.
The chaos, the creativity, the responsibility - it was mine to carry, mine to shape.

What started as a leap into the unknown became a decade of building behind the scenes.

Since then, I’ve worked with more than 20 early- and growth-stage startups, both VC-backed and bootstrapped, across B2B SaaS, Fintech, and Edtech. 
I’ve helped scale revenue from $500K to $20M, grow teams from 10 to 200, and build finance and ops functions from scratch.
I’ve navigated pivots, layoffs, down rounds, near-bankruptcies, exits, and helped founders get to the other side.

In 2024, I launched FounderFirst to do exactly that: support founders and leadership teams with the structure, clarity, and tools they need to grow sustainably.

What I Do:
- Finance: Fractional CFO support, modeling, forecasting, and investor-ready reporting
- Strategy: OKRs and operating models that don’t die after kickoff
- Coaching: For founders and finance leads navigating the messy middle

When I’m not working with founders, you’ll find me planning my next national park hike or deep in a great book (suggestions always welcome).

Curious what's possible on your scaling journey?

Don't be a stranger. Book an intro call: https://shorturl.at/kjU5J

Mariya Valeva

At 34, she rang the Nasdaq bell, holding her toddler in her arms.
A $1.6B valuation.
Katrina Lake had just taken her company, Stitch Fix, public.

A company she built from her apartment floor, while pregnant. Twice.
She didn’t come from a family of founders.
She didn’t have a network of angels or tech mentors to call.
Her mother was a teacher who immigrated from Japan.
Her father, a transplant doctor who believed deeply in hard work and quiet sacrifice.

She grew up straddling two worlds - Japanese at home, American at school.
Learning early that success didn’t come from confidence, but discipline.

Years later, Katrina found herself in business school, surrounded by future bankers and VCs.
But she had no interest in finance.
She wanted to build something… useful.
The idea started simple:
What if busy women could get clothes picked out for them - based on data, but curated by a human?

She used SurveyMonkey to collect style preferences.
Tracked feedback in spreadsheets.
Packed boxes from her apartment floor.
And mailed them one by one.
This wasn’t a “tech company” in the traditional sense.
No SaaS margins. No app. No virality.
Just a belief that personalization - done right - could scale.

Most investors didn’t get it.
Too operational.
Too slow.
Too… retail.
And maybe, too female.
So she ran lean.
Proved retention.
And let the numbers speak.

By 2017, Stitch Fix was ready.
She took it public, and made history.
The youngest woman to IPO a tech company.
A new kind of founder.
One who didn’t “fit the mold.”
She just built her own.

A second-generation immigrant founder, raised to keep her head down -
who ended up showing the world what leadership can actually look like.
Quiet. Relentless. Human.
And maybe that’s what more of us need to see right now.

You don’t truly understand a business until you’ve had to clean up the mess.

It’s easy to give advice when you’re not the one dealing with the aftermath.
Easy to sound smart when your strategy lives in slides - not in systems, team dynamics, missed targets, or investor pressure.

But business isn’t built in theory.
It’s built in the uncomfortable.
The tradeoffs.
The reworks.
The silent pivots.
The “we thought this would work” moments.

That’s where real insight comes from - not from watching, but from staying.
From living the consequences of your decisions and iterating through them.

Because until you’ve felt the problem, your solution is just a guess.

*Video credits: simplyougrow insta

One viral thread. $2.4M in ARR.
Sounds like the dream, right?

You post. It hits.
Traffic, users, momentum - all from one channel.
That’s exactly how Copy. ai took off.
No “multi-channel strategy.”
Just one thing done exceptionally well: Twitter.
One thread. $2.4M. Done.

Meanwhile, most founders are still doing content gymnastics across five platforms… and wondering why nothing’s landing.
The difference?
Focus that compounds.

→ Merit Beauty skipped TikTok and podcasts. IG only. $100M+ in sales.
→ Lenny Rachitsky started with one Substack - now brings in $500K+/year and runs a top business podcast. → Glossier? One blog built a $1.8B brand.
→ Physics Wallah? YouTube only. Now $2.8B.

You don’t need to be everywhere. You just need to be undeniable somewhere.
I break it all down in today’s newsletter, check it out here → https://lnkd.in/ej3GB8dc 

🦃 Happy Thanksgiving - enjoy the pie, and the newsletter!

How do you raise $350M, hit a $2B valuation…
and still crash hard?

Remember InVision? The design darling that disappeared.
They had everything:
✔️ A killer brand
✔️ 7M+ users
✔️ A market hungry for collaboration tools
✔️ And yes, $350M in capital and a $2B valuation

So what happened?
They made the same mistake too many founders do after a Series A or B:
They scaled hype instead of substance.

Here’s where it went off the rails:

🚩 They stopped listening to the market.
While Figma doubled down on real-time collaboration and cloud-native speed, InVision clung to its old prototype model and released Studio years too late with bugs, missing features, and poor adoption.

🚩 They over-invested in sales, under-invested in product.
Massive sales teams. Endless marketing pushes.
But behind the curtain? A tool users didn’t love and that teams outgrew.

🚩 Their tech stack couldn’t scale.
Studio and Freehand weren’t just late, they were unstable.
Performance lagged. Collaboration broke. Teams jumped ship.

🚩 They misread their edge.
Instead of doubling down on what made them valuable, they spread themselves thin trying to be everything, while Figma was becoming essential to modern design workflows.

🚩 They burned money chasing growth, not resilience.
Headcount ballooned to 1,200. Revenue fell by 50% in a year.
They sold Freehand in a fire sale to Miro.
They went from market leader… to a cautionary tale.

→ Product-market fit isn’t static.
→ Capital can amplify dysfunction.
→ Growth only works if your foundations are solid.

And guess what?
You might already be heading toward an InVision moment.
It won’t look like a crash, until it does.
Ask yourself:
- Are we evolving, or just expanding?
- Do we actually know our operational weak points?
- Is our product irreplaceable, or just familiar?

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The Battle

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