Alexey Gubarev: Leading Global Infrastructure Through Bold Investment, Health Innovation, and Community Impact
A Family of Engineers, a Student Entrepreneur, and a Career Built From the Ground Up
Alexey Gubarev did not discover entrepreneurship he grew up surrounded by it in spirit. Coming from a family of engineers, he absorbed a particular way of thinking about problems long before he ever started a company: methodical, practical, and always focused on what could be built rather than what simply existed. His first business came while he was still a student an internet advertising venture focused on running and optimising ad campaigns at a time when most people were still learning what the internet was.
That early instinct to move fast and build real things has never left him. In 2002, Alexey moved to Cyprus, and in 2005 he founded Servers.com with just 20 servers and an ambition that far outpaced those modest beginnings. Over the following 18 years, he built it into a global hosting company with data centers on multiple continents a business that was acquired by CloudOne Digital in 2023 for approximately $200 million. It was the kind of outcome that validated decades of patient, disciplined building and for Alexey Gubarev, it was not the end of the story but the foundation for everything that came next.
Alongside Servers.com, in 2016 Alexey and his partner Yuri Gurski built Palta, a health and wellbeing technology company whose portfolio now reads like a map of where digital health is going. It includes Flo Health, which became the first women’s health app to reach a $1 billion-plus valuation in 2024; Prisma Labs, creators of the AI-powered photo app Lensa AI; and Simple, an intermittent fasting and nutrition platform. Today, Alexey Gubarev divides his time between overseeing Palta’s portfolio, his work with TechIsland the nonprofit he co-founded to help grow Cyprus into a recognised tech hub and a handful of personal projects that reflect the full breadth of his curiosity, including a retro car museum he is currently building in Bishkek.
Ideas, Energy, and the Philosophy That Keeps Him Building
Ask Alexey Gubarev what motivates him every day, and his answer is characteristically direct. He has far more ideas than he has capital to fund even after successful exits and that gap is what keeps him working. Every project that succeeds funds the next one he actually wants to build. It is a self-sustaining engine of ambition, and one that has produced businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars while never losing sight of the things that make the building worthwhile in the first place.
Not everything Alexey does is designed to generate returns. He runs MadWay Rally, an off-road car rally he organises with friends every year a project that has never been meant to make money and never will be. In Kyrgyzstan in 2023, the MadWay crew did something that went far beyond sport: they rebuilt the Ornok-Kemin road that had sat abandoned and blocked by debris for two decades, marking the achievement with a roadside sculpture made from car and motorcycle parts. The trip closed with a charity concert at the equestrian arena in Cholpon-Ata. For Alexey, MadWay is the one project that reminds him why he is building everything else a reminder that leadership and entrepreneurship are most meaningful when they leave something tangible and lasting behind.
Palta and the Mission Behind the Portfolio
Of everything Alexey Gubarev has built at Palta, it is Flo that he speaks about with the deepest sense of purpose. When he and Yuri Gurski set it up in 2016, their mission was clear: to help empower billions of health-aware people to live healthier, happier lives. Women’s health was one of the most glaring gaps between that ambition and what actually existed in the market. Medical research has historically concentrated on men, leaving women without the reliable, personalised information they need to look after their own health across every stage of their lives.
Flo is closing that gap directly using solid medical science and a powerful digital infrastructure to turn a smartphone into a genuinely personalised, lifelong health companion. From a teenager tracking her first cycle to a woman navigating perimenopause with data and medically verified guidance rather than guesswork, Flo meets women where they are and grows alongside them. Reaching a valuation of over $1 billion in 2024 was a milestone that mattered not because of what it said about the business, but because of what it confirmed about the need Flo was built to serve. It is, for Alexey Gubarev, the clearest proof that building with genuine purpose and commercial ambition are not competing priorities. When they work together, the results speak for themselves.
Cold Plunges, Protected Sleep, and the Discipline Behind the Output
Behind Alexey Gubarev’s output is a set of daily habits that are as deliberate as his business decisions. Every morning begins with a cold plunge four minutes at around 5°C, before anything else. It is a practice that sharpens focus, resets the nervous system, and sets the tone for everything that follows. For someone managing multiple companies, a nonprofit, and a portfolio of personal projects simultaneously, that kind of intentional reset is not a luxury it is a necessity.
The second habit is one that took longer to learn: protecting his sleep. For years, like many entrepreneurs, Alexey treated exhaustion as a badge of honour pushing through early mornings rather than recovering from them. That has changed. Now, if he wakes at 4 or 5am, he treats the time as recovery taking melatonin and returning to sleep, or using meditation to rest properly rather than defaulting to the false productivity of running on too little rest. It is a small shift in philosophy that reflects a broader maturity in how Alexey Gubarev thinks about sustainable performance: the same way he thinks about building companies for the long run, not just the sprint.
The Decision That Could Not Be Delayed Leading Through the AI Transition
One of the most honest and revealing moments in conversation with Alexey Gubarev comes when he talks about a recent challenge and how he handled it. The challenge was not a market downturn or a failed product. It was accepting, with clear eyes and without sentimentality, how fast artificial intelligence had changed what actually needs to be done by human hands.
The moment of clarity came when he rebuilt his personal website, gubarev.com, himself in a matter of hours using AI and the result was more informative and better structured than what had been there before. That experience made a decision he had been quietly putting off unavoidable. He ended up letting go of the business analysts across every company he is invested in, because AI could now perform that analysis faster and to at least the same standard. It was not a comfortable call to make. But Alexey Gubarev is clear-eyed about what delaying it would have meant: the outcome would not have changed only the timeline. That willingness to make the hard call, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it involves real people and real consequences, is one of the defining qualities of his leadership.
The Honest Advice That Every Founder in the AI Era Needs to Hear
To those starting out in technology today, Alexey Gubarev offers advice that is refreshingly unromantic and all the more useful for it. Building, he says, is easier than it has ever been. AI has lowered the barrier to launching a product to the point where almost anyone with an idea can get something into the market. But that is precisely where the danger lies. So many AI startups are launching simultaneously that investors genuinely do not know where to direct their attention or their capital which makes raising for a new project significantly harder than it looks from the outside.
In Cyprus specifically, Alexey identifies a compounding challenge: there are very few experienced angel investors who actively back new technology companies at the early stage where backing matters most. The ecosystem is growing and TechIsland exists in part to address exactly this but it is not yet where it needs to be. His advice to founders navigating this environment is direct: spend less energy on the build and more on standing out from the hundreds of others doing the same thing. Become the kind of leader who brings people together. Develop the ability to do something genuinely original. Because in a field this crowded, that is what actually gets noticed and that is what actually gets backed. The best founders, Alexey Gubarev believes, have always been the ones who build things that could not have existed without them. That remains as true in the age of AI as it ever was.
Connect with Alexey Gubarev on LinkedIn to gain industry insights and visit his Website
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