Ivan Shkvarun

CEO & Co-Founder Social Links

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Ivan Shkvarun co-founded Social Links in 2015 and has led it as chief executive since January 2024. The company sells open-source intelligence: software that pulls together what is publicly visible across social platforms, messengers, blockchains and the dark web, and resolves it into the connections an investigator actually needs — who is linked to whom, which accounts belong to the same person, where a claim originated. The customers are investigators, fraud teams, and government and enterprise security functions, and the company reports more than 500 of them. What distinguishes Shkvarun’s tenure is a deliberate shift in what the technology is for. Social Links built its position on investigation, which is retrospective work performed after harm has occurred. He has been moving it toward prevention, on the argument that generative AI has industrialised fraud and disinformation faster than the defensive side has adapted. That argument became the DarksideAI initiative in early 2025 and an AI Defender product line, and it reframes the company from an investigative tool vendor into a digital-trust business — a market he sizes, optimistically, in the trillions.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Social Links in 2015 and became chief executive on 31 January 2024, succeeding co-founder Andrey Kulikov, having previously served as the company’s chief revenue officer.
• Grew the business from a prototype that won its first client within three weeks into a platform the company says serves more than 500 clients, headquartered in New York with an EU branch in Amsterdam, an R&D centre in Riga and a US branch in Miami.
• Ranked by Frost & Sullivan as a leading OSINT solutions provider in both 2023 and 2025, per the company’s own account.
• Launched DarksideAI in early 2025, a strategic initiative on the criminal use of artificial intelligence in fraud, cybercrime and disinformation.
• Repositioned the company toward AI fraud prevention with an AI Defender product line, and toward open-data products for finance, cybersecurity, and sales and marketing.
• Spent more than fifteen years in automation and held leadership roles at international IT companies, including running financial and public sector operations at SAP.
• Represented the company internationally, including at CES in Las Vegas in January 2026 as part of a Dutch startup delegation.
• Has worked with open data and pattern-finding across disparate sources since his university years, a span he describes as more than two decades.

Professional Journey

Shkvarun’s interest in the problem predates the company by a long way. He has described working with data since his university years, specifically on the problem of finding patterns and hidden connections across sources that were never designed to be read together — which is a fair one-line description of what OSINT tooling does. His formal career took him into enterprise automation and then into leadership at international IT companies, including SAP, where he led financial and public sector operations. Those are two of the most compliance-bound customer segments in enterprise software, and the experience of selling into them is directly relevant to a company whose buyers are banks, investigators and governments.

Social Links began in 2015 as a side project among three technical co-founders, all with backgrounds in the banking sector. The timing was not accidental. The explosion of social networks from around 2010 had created an enormous volume of user-generated data that was public in principle and unusable in practice, because nothing existed to connect an identity across platforms. The founders built an OSINT prototype and won their first client within three weeks — the kind of validation that settles an argument about whether a market exists — though they did not commit fully to scaling the business until 2019.

A second turning point, by his account, was the 2017 deepfake video of Barack Obama. His reading of it was that trust could no longer rest on surface-level perception of digital content, and that the discipline he had been building for investigation would soon be needed for verification. That conclusion shaped the company’s later direction more than anything in its OSINT roots.

He served as chief revenue officer through the company’s growth phase, and on 31 January 2024 became chief executive when co-founder Andrey Kulikov stepped down, a transition announced publicly that March. His stated agenda at the time was to move from OSINT into a broader open-data platform, with products aimed at finance, cybersecurity, and sales and marketing — a deliberate widening from the investigative niche in which the company had made its name.

Since taking the role he has concentrated on the AI dimension. Observing that criminals had begun using generative models for fraud and deception before defenders had adapted, he launched DarksideAI in early 2025 as a strategic initiative on AI-enabled crime and disinformation, and the company has built an AI Defender product line around fraud prevention rather than post-hoc investigation. He frames this as vindication of an early call, noting that major investors have since arrived at the same thesis. The company now runs from New York with European operations in Amsterdam and a research and development centre in Riga, and he has continued to represent it internationally, appearing at CES in Las Vegas in January 2026 with a Dutch startup delegation.

Education

No education could be established for Ivan Shkvarun in a form that can be recorded. Social Links’ own biography of him refers to an academic foundation in mathematics and an MBA in entrepreneurship, but names no institution for either, and no other source supplies one.