Vas Diachenko

Founder & CEO LoyaltyPlant

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Vas Diachenko is the founder and chief executive of LoyaltyPlant, a company that sells restaurant and retail chains the digital apparatus of customer loyalty: white-label mobile apps, loyalty programmes, a CRM and marketing automation, integrated with point-of-sale systems. Its pitch is to brands with substantial physical footprints and thin digital relationships — the argument being that a restaurant group knows almost nothing about the customer who walks in, and that the app is the only practical instrument for changing that. Diachenko arrived at the problem from the mobile side rather than from hospitality: he was a software developer at Motorola through the late 2000s, and his first venture, SmartKupon, used location-based mobile coupons to connect restaurants with nearby guests. LoyaltyPlant is the larger, longer-lived successor to that idea, with offices in New York, Warsaw, Kyiv and Dubai and, by the company’s account, more than 600 restaurant brands and 50 million end users in 30 countries.

Career Highlights

• Founder and chief executive of LoyaltyPlant, a mobile loyalty and CRM platform for restaurant and retail brands.
• Founded SmartKupon, an earlier location-based mobile couponing venture for restaurants, in the first year after Apple’s App Store opened.
• Software developer at Motorola, working on application engineering and codebase optimisation, before starting either company.
• Award winner at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, the prize sometimes called the “Small Nobel Prize”.
• Built the company to more than 100 technology staff across four offices, with roughly 6 million dollars invested in product development.
• Works alongside co-founders Alexandra Ermachkova, chief operating officer, and Paul Ivanov, chief technology officer.

Professional Journey

Diachenko’s first recorded professional role was as a software developer at Motorola, where he worked on application engineering and codebase optimisation during the years when the mobile handset industry was being remade by the arrival of app stores. His own account of the company’s origins turns on that timing: the App Store opened in 2008, and the opportunity he saw was that a restaurant could for the first time hold a direct, permanent channel to a customer in that customer’s pocket, rather than renting attention through advertising.

The first attempt at that was SmartKupon, which he founded around 2009. It used location-based mobile coupons to let restaurants reach guests near them — an idea very much of its moment, when geofencing was new and the assumption was that proximity would be the organising principle of mobile marketing. SmartKupon ran for roughly two years.

LoyaltyPlant is the second and far larger attempt, and it shifted the emphasis from acquisition to retention. Rather than pushing offers at strangers nearby, the platform gives a brand its own app, its own loyalty scheme and its own view of who its customers are, integrated with the point-of-sale system so that the loyalty data and the transaction data are the same data. The company describes its purpose as helping restaurant brands move from offline to online operation, and it sells the whole stack — app, CRM, campaign automation and analytics — as a managed product rather than as tooling. There is a genuine discrepancy in the public record about when LoyaltyPlant itself began: the company dates its founding to 2009, while independent listings give 2011, which is also when the SmartKupon period appears to end. The likeliest explanation is that the company counts its history from the earlier venture.

The business has grown into a distributed operation with offices in New York, Warsaw, Kyiv and Dubai and a partner presence in the UAE, employing more than a hundred technology staff. Diachenko has emphasised that the founding team was assembled around partnership, openness and transparency, values the company still publishes, and he leads it alongside co-founders Alexandra Ermachkova and Paul Ivanov. He is based in Dubai.

Education

No educational record for Vas Diachenko could be confirmed against any readable source. One unconfirmed report places him at Saint Petersburg State University studying for a Specialist degree in the period around 2006 to 2011, but that could not be verified and its dates sit awkwardly against his employment at Motorola over the same years, so it is not asserted here. Separately, he is an award winner at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a secondary-school science competition, which indicates a scientific education at that level but identifies no university.