Dmytro Fedoruk spent almost twenty years inside the law firms he now builds software for. He came to the UK for a week to see his son, War changed that plan, and Ranking Copilot was born.
Dmytro Fedoruk had a flight booked for one week. He was coming to London for half-term, to spend a few days with his son during a school break. He had spent almost twenty years by then building one of the most respected legal careers in Ukraine, first as Head of the M&A practice at Clifford Chance, then as a founding partner of Redcliffe Partners, one of the country's top five law firms. He was not planning a new chapter, just a week off.
Then, in February 2022, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began while he was still in the UK.
"I decided to make the most of the opportunity," is how Dmytro describes what came next. With his return home suddenly impossible, he looked at where he had landed and made a decision. London is one of the startup capitals of the world. If he was going to be here, he was going to build something!
Twenty years of knowing exactly what was broken
Dmytro didn't go looking for a business idea, he went looking inside the industry he knew better than any other, working through the most painful, repetitive and frustrating tasks he had lived through as a lawyer, until one kept surfacing above the rest: law firms' submissions to independent ranking directories.
Anyone who has worked in or around a law firm will recognise the shape of it immediately. It is a process that never really stops, entirely manual, and it swallows enormous amounts of time every year, while the results carry real weight for a firm's reputation and business development. It was also, crucially, not a Ukraine problem or a London problem. It was every law firm, everywhere. That was the seed of Ranking Copilot.
What Ranking Copilot actually does
The way Dmytro describes the business is deceptively simple: a system of record for a law firm's best work. Ranking Copilot takes one of the most valuable, and most poorly managed, assets inside any law firm, its history of past matters, and turns it into structured, connected digital data.
It started with directory submissions. It hasn't stayed there. The platform is now expanding into pitches and fee proposals, built on the same underlying data foundation, with the long-term ambition of automating far more of the law firm back office than anyone has managed to do so far.
It is, in other words, a founder building the product he spent twenty years wishing someone else had already built for him.
Why the UK, specifically
Dmytro is clear that the UK made sense on its own terms. The country combines a world-leading legal sector with a genuinely strong technology ecosystem and excellent access to investors, exactly the combination a legal tech founder needs.
Legal technology is moving fast right now, because AI has made products possible that simply couldn't have existed a few years ago. Much of the visible, front-office side of legal work is already being reshaped by it. The back office, where Dmytro spent two decades of his career, has largely been left behind. That gap is the opportunity Ranking Copilot is built to close, and London, as one of the world's leading legal, financial and startup hubs, is the perfect base to build that from.
One surprise stood out above the rest once he started building in earnest: the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme and Enterprise Investment Scheme. SEIS and EIS give UK-based investors a strong incentive to back early-stage businesses like his, and Dmytro found they made fundraising considerably more accessible than he'd expected. It was, in his words, a clear example of government policy actually working to encourage innovation rather than getting in its way.
Finding the route, and finding Innovator International
Arriving on a long-term business visitor visa gave Dmytro somewhere to stand, but not somewhere to stay. It capped him at six months at a time, which is not the kind of runway you build a company on. So he did what a former M&A lawyer does when faced with a complex set of rules: he researched the available routes properly, and concluded that the Innovator Founder visa was the right fit for what he was building.
He came across Innovator International while looking into the visa route itself, searching for an endorsing body that would take an ambitious technology business seriously rather than simply process it. Innovator International felt like the right fit from the start.
What helped most, he says, was the clarity of the guidance throughout the endorsement process. The team made the requirements easy to understand, answered questions quickly, and gave him confidence he was approaching the application the right way. Just as important was the sense that Innovator International believed in Ranking Copilot at an early stage, when it was still very much an unproven idea.
He's also quick to point out that this wasn't a box-ticking experience. Everyone he dealt with engaged with the business as a genuine company with global potential, which made the process feel personal and constructive rather than stressful.
"I am very grateful to Innovator International for believing in both me and the product, just as our investors and clients have done," Dmytro says of the process. He found it relatively straightforward, researching the requirements carefully and using AI extensively to help prepare his applications, which saved him a significant amount of money and meant he never needed to engage a professional visa consultant.
Where Ranking Copilot goes from here
In the near term, the goal is straightforward: become the leading global platform for legal directory submissions, while the expansion into pitches and fee proposals lets law firms reuse the same structured data across several of their most important business development processes. The longer-term ambition is bigger still, to become the dominant global platform for law firm back-office automation, full stop.
Ranking Copilot was built as a global product from day one. Dmytro's client base already spans 35 countries, so the UK was never going to be the whole story. But it remains an excellent base for the company, thanks to SEIS and EIS, a strong startup ecosystem, and London's standing as one of the legal and financial capitals of the world. It gives him access to sophisticated law firms, experienced talent and international investors, while he continues to serve clients everywhere.
Asked what would help most as he continues to establish the business here, Dmytro doesn't hesitate: networking and access to funding. Introductions to law firms, legal technology partners, experienced founders and investors, the kind of connections that can genuinely change the trajectory of a company like his.
What he'd tell another founder
Dmytro's advice to anyone considering the same path is grounded in exactly the experience that got him here. Find a genuine pain point, ideally in an industry you understand exceptionally well. Make sure the market behind it is large enough to matter. Build a solution that creates obvious value, and aim to be the very best in that category, not just a competent entry into it.
He's also candid about what his own story proves, which is that innovation doesn't wait for ideal circumstances to show up. He came to the UK expecting to stay for a week. A war changed everything, and out of that, an unplanned new chapter opened up.
"My experience has shown me that even the most difficult circumstances can become the starting point for building something valuable," he says. "The UK gave me the environment in which to turn almost twenty years of legal experience into a global technology business."
Ranking Copilot is Dmytro Fedoruk's AI-powered platform helping law firms manage directory submissions, pitches and fee proposals. Dmytro is a member of the Innovator International community, supported on the Innovator Founder visa route.
