A Ukrainian Founder Wants to Build the “YouTube of Software” — and ZAS Ventures Just Wrote the First Check

Robutler opens a library of free, remixable professional apps where makers get paid when their work is used. Behind the apps sits an agent-to-agent infrastructure layer that ZAS Ventures says is the real bet.

Volodymyr Seliuchenko has a simple pitch for Robutler: instead of renting software app by app, let people build it together and get paid when it’s used. ZAS Ventures, a US-based VC firm dedicated to backing Ukrainian-founded companies, has put down $400,000 across its two funds as the company’s first institutional check.

Robutler is now public with a shared library of professional-grade tools spanning documents, presentations, design, video, engineering, whiteboards, project management, music, and games — each with real-time collaboration built in. Every app is free. The twist is on the back end: makers publish apps, others can remix and improve them, and everyone earns a share of the revenue generated whenever their work — original or remixed — gets used.

“Think of Robutler as the YouTube of software,” Seliuchenko said. “Here every app is free to use, and Robutler pays the makers whose apps get used, along with the makers they remixed from.”

The real product is the layer underneath

The consumer-facing app library is the visible part. What convinced ZAS Ventures to invest sits one level down: Robutler’s Web of Agents, an infrastructure layer that lets applications and AI agents find each other and collaborate in natural language, with connections to external assistants and coding agents including Claude and Codex.

Robutler has filed three patent applications covering agent discovery, trust ranking, and the usage-attribution system behind maker payouts. The company has also published research on arXiv (TrustFlow) and built two open protocols — Agent OAuth and UAMP — for identity verification and messaging between agents across different organisations.

“Most AI companies are building a better tool. Volodymyr is building the place tools come from,” said Andrew Zinchuk, Founder and Managing Partner of ZAS Ventures. “We wrote the first check into Robutler because of the layer underneath the apps: discovery, trust and payments between agents. That is the piece the whole agentic internet needs, and almost nobody is building.”

Why a Ukrainian-focused fund is watching this closely

ZAS Ventures invests at pre-seed and seed across AI, SaaS, and robotics companies founded by Ukrainians, regardless of where they’re based — Robutler itself is headquartered in Los Gatos, California, not Ukraine. Since 2023, the firm has backed more than 25 companies across two funds and was named Investor of the Year 2025 by the Ukrainian Startup Fund. Its stated goal: 30 Ukrainian-founded unicorns by 2034.

For ZAS, Robutler fits a thesis the firm has been vocal about — that Ukrainian engineering talent is increasingly building category-level infrastructure rather than point solutions, and doing it from hubs like Silicon Valley rather than only from Ukraine. It’s a pattern startupreporter.eu has tracked before, from Osavul’s disinformation-detection platform to other Ukrainian-founded companies building for global markets.

The “infrastructure underneath the product” framing also echoes a theme we’ve covered in the European AI space more broadly — see our interview on Orq.ai’s bet on becoming the “HR department for AI agents”, where founder Sohrab Hosseini makes a similar case for governance and infrastructure layers being the real defensible product, not the front-end tool.

Robutler was founded in 2025 and is available now at robutler.ai.

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