Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko: Email Address, LinkedIn and Bio (2026)

Dmytro Gerasymenko at a glance

Ahrefs CEO email address: how to reach Dmytro Gerasymenko

Dmytro Gerasymenko doesn’t publish an email address. His X bio lists his companies but no email, and Ahrefs’ team page links only his X and LinkedIn profiles (Ahrefs) (checked Nov 4, 2026). For press, Ahrefs’ inbox is pr@ahrefs.com (Ahrefs); for anything else, support@ahrefs.com.

Ahrefs email address pattern

Ahrefs staff mostly use {first}.{last}@ahrefs.com, according to LeadIQ (LeadIQ) and Prospeo (Prospeo).

Ahrefs has said its domain catches mail sent to any name, so a verifier may not be able to confirm a guessed address, and a message to a wrong one may never be read. All Ahrefs patterns, domains and official inboxes are on the Ahrefs email format page.

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Career timeline

From Nizhyn to Singapore: how Ahrefs started

Gerasymenko was born in Nizhyn, a city north-east of Kyiv. “My father put the first computer together when I was 6 years old,” he told AIN, and at school he built a search engine for documentation and sold books through it, “until something happened to the server and all my achievements got lost” (AIN).

He studied computer science at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, where Igor Pikovets, now Ahrefs’ CTO, was in his group. Sources differ on whether he finished: he speaks of graduating, while Forbes Ukraine wrote in 2021 that he left in his fifth year, in 2007 (Forbes Ukraine). He worked as a C# and PHP developer at a Kyiv web studio, then freelanced for a US company, and his small team built search engines for PDF files and music (AIN).

Ahrefs began with an invoice. Paying for Majestic, the backlink database of the day, he decided he could build a similar system for the money (AIN). In 2010 he and Pikovets started on a crawler, written in OCaml, and about a year later they launched a paid service on its link index and won its first customers with ads on SEO forums (AIN). In 2012, with about seven people and roughly $1M in annual revenue, he moved the company to Singapore (Forbes Ukraine).

Ahrefs never took investors. “I think I got emails from almost every active venture capital fund in the world,” he said in 2021; “we were profitable from year one and growing at a very good pace, so external funding was not needed” (Vulcan Post). Its ARR passed $40M in 2018 (AIN) and $150M by 2026 (X).

Yep, and his case against Google

In March 2019 Gerasymenko announced that Ahrefs would build a general search engine to compete with Google, with a “90/10 profit share model, meaning 90% goes to content creators” (X). Yep.com launched in June 2022 (TechCrunch). He argues that only a bootstrapped company can keep that promise: a venture-funded one would have investors “pushing to grow revenue perpetually and at some point, it would be 85/15 split, then 80/20, and so on” (Search Engine Journal).

Ahrefs and the war in Ukraine

Gerasymenko is Ukrainian, and so is most of Ahrefs’ leadership (AIN). The day after Russia’s full-scale invasion, he rebuked rival Semrush for calling it “events in Ukraine”: “what you refer to as ‘events in Ukraine’ is actually ‘Russian aggression against Ukraine’” (X). On March 3, 2022, Ahrefs blocked all access from Russia and Belarus (X), and by April it had raised more than $1.5M for Ukrainian charities (Search Engine Land). In July 2024 it gave $1M to rebuild Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv (X).

In his own words

“VC-funded startups don’t survive all that well in the long run because their mentality is ‘all or nothing’.”

— Vulcan Post, April 27, 2021 (Vulcan Post)

“We managed to create a product that promoted itself at an early stage. … We have no sales team to this day.”

— AIN, May 30, 2019 (AIN)

“By investing in hardware and a data centre, Ahrefs saved $400M over 3 years.”

— Post on X, March 9, 2023 (X)

“Google will have to change its business model or see its market and ad revenues shrinking.”

— Post on X, June 18, 2021 (X)

“MCP has been our fastest growing product this year, and we’re investing in making it faster, better, and available to more customers.”

— Post on X, September 16, 2026 (X)

Ahrefs’ leadership

Full company profile, including revenue and products: Ahrefs in 2026: revenue, valuation, funding, CEO.