Leobit CEO Oleksa Stelmakh Wins Gold and Silver Stevie® Awards in 2026 International Business Awards®

Lviv, Ukraine, September 2026 – Leobit, a .NET, AI, and web application development company, is thrilled to announce that our founder and CEO, Oleksa Stelmakh, was named the winner of a Gold Stevie® Award in the Best Entrepreneur – Computer Services category and a Silver Stevie® Award in the AI Leader of the Year category at the 23rd Annual International Business Awards® (IBAs). The two individual honors are part of six Stevie Awards Leobit received this year, the company’s third consecutive year of recognition at the IBAs.

The International Business Awards are the world’s premier business awards program. All individuals and organizations worldwide, public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small, are eligible to submit nominations. The 2026 IBAs received entries from organizations in 82 nations and territories.

Stevie Award nominations were evaluated by more than 200 business professionals worldwide serving as judges on 9 specialized committees. The committees that reviewed Leobit’s nominations included executives and senior professionals from organizations such as Google, IBM, PwC, SAP America Inc., and Amazon. Judges determined the winners based on their average scores during the independent judging process in June and July.

Oleksa Stelmakh received the Gold Stevie Award in the Best Entrepreneur – Computer Services category, recognizing his role in strengthening Leobit’s market position through strategic partnerships, expanded technology expertise, and active industry leadership.

Under his leadership, Leobit established its long-standing partnership with Microsoft. Since 2018, the company has held the Solutions Partner designation for Digital & App Innovation and, in 2025, added the Solutions Partner designation for Data & AI. Leobit also strengthened its quality engineering practice, achieving ISTQB Platinum Partner status while maintaining its ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 27001 certifications.

Oleksa has also built a visible presence beyond Leobit as a technology leader and contributor to the broader industry. In June 2025, he was appointed Chair of the Technology and Sustainability Awards Judging Committee for the International Business Awards. He has shared his expertise at industry events including the Finnish-Ukrainian Tech Day and Microsoft Azure Dev Summit 2025, led public discussions on AI transformation and corporate LLMs, and delivered lectures at leading universities.

Together, these initiatives reflect an entrepreneurial approach that extends beyond growing a software company: building strategic technology alliances, strengthening organizational expertise, and contributing knowledge and leadership to the wider technology community.

The AI Leader of the Year category recognizes executives who move AI adoption beyond pilot projects into measurable, organization-wide transformation. Judges pointed to Oleksa Stelmakh’s approach as a standout example of exactly that: he treated AI as an operating principle rather than an add-on, driving a company-wide transformation before ever pitching AI services to clients.

In 2024, he set an AI-first course for Leobit, starting in R&D and extending it across every function through new policies, processes, and competencies. By early 2026, over 80% of the workforce had been upskilled in AI tools.

This company-wide transformation led to Leobit introducing an AI-native SDLC and embedding AI throughout the software delivery lifecycle to help customers bring their products to market faster. The shift strengthened both Leobit’s internal capabilities and its customer offering, turning an early strategic decision into a new way to operate and deliver software.

About Leobit
Leobit is a .NET, AI, and web application development provider for technology companies and startups in the US, the EU, and beyond. Our technology focus covers .NET, Angular, iOS, Android, Azure, .NET MAUI, Blazor, Flutter, Ruby, PHP, React, and a comprehensive range of other technologies from Microsoft, web, and mobile stacks. Leobit has a representative office in Austin, TX (USA) and development centers in Lviv (Ukraine), London (UK), Tallinn (Estonia), and Krakow (Poland).

About the Stevie Awards
Founded in 2002, the Stevie Awards are widely recognized as the world’s premier business awards programs, honoring outstanding achievements in the workplace worldwide. The name “Stevie” is derived from the Greek name Stephanos, meaning “crowned.” The Stevie Awards include nine international business awards programs. Each year, the Stevie Awards receive more than 12,000 nominations from organizations in more than 70 nations and territories, recognizing organizations of every size and the professionals behind their success.