Eugenia Kuyda | Source | CEO and Founder at Replika

When she started the company in 2013, its main product was a chatbot that talked to you about restaurant recommendations. Much of her team was hired from the Russian search engine giant Yandex, and Luka used the TensorFlow library to build its neural network.
In November 2015, Kuyda’s best friend, a startup founder named Roman Mazurenko, died in a car accident in Russia. As a means to process her grief, she scrolled through thousands of text messages she had received over the years from Mazurenko, and realised that his responses could be used to make something.
She used Luka’s expertise in chatbot-technology and computational linguistics, and a large collection of his texts, to create an avatar that mimicked Mazurenko, a kind of memorial bot.
Born in Moscow, Kudya was previously a columnist at one of Russia's biggest dailies and also founded Bribr, an app that could surreptitiously record someone if they were asking for a bribe.