SpeakUp: Redefining Speaker Discovery With an AI-Powered Marketplace For Experts And Organisers

If talent isn’t the problem, why do so many expert voices remain invisible?

Nikita Zhuchkov and Helen Kareva built SpeakUp to make speaker recognition depend on skill, not access.

Nikita and Helen arrived in Dubai as life partners with a completely different startup idea. Instead, they realised that you can be a top expert in your home country, invited to every interview and conference — but the moment you move, you become a nobody. You can’t get on stage without endless searches on conference websites, expensive agencies that rarely respond, strong personal connections, or a single global platform. Organisers struggle too, spending weeks scouting, repeating the same names for events, and relying on familiar referrals.

The problem was not skill; it was closed doors.

Noting their learnt experiences, the two founders decided, “If the world doesn’t give us a stage, we will build one.”

In a city like Dubai, where podcasters, speakers, and creators actively want innovation, support from hubs like Meydan Free Zone inspired SpeakUp: an AI-powered platform that gives a voice to people who can change the world by making expert discovery fair for speakers and efficient for organisers.

Changing Who Gets Heard by Changing How They’re Found

In Dubai, the founders discovered that speakers from India, London, and many other places face the same problem when they move: they suddenly become invisible to media and conferences. Powerful voices remain silent while average voices dominate, simply because they have more connections.

But talent shouldn’t pay for the right to be discovered. Yet for decades, the industry has been built on commissions, and many speakers donate part of their fees to charity. SpeakUp exists to change that. ‍

‍By removing commissions and using AI to match speakers and opportunities, SpeakUp removes artificial barriers and makes the process fairer for both sides. Nikita and Helen say, “Our mission is to make discovering experts as easy as booking a ticket. Instead of relying on closed bureaus and personal networks, we provide an open, data-driven, and AI-powered way to find the right voices.”

Creating A Fair Stage Powered by AI

When Helen said, “If you can book a villa in seconds, why can’t you book a speaker just as easily?”

‍This became the core concept behind SpeakUp, as Nikita and Helen turned this very question into a product.

In a relationship-based industry, decisions are often made “by friendship” or habit. SpeakUp’s algorithm doesn’t choose friends; it chooses the best fit. It analyses topics, audience, format, reviews, awards, languages, and many other nuances that a human agent can’t process at scale. On SpeakUp, opportunities become proactive. The request appears, and the right speakers come to it. This reverses the dynamic of usual networking and outreach and modernises a model that was long overdue for change.

The two founders also decided to centralise chats and booking in one place, because booking and communication shouldn’t be chaotic across WhatsApp groups, DMs, and scattered emails in the age of AI. They reiterate that “Achievements are the new currency of trust,” which is why speakers need to show verified qualifications and both parties get to provide feedback. The result? Audiences get stronger voices, and conferences stop inviting the same lineups every time.

A speaker’s success doesn’t end with a booking; it begins there. Organisers still have many other challenges like production, promotion, logistics, coaching and more. SpeakUp’s Growth Marketplace is an ecosystem that helps them solve these issues and save money in the process. To make the industry cleaner and more transparent, each opportunity is labelled as either free, paid, or reward-based, aligning expectations and removing grey areas by letting organisations that pay choose formats openly.

From a fragmented system to a unified marketplace, SpeakUp is actively turning speaker discovery into proper infrastructure that focuses solely on skill. ‍

Where a Community Becomes the Growth Engine

SpeakUp kicked off with people who were tired of waiting and had something important to say. The first outreach happened with messages on LinkedIn when Helen had around 100 followers, and momentum followed from those who believed in the idea. First, a Forbes editor replied, then speakers from the US began joining after online meetings, and one day CNN appeared as a user on the platform, posting more than 20 requests — a moment that was a turning point.

Rather than charging speakers to be seen, SpeakUp promotes them for free through ads, SEO and media, because the founders believe their brand grows when the community grows, and it’s important that every speaker can find their stage.

Growth isn’t fuelled by heavy marketing spend, but by product fit. SpeakUp’s acquisition cost on Google Ads is about 10x lower than industry benchmarks, showing that demand finds them on its own.

Two channels became major drivers:

• Google Ads: A remarkably low acquisition cost
• LinkedIn: Top companies like Salesforce were tagging SpeakUp, mentioning plans of registering their top managers

Growth, Challenges & Milestones

‍SpeakUp’s instant growth came from demand that was already waiting. The moment they went live in Dubai in April 2025, the market showed how urgently it needed fair speaker discovery.

These are some milestones that signalled the shift:

• SpeakUp surpassed 30,000 users in just 5 months after launch
• One request in Brazil got over 100 applications in 24 hours
• During one dinner, the founders saw 400+ new user registrations stack up in an hour
• SpeakUp was on global stages like The Final Pitch and the World Summit Awards
• Lastly, a speaker from Africa got booked for a crypto summit in Dubai through SpeakUp and cried when he shared it

But behind this steady momentum was a significant challenge: building AI that truly understands people, not just keywords. Nikita worked days and nights, and the founders still live in that intense rhythm, while Helen continued working from a hospital bed to keep the product and users moving forward. They overcame the challenge by refusing to compromise on quality and by listening carefully to real user behaviour.

And building in Dubai made their ambition realistic. As the two founders say, “In other places, people would’ve focused on risks. In Dubai, people focus on possibilities, and being in an ecosystem supported by hubs like Meydan Free Zone gave us the confidence and infrastructure to build a truly global product from day one.”

Looking Ahead

People told Nikita and Helen, “You won’t be able to break an industry that has been built on commissions for decades.”

They responded with SpeakUp.

The goal ahead is simple: make booking a speaker for anything from a small meetup to a global tech summit like GITEX feel as straightforward as ordering groceries online.

The next chapter for SpeakUp? A world where no one needs special connections to be heard, to keep improving the product, to bring more transparency to reviews of events, producers, podcasters and speakers, to build analytics that help both sides make better decisions, and to raise the overall quality of the industry.

And in an industry where voices move from Nigeria to Dubai to London, SpeakUp was created to follow people, not borders. With support from Dubai’s ecosystem and hubs like Meydan Free Zone, that belief becomes a global standard.