Dima Rubanov

Dima Rubanov is a Vienna-based developer and entrepreneur best known as co-founder of Oscar Stories, an AI app that writes personalized bedtime stories with the child as the hero. He builds it, and a growing set of other AI products, with his high-school friend Matthias Neumayer under their studio RUN LABS.

Rubanov studied business administration at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and earned an MSc in Finance at Cranfield University in England. He spent more than ten years in consulting, much of it for airports, working on data analytics, corporate planning, strategy and acquisitions across Europe, South America and Africa. He is also a trained pilot, which his X bio lists first. He and Neumayer started coding as teenagers, when they ran a small internet forum about film and politics.

The pair founded heyqq GmbH in Vienna in 2022 and launched Oscar Stories on Product Hunt in March 2023, where it reached the top spot and drew about 500 sign-ups on its first day. The idea came from Oscar, the godchild of one of the founders, who wanted new stories about himself every night. The app passed 50,000 downloads and 700 subscribers by 2024, was covered by Austrian press and Wired, and the studio now says it has more than 100,000 users. The team also won a government grant to reduce gender bias in children's stories.

Since then RUN LABS has shipped a string of AI products: Branding5, which was #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt in January 2024 and builds a brand strategy in about 30 minutes, Intellipaper (originally FragDasPDF) for working with PDFs and research papers, the child-safe learning app LORA, Oscar Moneyfox for kids' financial literacy, the civic tool FragDiePartei and Polytender, an AI agent that matches companies to public tenders.

Rubanov is an example of a career-switcher who went from corporate finance to shipping consumer AI apps as a two-person team, and of a duo turning one hit product into a small studio of related bets.