Ilya Levtov, founder and CEO of Craft, has never written a line of code during his career, yet he built a 12-year-old software company specializing in supply chain intelligence. He says the company currently works with 35 U.S. federal government agencies and generates tens of millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue. Levtov has raised $42 million in funding, after beginning a career path unlike the typical route taken by software company founders in Silicon Valley.
This experience is part of a Crunchbase News series about startup founders with nontechnical backgrounds. The story does not offer a formula confirming that software expertise is unimportant; rather, it presents a practical trade-off: a nontechnical founder may face greater difficulty building the product and evaluating engineering talent, but may possess different strengths in understanding customers, managing teams, raising capital and closing deals.
A Career Path That Began With Music and Venture Capital
Levtov’s family immigrated from the Soviet Union to England when he was a child. With two musician parents, he began playing the cello at age four, then attended a specialist music school in London, studied at the Royal College of Music, and participated in an exchange program between Columbia University and Juilliard while earning a degree in English literature from Columbia.
Levtov later decided to keep music as a hobby and turn toward business. He worked at Goldman Sachs, then attended Stanford Business School and joined the technology advertising startup Spot Runner, where he witnessed its growth from around 10 employees to nearly 200 employees during his time there. He later worked as a venture capital investor at Venrock, then took an operating role at video service company Crunchyroll. He also worked at Deutsche Telekom helping Silicon Valley startups, including Evernote, Box, Dropbox and Pinterest, build distribution partnerships.
The Gap Between the Idea and the Code
Craft emerged from an unsuccessful attempt to build a social network for businesses. During the project, Levtov’s team collected data from company websites, job pages, management pages and other sources to create company profiles. When those profiles began appearing prominently in Google results, Levtov saw the possibility of an independent business.
Turning the idea into a product, however, was slower than the path a technical founder might take by writing a prototype independently during spare time. Levtov says the first programmer he hired was a freelancer in 2015, paid $20 per hour through Odesk or Upwork. He had to search for developers, explain his vision, try to verify that the execution matched what he had in mind, and then secure the money needed to pay development costs.
Levtov describes this dependence as a fundamental disadvantage in the early stages, because a nontechnical founder does not always have the knowledge needed to evaluate code or quickly identify that the technical person he hired is not a good fit. He says Craft hired the wrong person at certain stages, and that such decisions slowed the company’s growth.
From Company Profiles to Supply Chain Intelligence
Even so, the product gained momentum. According to Levtov, the company profiles appeared in 100 million search results each month and attracted approximately 2.25 million organic visitors. The commercial shift came when someone from Lockheed Martin contacted the company, explaining that the data it collected could help monitor changes within broad supply chains.
The system was able to capture signals such as hiring changes, executive departures and new product launches. Lockheed Martin became Craft’s first enterprise customer. In 2020, the U.S. Air Force contacted the company about using the product to monitor 300,000 companies in the defense industrial base. Levtov says the company closed a five-year deal worth $6.5 million after 94 days.
This path led the company to redefine itself. Rather than being merely a platform for company profiles, the team realized that it was a supply chain company. More importantly, the early users were not developers looking for better development tools, but business organizations facing a problem in understanding a complex network of institutions and tracking its changes.
Why Does the Experience Matter to Founders and Investors?
Craft’s story reveals that a nontechnical background does not eliminate the need for engineering expertise, but it changes how risk is distributed within the company. Initially, a technical founder may give the company a faster ability to test the idea and build the product, while also possessing a direct means of connecting the business concept to the code being implemented. A nontechnical founder, meanwhile, may compensate with a greater ability to understand the market, speak with customers, develop relationships, raise funding and close deals.
Levtov confronted this bias directly when he began raising funding in London during 2015 and 2016, where he found funds that emphasized supporting technical founders in their messaging. But he did not consider himself completely excluded; his background at Stanford and Venrock ultimately helped him raise funding from the United Kingdom’s Downing Ventures, and then from Uncork Capital after returning to Silicon Valley.
Levtov believes artificial intelligence makes the discussion more complex, as it becomes possible to build increasing portions of software without traditional programming expertise. But he does not conclude that technical founders are no longer important. His view is that the ideal combination often brings together both sides: one founder who deeply understands technology and another who excels at business, customers and deals.
The practical conclusion from Craft’s experience is not that technology can be bypassed, but that a company’s needs change as it moves through different stages of growth. At one stage, building the product may be the priority; at another, the focus may shift to hiring, sales, positioning, marketing or closing deals. The open questions remain tied to the nontechnical founder’s ability to build a reliable engineering team, measure execution quality and make rapid decisions when they cannot inspect the technical details themselves.