From Blender to Blockbusters: One Engineer’s AI Revolution

“We’re essentially putting a Hollywood-scale creative toolkit into the hands of everyone,” says Mykhailo Kovetskyi, Founding Full-Stack Engineer of Portal AI.

Some people stumble into tech. Mykhailo Kovetskyi (Mike) ran headfirst into it, with a controller in one hand and a copy of Neuromancer in the other.

As a kid growing up in Ukraine, his imagination was constantly fueled by sci-fi worlds and video game quests. But unlike most teens who just played games, Mike started creating them. By 15, he was teaching younger students how to render 3D graphics in Blender, discovering a knack not just for tech, but for leadership, explaining complex tools in a way that made creativity feel accessible, not intimidating.

That mindset has never left him. Today, Mike is the founding full-stack engineer at Portal AI, a fast-growing platform that’s taking AI-generated storytelling to a whole new level. His path there – it’s the stuff of modern startup legend.

Code, Grit, and a Game-Changing Marketplace

At 18, Mike went all in as a full-time engineer. Obsessed with moving fast and breaking new ground, he dove deep into the blockchain world and, in 2017, joined forces with longtime collaborator Volodymyr (Vlad) Panchenko to build DMarket, a decentralized marketplace for trading in-game items.

He wrote the first line of code. Then he scaled the team. Then, eventually, he helped scale the company right into the arms of Web3 gaming powerhouse Mythical Games, which acquired DMarket in 2022.

“The DMarket experience didn’t just teach me how to build platforms,” he says. “It taught me how to build people. Great tech only works if you know how to grow great teams.”

Portal AI: The Creative Engine for a New Internet

After the DMarket chapter closed, Mike didn’t take a break — he started tinkering. Inspired by the rise of generative AI, he began developing hobby projects that explored AI-generated social video channels. He was essentially coding the bones of what would become Portal.ai, long before the company officially formed.

Portal’s founder, DMarket’s alumnus, noticed what Mike was building. The timing was perfect. The vision aligned. And just like that, a new venture was born.

But Portal isn’t just another AI startup. It’s a new category of social platform, one built on co-creation.

Instead of passively consuming video, users build evolving, cinematic storylines together. You can remix someone else’s clip, extend a scene, or contribute a whole new branch to a shared universe. It’s storytelling without gatekeepers. “We’re seeing users create narrative threads that stretch across dozens of clips, worlds are literally being built in real time,” Mike explains.

And unlike platforms that tack on AI tools as afterthoughts, Portal bakes creativity into its core. “It doesn’t feel transactional. It feels like a playground.”

Chasing Bigger Goals

Here’s the twist: Portal didn’t start out as a storytelling platform. Its earliest iteration was a high-performing ad-tech product, technically solid, financially viable, but spiritually off.

“It was working,” Mike admits. “But it wasn’t why we started building in the first place.”

So the team did something rare in tech: they walked away from a working formula to chase a bolder one. They focused on their shared dream of empowering everyday users to become storytellers, filmmakers, and worldbuilders. “We knew it was risky,” Mike says, “but it aligned everyone. And that changed everything.”

Building the Future at Warp Speed

As Portal’s technical engine, Mike now oversees everything from AI video generation to personalized content feeds. He’s the connective tissue between R&D and product, the person who makes sure wild ideas actually ship.

But his real superpower is empowering other engineers to take ownership. “I believe innovation thrives when leadership is decentralized,” he says. “We don’t need one visionary. We need a culture where everyone feels like one.”

That ethos of “collective leadership” is what keeps Portal moving fast, experimenting freely, and staying ahead in an industry where yesterday’s breakthroughs are today’s table stakes.

A New Hollywood, Born From the Internet

What Portal.ai is building isn’t just impressive, it’s paradigm-shifting. By lowering the creative barrier for creators, the platform is opening up storytelling to a global community of users who would never think of themselves as filmmakers.

“We’re giving people the tools to build cinematic universes without ever touching a camera,” Mike says. “The next Harry Potter or Star Wars might not come from a studio. It might come from a Portal AI universe.”

And for a kid who once taught Blender in a computer lab at 15, that’s exactly the future he’s been dreaming of.