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 expertise, not access.

Nikita and Helen arrived in Dubai as life partners with a completely different startup idea. Instead, they personally experienced that in a new market, expertise doesn’t automatically translate to opportunity. If you’re not a household name locally, the global events and speaking industry treat you like you’re starting from scratch.

Speakers watched opportunities hide behind application forms, unanswered agency emails, and “connections” they didn’t have. Organisers struggled too, spending weeks scouting, repeating the same names for events, and relying on familiar referrals.

Noting this, the two founders decided, “If the world doesn’t give us a stage, we will build one".

In a city where podcasters, speakers, and creators welcome innovation, support from hubs like Meydan Free Zone inspired SpeakUp: an AI-powered marketplace 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

‍After moving to the UAE, Nikita and Helen kept hearing the same thing from experts and event teams across Dubai, London, Mumbai, and beyond. Powerful voices remain silent while average voices dominate, simply because they have more connections.

But, talent shouldn’t pay to be found. Yet the industry has long taken commissions from speakers who’ve already earned their fees, even from those who donate to charity. SpeakUp exists to change that.

With AI-powered profile matching and commission-free access, public speaking can finally be democratised. Nikita and Helen say, “Our mission is to make discovering experts as easy as booking a ticket. We replace gatekeeping with an open, data-driven, 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 essence behind SpeakUp, as Nikita and Helen turned this very question into a product.

In the public speaking industry, access has always depended on inboxes and friendships. This is why SpeakUp removes commissions entirely and lets their AI algorithm suggest speakers based on topics, audiences, and reviews to help find the perfect fit. Organisers don’t hunt for speakers; they post a private or public request, and the right speakers come to it. This flips an outdated dynamic where experts had to chase opportunities or rely on favours.

The two founders also decided to centralise chats and booking on SpeakUp because booking shouldn’t live across WhatsApp groups, DMs and scattered emails. 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 recycling the same names.

But booking is just step one. Organisers need PR, coaching, production, marketing, and venues - the Growth Marketplace provides just that, where partners who give more value pay less, turning growth into a shared incentive, not a plain transaction. To make things more transparent, each opportunity is labelled as either free, paid, or reward-based, removing grey areas and guesswork.

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 to be heard. The first outreach happened on LinkedIn when Helen had 100 followers, and momentum followed from those who believed in the idea. A Forbes editor replied, then speakers from the US began joining through online meetings, and one day CNN appeared on the platform, posting more than twenty speaker requests - a moment that changed everything.

Rather than charging speakers to be seen, SpeakUp promotes them for free through ads, SEO and media, because a marketplace shifts to an industry only when everyone participates.

Growth isn’t fuelled by heavy marketing spend, but by product fit. SpeakUp’s acquisition cost on Google Ads is almost 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 tagging SpeakUp to register executives

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
• A single request in Brazil got over 100k applications in 24 hours
• During one dinner, the founders saw 400+ registrations stack up in an hou
• 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 understands people, not just keywords. It took nights of coding and persistent refusal to compromise on quality. Later, they overcame this by listening to real behaviour and designing discovery around people.

And building in Dubai made their ambition realistic. As the two founders say, “In other places, people focus on risks. In Dubai, people focus on possibilities, and being in an ecosystem supported by hubs like Meydan Free Zone helped us build a 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 workshop to a global tech summit feel as straightforward as ordering groceries online. The next chapter for SpeakUp? Opening more doors for storytellers and speakers worldwide through deeper transparency, better reviews, industry-wide analytics and a discovery system that treats skill as the only qualification. And in a world 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.