In the fast-moving world of digital commerce, few challenges are as deceptively complex as the way images and videos travel across the web. The modern online shopper expects rich, high-resolution visuals instantly — from detailed product photography to immersive lifestyle content. Yet the infrastructure behind the scenes was never designed to handletoday’s media load. It’s a problem that affects page speed, cloud costs, engineering pipelines, and even return rates.
For most companies, this challenge sits quietly in the background. For Vladyslav Malanin, it became the center of his career.
Vlad is the Co-Founder and CTO of SpeedSize, an AI media-optimization platform used by more than 200 global e-commerce brands. He is known today for leading one of the most advanced approaches to visual AI, but his path into technology began far earlier, and in an entirely different discipline. Worth mentioning: he is also a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Before entering the tech world, Malanin trained as a medical doctor, graduating with honors in general surgery from Odesa National Medical University. He spent several years in surgical practice as a military surgeon before redirecting his focus toward computational science, eventually earning a PhD in Computer Science from the Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. That shift may sound dramatic, but to Malanin, the connection was clear: both fields require precision, systems thinking, and a deep understanding of how small details shape larger outcomes.
His early engineering work focused on building and scaling high-load digital platforms, where he designed systems capable of handling massive traffic volumes and complex data flows. In parallel, he consulted on advanced media-processing pipelines, creating automated technologies for large-scale video and content production long before today’s wave of generative AI. These experiences shaped his approach to performance engineering and laid the groundwork for his later work in visual AI.
Vlad’s most consequential venture began in 2019, when he co-founded SpeedSize. His insight was simple but profound: the internet is drowning in visual data, and existing compression or CDN strategies were no longer keeping up.
“Images have evolved faster than the web that carries them,” he explains. “We needed a new scientific approach, one based on how the human eye actually works.”
SpeedSize uses AI to analyze every pixel of an image and determine what the human eye can and cannot detect. The platform removes only the invisible data while keeping completeclarity, color accuracy, and detail. The output is visually identical, yet dramatically lighter.
For brands, the impact is immediate: faster page loads, lower bounce rates, reduced infrastructure strain, and fewer product returns caused by inaccurate colors or textures. SpeedSize’sapproach has attracted more than $6 million in investment, earned recognition from The Lead’s “Leading 100,” the International WooCommerce Speed Up Challenge, and multiple startup competitions.
While the commercial story is impressive, Malanin’s work extends beyond private-sector innovation. In 2021, he collaborated with the Public Health Center of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine to build the Life Calculator. This large-scale digital health tool helped more than 270,000 people assess lifestyle risks and prevent disease. The Ministry awarded him a formal letter of appreciation for the project’s national impact.
Malanin’s scientific footprint is equally notable: dozens of academic publications and 2 granted patents. But perhaps what makes Malanin’s story most relevant to readers today is how closely it aligns with the challenges ahead. As AI transforms content creation, as infrastructure buckles under rising media demands, and as digital experiences become more immersive, the need for intelligent visual optimization grows exponentially.
Speed, accuracy, and trust will define the next era of the internet. And the people who understand how to build for that future, at the intersection of human perception, machine intelligence, and massive-scale engineering, will shape what comes next.
Vlad Malanin is one of them.
Contact Name: Vlad Malanin
Company/Brand Name: SpeedSize
Full Postal Address: Derech Dgania 80, 12, Netanya, 4237696 Country/City/State: Israel
Website Link: https://speedsize.com
Company social media: https://www.linkedin.com/company/speedsize/
Personal social media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlad-malanin
