The average knowledge worker uses 10 to 14 different apps a day, switching between them roughly 25 times in that same stretch. Notes live in one tool, tasks in another, planning in a third, and every switch forces the brain to drop one task and reconfigure for the next. That cost lands on everyone, but it lands hardest on people whose working memory is already stretched thin, including the large share of people with ADHD for whom working memory is a documented core impairment rather than a side effect. xTiles was built directly inside that problem, by a founder who lives with it every day.
The xTiles Solution
Max Kuchur founded xTiles in Ukraine in 2021, designing the product around how his own ADHD brain actually works rather than adapting an existing productivity tool and hoping it fits. The result is a single visual workspace for notes, tasks, planning, and collaboration, built so a user can see everything in one place instead of piecing it together across a dozen open tabs. Co-founder Serhii Borbotko came to the product the way many of its users do. He adopted xTiles for his own team before he ever joined the company.
Growth without a North American footprint
Now headquartered in Poland, xTiles has grown to a team of 40. North America is already the company’s largest market by user base, a fact that stands out because it happened without a dedicated local presence, local partnerships, or a single Sprint Week meeting. Users found the product on their own and stayed.
Most productivity tools are built for a general user and then patched with features for edge cases. xTiles reversed that order. Building for a brain that struggles with fragmented, inconsistent interfaces meant the product had to be visual, consolidated, and forgiving of context switching from the start, and that design choice turned out to serve a much wider audience than the founder originally expected.
Testing that Gap in-person
In 2026, Max and Serhii came to Toronto for Sprint Week, TBDC’s five-day market entry program. The format is built to compress months of cold outreach into a single week of meetings with the buyers, partners, and institutions that actually make decisions in a founder’s sector, so a company finds out quickly whether a product that works in one market travels to another.
The team left Toronto with pilot agreements at two universities and a clear next step: incorporate in Canada and come back to build on what the week started. Universities are a demanding proving ground for a productivity tool, with large, fragmented user bases across departments, research teams, and administrative staff who all run on different systems and different habits. A pilot in that environment tests whether xTiles holds up under exactly the kind of app sprawl it was built to solve.
What Sprint Week confirmed for xTiles
Watch the full episode with Vemoco
For xTiles, the question was the same one every founder brings to Sprint Week: does a product built and proven in Europe hold up against a North American buyer with no prior relationship to lean on. The two university pilots suggest it does, and they give the company something more useful than a warm reception. They give xTiles a concrete foothold, two live environments where the product now has to perform under real institutional conditions rather than a cold market it has to re-enter from scratch once the company is ready to formally launch.
xTiles’ episode of Northbound, TBDC’s documentary series following international founders through Sprint Week, is available now, with Sarah walking through the app-switching problem the product solves, the Toronto week, and what the university pilots mean for the company’s next chapter in North America.
Learn more about TBDC’s Horizon program for European founders entering North America.
