WHAT SHE BROUGHT WITH HER

Kateryna Sporysh, twenty-one, runs Cyberfortis Consulting's operations in Canada and the United Kingdom — from a village in north eastern Ukraine, close to the line of contact. The path here started with a Duolingo certificate and three buses to Berlin.

“ I know I'm not meant to do just one thing in life.”

— Kateryna Sporysh, in a message to the CEO of Cyberfortis, before she joined

In her final semester at Centennial, she applied to a cybersecurity and governance consultancy called Cyberfortis Consulting Limited. The application landed in the inbox of the company's founder and CEO, Padala Abhishek Naidu, in the middle of one of the busiest stretches Cyberfortis had had to that point. He was standing up Fortisone GRC, the firm's flagship governance, risk and compliance platform, on the back of a partnership with IBM that had just been signed and a product still in build. The company was pre-revenue, bootstrapped, and roughly two million pounds in.

A lot of applications for a consultant role read like applications. Hers read like a conversation with someone who had already thought about what building a business meant — and who wanted to know what he thought about education before telling him what she could do. She asked him how he felt about formal degrees in a world full of alternative learning. She asked him how he saw education shaping a career or a business.

Then, almost in passing, she said this:
"Before the war started, my parents were just about to launch an agricultural business in Ukraine. If the situation allows, I'd love to help rebuild and eventually expand it — bring it into Canada through importing/exporting."

She wasn't applying for a consultant role. She was telling Cyberfortis's CEO what she was going to do with her life, and asking whether some part of his business might fit inside that picture.

She added, in the same exchange:
By nature, I'm very diverse — I give my best in everything I do, and I know I'm not meant to do just one thing in life.

What he saw in the message wasn't a graduate trying to break in. It was a peer, four years earlier than she should have been one, already asking the right questions. He had spent two million dollars and months of sleep on Fortisone GRC by the time her note arrived. He didn't have the luxury of hiring to fill seats. He needed people who would catch fire with the idea. She had caught fire before they had spoken.

He offered her a profit-sharing role. The president of the company interviewed her. She accepted.

She started in July 2025.

Naidu trained her himself. Her commercial instincts — B2B selling, client conversation, the texture of how enterprises buy — were already in place. Cybersecurity, governance, risk and compliance were not. She picked them up at a pace that surprised him. Her brief, in those first weeks, was client engagement and outreach. The IBM partnership was on the books. The product was still being built. She brought the commercial side.

In October, Cyberfortis flew to Dubai for GITEX, the largest technology event in the world, and Expand North Star, its sister conference for high-growth and venture-backed companies. Kateryna was invited along to observe. Her remit was to learn.

GITEX hosts a closed-door investor lounge — a private room, gated by security, accessible only by pre-booked appointment. Companies twice Cyberfortis's size were struggling to get on the calendar. Kateryna approached investors directly on the floor. One agreed to a meeting. That booking opened the room.

By the end of day one, she had run nearly five investor meetings to a productive close — a tally, Naidu has said, that professionals twice her age were struggling to manage that week. Cyberfortis was not chasing capital at GITEX, and has not raised any. The point of the story is something else: a twenty-year-old who had landed in Toronto two winters earlier with broken English had, in a single afternoon, walked her young company past a velvet rope older companies could not get past.

She did not stop at investors. She closed distributor channels in Dubai that have since fed into multi-million-dollar pipelines. She handled the in-person meeting that became Cyberfortis's Google partnership. When Naidu's executive assistant was on leave, she ran his calendar without being asked.

In the middle of the conference, in the car on the way to the venue, he told her she was being promoted to Associate Vice President of Client Relations. Her reaction, he says, was motivated. She kept working.

Months later, Cyberfortis elevated her again — to Global Managing Director for Canada and the United Kingdom. The reasoning was practical. The company was scaling rapidly into new geographies and needed someone who understood both the vision and the speed. There were not many people who did. She had become one of them. She was twenty.

Today she runs the seat from where she grew up. She is with her parents. The agricultural business they were about to launch when the invasion came is still on hold; she is, in her CEO's words, a catalyst for them. Her workday begins by engaging Naidu and the executive team — setting bidding strategy, working client resolutions, taking client calls — and runs about fourteen hours. She has been asked, more than once, to take a week off. She has not. She travels to Germany twice a year to handle European partnerships, and she comes back.

The war, in 2026, is worse than it was when she went home. Russia is targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure daily. On the worst nights, the country's air-defence systems intercept more than a thousand drones. Power cuts last days; her household runs on generators, and sometimes without light. The winter just past was the country's hardest, with bread and fuel shortages across the country. The forest is still in front of her. So is the work.

Between calls and bid responses, she is completing the Credential of Readiness from Harvard Business School.

***

***

She is twenty-one years old. She is the Global Managing Director for Cyberfortis Consulting Limited's operations in Canada and the United Kingdom. Her client portfolio includes the UK Ministry of Defence, the Crown Commercial Service, and the Cabinet Office. She earned the title at twenty.

She works the seat from a village in north-eastern Ukraine, close to the line of contact, where the forest visible from her house was occupied by Russian forces and later liberated by the Ukrainian army. Her workday runs roughly fourteen hours. Between calls and bid responses, she is completing the Credential of Readiness from Harvard Business School.

Three years ago, she landed in Toronto, in January, on her own, seventeen years old, with broken English and the better part of a year of full-scale war at her back.

***

Kateryna Sporysh grew up in northern Ukraine, in a region that would later see Russian armour roll through it. As a child she finished what she started. Early in secondary school she made her grandmother a promise: she would graduate with the Ukrainian gold medal, the country's highest distinction for academic performance, awarded only to students who carry straight A's across all six secondary years. She did. She wore the medal home

School itself was not a place that cheered her on. She found her own way through it. The reward for finishing first in her class was a debate competition, in Ukrainian, that she won — and with it a full scholarship to one of Kyiv's most prominent universities. She turned the scholarship down. She did not want to take a place from someone who had earned it more than she had, and she had decided, by then, that her life was elsewhere.

Where it was, exactly, she did not yet have the language for. So she taught herself the language.

***

She had decided in high school that she wanted to study in Canada. She did not speak a word of English. There was no money for a tutor, no testing centre nearby, no coaching programme. For a year she worked through Duolingo on her own. When the time came, she sat the Duolingo English Test — the cheaper, more accessible alternative to IELTS — and failed it. She sat it again. She passed. Centennial College in Toronto admitted her to its Business Administration programme at the School of Business.

To file her Canadian student visa, she had to leave Ukraine. The application could not be lodged from inside the country. Russia's full-scale invasion had begun ten months earlier. Kateryna was seventeen. She took three buses, alone, from northern Ukraine to Berlin, navigated the obstacles between the bus station and the Canadian embassy, lodged her application, and went home to wait.

She landed in Toronto in January 2023.

***

This piece is not for her. Kateryna Sporysh did not need to be told who she is.

It is for the seventeen-year-old somewhere else in northern Ukraine looking at embassy paperwork and a price tag and wondering whether the door on the other side is even there. It is for the Centennial student a semester from graduation about to settle for a job that doesn't fit because the bigger one looks too far. It is for the employee at Cyberfortis trying to understand what bar this company holds itself to. It is for the client across the table from a twenty-one-year-old Managing Director, wondering, briefly, whether the title is real.

It is real. This is what skin in the game looks like.

Or, in her own words, on the record at her college earlier this year:
Your life is something you actively design — not something that just happens to you.

She is twenty-one.

***

The first weeks in Toronto are the part of her story she tells the least. She had housing arranged. She had no one. She practised English with her roommate in single broken sentences. She had enrolled in Centennial's three-year Business Administration degree.

Inside her first year, financial reality forced her to recalibrate. She downgraded the three-year degree to the two-year diploma to keep going.

Her study permit did not allow her to work. She applied to Canadian immigration authorities for a work authorisation under the permit and, after a wait, received it. From that point on her week ran from seven in the morning until ten at night. She worked at a flower shop. She worked as a barista at a café. She worked as a receptionist at a medical clinic. In the hours that were not classes or shifts, she read Good to Great and a stack of books on project management, investing, and how businesses are actually run. She picked up additional work as a quiz builder for an Australian tutoring company, and in B2B sales on the side.

It was during this period that the grandmother she had promised the gold medal to passed away. Kateryna kept her schedule. She graduated with strong marks.

Her professors remember her.