Age: 22

Origin: Georgia

Based in: Toronto, Canada

Education: École Polytechnique & University of Toronto

Occupation:

• Co-founder & CEO of RehabGlove
• Co-founder & CTO of DineSpace

At the young age of 22, Giorgi Tskhovrebadze has already achieved major success as a video game programmer and as a start-up entrepreneur by turning the skills he learnt from playing and designing video games into technology that can make a huge impact on people’s lives.

Giorgi first became interested in computer programming at age 10 when he began studying at the Information Technology Centre “Mziuri”. While studying there for three years he learned the coding languages C# and ActionScript3. He used this knowledge to begin creating his own mobile phone games before becoming one of the designers for the Facebook game Stick Run in 2012, which boasted 50 million players. After leaving Stick Run Team in 2013, he started creating games for Facebook Platform, one of the games being Fly and Smash, which had half a million players and over 400,000 likes on Facebook.

In 2016, Giorgi graduated from the Komarovi Physics and Mathematics High School in Tbilisi. With the end of school, Giorgi had more time to focus on programming and expanding into the business sphere. Along with the Tunisian programmers Ahmed Selmi and Iyed Ben Hadj Dahmen, Giorgi created the Wild Ones Remake – the game has over one million players worldwide and is now listed on Facebook’s Top Role-playing video games category. In 2017, Giorgi joined the first class of the English-language Bachelor programme at École Polytechnique in France.

With his brother Dimitri Tskhovrebadze, Giorgi co-founded the start-up RehabGlove in 2016. RehabGlove is an exoskeleton glove that assists patients who have suffered from a stroke and lost control of one of their hands. In the first stages of the treatment, the glove reproduces the movements made by the healthy hand; once the patient has recovered enough strength to make micro-movements with the damaged hand, the glove uses force sensors to support them and allow the two hands to perform separate tasks. To make the experience more entertaining, the start-up couples its glove with a virtual reality headset to allow patients to be immersed in the environment of their choice, and to visualise the movements of their hands as well as possible. RehabGlove is the only product on the market which offers full rehabilitation while also being affordable in comparison to competitors. RehabGlove costs 10,000 euros a year subscription for rehabilitation clinics.

“Gamification is an important part of the rehabilitation process because it works with the patient’s motivation and progress,” said Giorgi on RehabGlove.

RehabGlove quickly became very successful and has won Giorgi many awards. RehabGlove was a beneficiary of the Georgian Innovation and Technology Agency (GITA): a Tbilisi-based organisation supporting innovative entrepreneurship for state and private sector entities. From February 27-March 2, 2017, RehabGlove was among over 2,500 exhibitors at the Mobile World Congress that took place in Barcelona. Promoted as the “biggest and best mobile” event of this year, the global exhibition hosted over 100,000 visitors from more than 200 countries. It allowed innovators around the world to showcase their tech projects for mobile platforms that contribute to education, health, commerce, and other social and economic fields. RehabGlove finished in the top 10 of the projects that were introduced at the event.

Microsoft named RehabGlove “The Best Innovation in CEE & Central Asia regions.” At the Seedstars Regional Summit in Kyiv, Ukraine, RehabGlove was named as “Georgia’s most promising start-up,” and was presented at the Seedstars World Summit in Switzerland in April 2018.

Giorgi’s latest venture is in food tech. He co-founded and is the CTO for the app DineSpace, founded in October 2020, which allows users to pre-order and pre-pay for their meals. This saves people the valuable time they lose from waiting to order and receive their food and also waiting for their bills. Restaurants will also benefit from this app as it will increase table turnover. DineSpace offers customers reasonable cancellation times. However, for those reservations where the restaurant has already started food preparation, DineSpace will implement a system, which will enable the restaurants to redistribute this food within the community and not let it go to waste. Giorgi states that the priority of DineSpace is to be sustainable and make sure that food is not being thrown away.

DineSpace is already attracting major investment from the UK, Germany, Estonia, and Georgia. DineSpace won the European Fund for Southeast Europe pre-accelerator with a 10,000 Georgian lari ($3,200) cash prize and more recently gained a 15,000 lari grant from Georgia’s Innovation and Technology Agency.

The app is already up and running in Georgia, they had 60+ restaurants on board for the pre-launch and they are hoping to target the English cities of London, Exeter, and Brighton next.