Kirill Merikov

Kirill Merikov

Economics, markets, founder

Moscow, · Russian, English

I run a VPN service, I’m building a trading system and I compete in economics olympiads. I also co-founded a grant fund for young founders in Russia.

Work

  • RunoVPN

    A VPN service I started as a Telegram bot and later moved onto its own platform, runonet.com. I run it end to end: product, payments, support and growth.

    The platform handles sign-in by email, Google or Telegram, takes card, SBP and crypto payments, and issues access automatically as soon as a payment clears. A reconciliation job catches the worst case in this business, a customer who paid but didn’t get access, and fixes it without a support ticket.

    Growth runs through a partner program: every partner gets one link for the site and one for the bot, with separate funnels and payouts, and the admin panel shows the whole path from visit to cart to payment. After a security review I locked down database access rules and the content security policy. Live since June 2026.

    • Next.js + Supabase
    • Cards, SBP, crypto
    • Site + bot funnels
    • Live since June 2026
  • tradeBOT

    An autonomous system that watches the US stock market around the clock: companies, macro, money flows, energy, geopolitics and crypto. From the overall picture it forms trade ideas, and every idea has to pass a chain of independent checks before anything is executed. The aim is rare trades with asymmetric risk and reward; protecting capital comes before return.

    It runs in two loops. A cheap perception loop never stops: each domain has a scout agent that polls sources, removes duplicates and records only facts, each stamped with the moment it became public. A decision loop wakes up only for a real candidate. A synthesizer checks the picture against the system’s memory, an opponent agent hunts for weak spots and can kill the idea, a decision agent prices the expected value after costs, and a Monte Carlo risk module sizes the position. Every decision is logged before the price moves, so the probabilities are calibrated against what actually happened.

    Hypotheses are registered before the data arrives, then tested on a separate period with placebos, event twins, block bootstrap and corrections for multiple comparisons. The whole system can be replayed through real history in the exact order information became known. So far no signal family has passed the confirmation test, so by the project’s own rules it trades on paper only. Real money goes in only for trade types that hold up on fresh, forward data.

    I set the problem and own the architecture, the research method and the risk policy, and I write code as well. Two developers build modules, connect data sources and run the server.

    • ~96k lines of Python
    • 10,000+ tests
    • 40+ data channels
    • 7,000+ US issuers
    • Paper trading only
  • Mars

    An internship in the Strategic Revenue Management team at Mars while I was still in school. SRM is the part of a consumer company that decides how products are priced and promoted on the shelf, so the work sits exactly where economics meets real sales data.

    At the end of the internship I was offered a full-time role. I turned it down to keep time for olympiads and my own projects.

  • MR

    A community that started in my school in 10th grade and quickly grew beyond it: now about 400 people aged 15 to 24. Teams the fund turns down get a place in MR, and I keep following how they do.

  • Fyodor Orchenko Fund

    A grant fund for school and university students with business ideas, named after my friend Fedya Orchenko, who died at seventeen. The day I had the idea, I made a group chat with his two sisters and fifteen of his friends. Those fifteen became the team, and nobody is paid.

    Money follows evidence. Finalists go through Sprint, a ten-day show filmed with mentors, where they test their hypothesis on real customers. They get ₽50k, ₽50k and ₽75k in tranches, each released only after the previous stage is confirmed, and up to ₽575k more for scaling if the hypothesis holds. I designed the show’s economics.

    We picked the first two teams at the final of the All-Russian School Olympiad on Entrepreneurship and granted them ₽1.25M. Lvinka Lab turns retail food waste into feed protein with black soldier fly larvae; ZooMetrika diagnoses cattle health early with sensors and computer vision. In selection I looked at how a team works together more than at what it had already built. ZooMetrika had the hardest idea and the least finished product, we argued for a long time, and we funded it.

    Partners: Sber, the Vklad v Budushchee foundation and the Olympiad on Entrepreneurship. Season one is open to students from 10th grade to the second year of university; finalists are picked on December 21, 2026.

    • ₽1.25M granted
    • Up to ₽750k per team
    • 15 volunteers
    • Season 1: 2026/27

Education

  • Gymnasium of the Kosygin Russian State UniversityClass of 2026

    Top annual grade in math, 6 of 162 in my year

Selected awards

  • 1st placeInternational Economics Olympiad (IEO), Open Track2026
  • 3rd placeDEADLINE case championship, Central University × T‑Bank2026
  • WinnerHSE Olympiad “Vysshaya Proba”, Economics (~18,000 participants)2026
  • WinnerMoscow Olympiad for School Students, Economics2026
All 15 awards →

Outside of that, I spent three seasons as a goalkeeper for Torpedo Moscow’s youth water polo team (bronze at the Russian U18 Championship) and now play volleyball with friends. If you want to talk about markets, olympiads or any of these projects, write to me.

Skills

  • Economics
  • Financial modeling
  • Case solving
  • Revenue management
  • Market analysis
  • Statistics
  • Monte Carlo
  • Product management
  • Team leadership
  • Partnerships
  • Python
  • SQL
  • TypeScript
  • Next.js
  • PostgreSQL
  • Supabase
  • Linux
  • REST & WebSocket APIs
  • LLM agents
  • pytest
  • Git

Projects

202420252026 RunoVPNtradeBOTMarsMRFyodor Orchenko Fund now
RunoVPN2026 –

Founder · VPN service

A VPN service I started as a Telegram bot and later moved onto its own platform, runonet.com. I run it end to end: product, payments, support and growth.

The platform handles sign-in by email, Google or Telegram, takes card, SBP and crypto payments, and issues access automatically as soon as a payment clears. A reconciliation job catches the worst case in this business, a customer who paid but didn’t get access, and fixes it without a support ticket.

Growth runs through a partner program: every partner gets one link for the site and one for the bot, with separate funnels and payouts, and the admin panel shows the whole path from visit to cart to payment. After a security review I locked down database access rules and the content security policy. Live since June 2026.

  • Next.js + Supabase
  • Cards, SBP, crypto
  • Site + bot funnels
  • Live since June 2026
tradeBOT2024 –

Architecture lead, team of 3 · multi-agent trading system

An autonomous system that watches the US stock market around the clock: companies, macro, money flows, energy, geopolitics and crypto. From the overall picture it forms trade ideas, and every idea has to pass a chain of independent checks before anything is executed. The aim is rare trades with asymmetric risk and reward; protecting capital comes before return.

It runs in two loops. A cheap perception loop never stops: each domain has a scout agent that polls sources, removes duplicates and records only facts, each stamped with the moment it became public. A decision loop wakes up only for a real candidate. A synthesizer checks the picture against the system’s memory, an opponent agent hunts for weak spots and can kill the idea, a decision agent prices the expected value after costs, and a Monte Carlo risk module sizes the position. Every decision is logged before the price moves, so the probabilities are calibrated against what actually happened.

Hypotheses are registered before the data arrives, then tested on a separate period with placebos, event twins, block bootstrap and corrections for multiple comparisons. The whole system can be replayed through real history in the exact order information became known. So far no signal family has passed the confirmation test, so by the project’s own rules it trades on paper only. Real money goes in only for trade types that hold up on fresh, forward data.

I set the problem and own the architecture, the research method and the risk policy, and I write code as well. Two developers build modules, connect data sources and run the server.

  • ~96k lines of Python
  • 10,000+ tests
  • 40+ data channels
  • 7,000+ US issuers
  • Paper trading only
Mars2025

Intern · Strategic Revenue Management

An internship in the Strategic Revenue Management team at Mars while I was still in school. SRM is the part of a consumer company that decides how products are priced and promoted on the shelf, so the work sits exactly where economics meets real sales data.

At the end of the internship I was offered a full-time role. I turned it down to keep time for olympiads and my own projects.

MR2024 –

Founder · community of ~400 people

A community that started in my school in 10th grade and quickly grew beyond it: now about 400 people aged 15 to 24. Teams the fund turns down get a place in MR, and I keep following how they do.

Co-founder · grants for young founders

A grant fund for school and university students with business ideas, named after my friend Fedya Orchenko, who died at seventeen. The day I had the idea, I made a group chat with his two sisters and fifteen of his friends. Those fifteen became the team, and nobody is paid.

Money follows evidence. Finalists go through Sprint, a ten-day show filmed with mentors, where they test their hypothesis on real customers. They get ₽50k, ₽50k and ₽75k in tranches, each released only after the previous stage is confirmed, and up to ₽575k more for scaling if the hypothesis holds. I designed the show’s economics.

We picked the first two teams at the final of the All-Russian School Olympiad on Entrepreneurship and granted them ₽1.25M. Lvinka Lab turns retail food waste into feed protein with black soldier fly larvae; ZooMetrika diagnoses cattle health early with sensors and computer vision. In selection I looked at how a team works together more than at what it had already built. ZooMetrika had the hardest idea and the least finished product, we argued for a long time, and we funded it.

Partners: Sber, the Vklad v Budushchee foundation and the Olympiad on Entrepreneurship. Season one is open to students from 10th grade to the second year of university; finalists are picked on December 21, 2026.

  • ₽1.25M granted
  • Up to ₽750k per team
  • 15 volunteers
  • Season 1: 2026/27

Awards

20256
20269
InternationalCase competitionsRussian olympiadsSport

International

  • 1st placeInternational Economics Olympiad (IEO), Open Track2026
  • Top 3Global Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge (GYEC)2026
  • 4th placeInternational Olympiad on Financial Security2025
  • Top 38International Finance Olympiad (IFO)2026

Case competitions

  • 3rd placeDEADLINE case championship, Central University × T‑Bank2026
  • Top 37Wharton Global High School Investment Competition, UPenn2025/26
  • Top 50Harvard Crimson Global Case Competition2025

Russian olympiads

  • WinnerHSE Olympiad “Vysshaya Proba”, Economics (~18,000 participants)2026
  • WinnerMoscow Olympiad for School Students, Economics2026
  • WinnerFinancial University Olympiad “Your Calling Is Finance!”, Economics2026
  • Prize-winnerFinancial University Olympiad “Your Calling Is Finance!”, Economics2025
  • Prize-winnerHSE Olympiad “Vysshaya Proba”, Financial Literacy2026
  • Winner ×2RANEPA Olympiad, Economics and Financial Literacy2025
  • Winner ×2Plekhanov Olympiad, Economics and Financial Literacy2025

Sport

  • BronzeRussian U18 Water Polo Championship, goalkeeper2025

Contact

Questions, ideas, or a team for the fund. It comes straight to me, or write to merikovkirill9@gmail.com.