Ukraine's rival telcos collaborate on one identity layer

myGaru, an identity startup built by two Ukrainian founders, has persuaded all three of Ukraine's major mobile operators (Kyivstar, Vodafone Ukraine and lifecell) plus landline operator Ukrtelecom to share a single pseudonymised identity layer for advertising. The model combines telco reach without combining telco data. "We want to accumulate more data signals than any walled garden while not being one ourselves," Yuriy Gorokhov, head of ad platform and an Internet Advertising Bureau Ukraine board member, told AdExchanger. Carriers pseudonymise a subscriber's network signal before passing it to myGaru, which generates a one-time token per ad request that expires after the audience match, with no personally identifiable information stored in its perimeter. Kyivstar's addressable reach, Gorokhov claims, jumped from roughly 35% of subscribers via cookies to 97% after integration. The venture operates on a commission model and licenses its tech to local partners in each of its active markets: Ukraine, Vietnam and Azerbaijan, reaching more than 115 million users.

The crux

Cookieless identity has been treated as a walled-garden arms race, but myGaru is arguing the durable answer is carrier-grade, consent-by-network pseudonymisation that pools rival telcos' reach without pooling their data, giving publishers and advertisers a signal that survives where cookies and device IDs fail.

Sell-side read

The 35% to 97% reach jump is the number to internalise: if carrier-based identity can recover reach lost to Safari, Firefox and in-app browsing, it reopens addressable inventory that has been leaking value since third-party cookie deprecation tightened.

Watch

whether myGaru's model travels beyond Ukraine and whether a Western carrier (or carrier consortium) adopts a comparable neutral-third-party identity layer within two quarters.