In September 2025, MacPaw founder Oleksandr Kosovan announced that his 17-year-old company, long known for macOS utilities, was being restructured into an AI-first business. At the center of this shift is the AI assistant Eney, which is intended to become an intellectual «umbrella» for the entire MacPaw product line.

Kosovan told Forbes Ukraine how the transformation is unfolding and how much of MacPaw’s future now hinges on whether it succeeds.

What will change

• Under the new plan, Eney and Setapp will function as a single system. A user describes a problem, and Eney selects the appropriate model or application to solve it. The bet is on a shift in user behavior, with people beginning to manage their desktops through AI assistants. So far, that has not become a mass phenomenon.
• Volodymyr Kubytskyi is leading the AI transformation. In August 2024, he became MacPaw’s AI director after nearly a decade developing AI solutions at the IT company LUN.
• Kubytskyi authored MacPaw’s AI strategy for 2025–2026 and initiated organizational changes. Instead of a single centralized AI team, each product now has its own dedicated AI group.
• MacPaw also plans to change its business model. It will most likely move toward a consumer usage model, where users pay for actual AI usage based on the number and complexity of requests.
• According to Kosovan, the first tangible results of the AI transformation should appear within a year or two. For now, he rates progress as «four out of ten.»

Why now

• Despite having developed more than a dozen products, MacPaw remains heavily dependent on a single one. Its debut and flagship product, CleanMyMac, a utility that optimizes macOS performance, still generates nearly 80% of the company’s revenue. According to Forbes Ukraine, the product had 1 million monthly paying users in 2021. The company does not disclose current figures.
• This revenue concentration stems from a series of unsuccessful diversification attempts. The most successful of these was Setapp, the subscription-based app service launched in 2017, but even that did not significantly shift the balance. According to Kosovan, Setapp accounts for about 15% of revenue.
• The latest traditional product, the Moonlock cybersecurity app launched in October 2025, is still too new to evaluate, Kosovan says. Now, he plans to focus maximum effort on AI products and building MacPaw’s own AI ecosystem.
• The shift to AI is also happening against the backdrop of weak financial performance. In 2024, MacPaw reported a loss of more than $10 million for the first time. In November 2024, the company laid off 100 employees — about 20% of its workforce.
• Part of the losses, Kosovan says, was driven by a sharp increase in R&D spending as the company accelerated development of new products, including Eney. Slow growth was another factor pushing the company in this direction.
• According to MacPaw Family Ltd’s 2021–2024 reports, the company’s average annual growth rate over the past three years has been about 7%. That is far too slow to support Kosovan’s long-standing ambition of taking MacPaw public.
• Whether and when that might happen now depends largely on the success of MacPaw’s AI-first strategy.