Exsto was created by a small team of two software developers, Natalia Panferova and Matthaus Woolard. This husband and wife team met each other in Europe right after graduating from University in 2013. They now live in Wānaka in the South Island of New Zealand with their flat-coated retriever, Phoebe.

Natalia studied pedagogics and linguistics, pivoting to technology shortly after graduation while also exploring opportunities in the computational linguistics field. She then worked as a web developer before discovering her passion for Swift and iOS.

Matthaus has a background in mathematics and machine learning. He also was a data scientist and a full stack developer earlier in his career.

After living in a few different European countries, such as Ireland, Germany, and France, Natalia and Matthaus wanted to explore more of the world and decided to come to New Zealand. They first settled in Christchurch and worked in local tech companies.

Whilst building iOS applications, Natalia started a blog to share her learnings with other developers across the world in 2020. Her passion for the SwiftUI framework is obvious in the numerous posts which soon had quite a following. In fact, it got discovered by the members of the SwiftUI team at Apple who subsequently informed her they were hiring for an engineering role where she could be part of the team that develops the framework. 

Natalia landed the job and given the pandemic, worked remotely from New Zealand. She loved designing SwiftUI APIs (Application Programming Interface) and especially enjoyed working with talented people across different teams at Apple. When asked to join the team in person and relocate to Cupertino in the US, she did some soul searching and realized how New Zealand had become her home and where she wanted to do her best work. She also missed blogging and building her own apps.

In 2022, Natalia joined Matthaus as a co-founder of their own company, Nil Coalescing. It wasn’t long before they supported themselves through contract work, consulting and their software development blog. Natalia also wrote her highly regarded book which helps developers to start using SwiftUI in their existing UIKit projects called “Integrating SwiftUI into UIKit Apps”.

And then it was their turn to build their debut app for their own company. “Exsto”, latin for “I standout, I exist, I appear” was born. Exsto inspires people to discover their creative powers and helps overcome the initial artistic inertia. 

Natalia and Matthaus both like sketching and painting but often feel stuck when trying to plan their artworks in advance. They designed Exsto to help aspiring artists like themselves overcome that quandary, and to help them immediately enjoy the process. Exsto users can discover their artworks while creating without premeditation, a bit like looking for imaginary shapes among the clouds in the sky.

In early 2023, Natalia was accepted into the Apple Entrepreneur Camp, a one-on-one technology lab for underrepresented founders and developers with app-driven businesses. Here, Natalia and Matthaus received a lot of great advice from Apple designers and engineers. Exsto version 2.0 incorporates much of their learnings, with a greater focus on spontaneous creativity with ready-to-use color sets, and simplified tools and settings. Technologically wise, version 2 also contains Exsto’s first Metal-powered implementation, bringing significant benefits of hardware-accelerated graphics that tap the full potential of Apple silicon.

Natalia and Matthaus are dedicated to continue evolving Exsto and to bring joy and creative inspiration in the lives of more people.