Etien Yovchev is a co-founder and Managing Partner at The Recursive, building the relationship Infrastructure for regional tech ecosystems with international ambition - from CEE to GCC and DACH.
From connected dining lamps to digital humans and smarter hotel operations, here's what we saw at the Startup Den, part of Dubai’s Future Hospitality Summit.
The Recursive co-founder Etien Yovchev talks to H.E. Wesam Lootah, Director General of GovDigital at DGE, on how the Abu Dhabi Government upskilled 95% of its workforce for AI, how it balances global tech partnerships with data sovereignty, and why governance guardrails matter most for public trust.
Part of Dubai Future Finance Week, the invitation-only gathering will bring family business owners, next-generation leaders, family offices, and global experts to Madinat Jumeirah on November 5.
Organised by DIFC, the 4th edition of the Dubai FinTech Summit gathers C-level leaders, decision-makers, regulators, innovators, and market pioneers from across the world.
The inaugural Dubai Future Finance Week, led by DIFC, runs 2-6 November. Over 850 speakers are confirmed across 85 events and 12 signature forums. The programme covers FinTech, tokenisation, Islamic finance, family wealth, sustainable finance and private capital.
After 20 years building Poland's startup ecosystem, AIP Seed CEO Dariusz Zuk says the missing piece is density at the top: founders who have scaled, private capital and big exits. He is building a VC platform rather than a bigger fund, with a planned Warsaw Stock Exchange listing.
Ai Everything Abu Dhabi is one of the year’s biggest applied AI showcases, bringing together AI enterprises, unicorns and startups building the infrastructure, frontier models, and full stack AI solutions across industries.
Events, investors, free zones, councils, and trade agencies: in this listicle, we start mapping the initiatives and stakeholders building the bridges between Central and Eastern European communities.
AI Everything Abu Dhabi runs for two days at ADNEC. It combines multiple conference tracks, an exhibition floor, workshops and a set of co-located vertical events covering government, data centre infrastructure, semiconductors, quantum, physical AI, cybersecurity, enterprise and startups.
Of the four drivers of AI capability that are coming, Europe can realistically play a role in agentic orchestration. Everything else depends on closing the adoption gap fast enough to matter.
The Gulf adopts technology quickly, but the decision follows the relationship rather than the pitch. Romanian founder Antonia Dumitriu shares her journey of entering the GCC, adapting the product to local privacy norms, and learning why the meetings had to happen in person.
This article tracks the history of Gulf Investors backing some of the most defining deep tech companies coming out of Central and Eastern Europe in the past 5 years. These scaleups operate cargo drones, robotaxi ecosystems, voice AI, hypercar manufacturing, clean energy, and longevity biotech.
At Techsylvania in Cluj-Napoca, the CEO of SPARK, Sharjah's Research, Technology and Innovation park, made the case for partnership over competition, explained the role of government vision for attracting world-class talent, and was candid about what European founders get wrong about the Gulf.
Ivan Maltsev has spent a decade building and investing in crypto across three continents. His read on 2026: the UAE leads on regulation and ecosystem, the US still owns the venture capital, and Europe is maturing, just more slowly.
Organized in partnership with Plug and Play, the event created a platform for high-impact discussions, meaningful networking, and cross-border collaboration between Europe’s innovation ecosystem and the rapidly growing markets of Azerbaijan, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and beyond.
The third edition of the Google Cloud Day Bulgaria delivered its biggest headline yet — one of the European Union's first national "Cybershield" deployments. But the enterprise adoption numbers behind the big stories reveal a country still running at two very different speeds.
From June 24 to 26, We Make Future fills BolognaFiere with 90+ stages, 1,000 speakers, and a Startup Arena open to founders from 80+ countries. Here's what's on the program. The Recursive is a media partner of WMF – We Make Future 2026.
LAUNCHub Ventures has appointed Zagreb-based Vedran Blagus as its new associated partner, tasked with leading the firm’s expansion across Croatia, Slovenia, and the Western Balkans. "I want to be the first person in the region founders call," he says.
