# The Recursive
> The relationship infrastructure connecting founders, investors and enterprise leaders across CEE, GCC and DACH through media, market entry and events.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).
## Pages
### Account
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Don't Miss The Next Deal

# Get the intelligence  
your feed doesn't have.

Insiders' intelligence on emerging European tech ecosystems and beyond. Built for operators who read past the press release.

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### Membership
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### Featured
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/featured/
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### Reports
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/reports/
Last updated: 2026-07-22T10:36:04.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/R_Reports_Color-1-1.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/AI-Index-General-Assets-3-1.png) 

## ****CEE AI Index 2026**

AI Chamber, in partnership with The Recursive Media and collaboration of Europe Cloud, has launched the CEE AI Index 2026, the first index focused on assessing the ability of Central and Eastern European countries to develop, operate, and host AI efficiently, safely, and in a governed way.

[Check the rankings!](https://www.ceeindex.ai/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/04/defense_report-1.png) 

## WHO IS PROTECTING EUROPE'S FUTURE?

A comprehensive market research report on cybersecurity and defense technology innovations in Central and Eastern Europe.

[Get the report!](https://report.therecursive.com/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/04/Money-in-motion.png) 

## MONEY IN MOTION

A comprehensive market research report on private capital flows and investment strategies in Central and Eastern Europe.

[Get the report!](https://hnwi.therecursive.com/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/04/AI-2024-report.png) 

## STATE OF AI IN CEE Report 2024

The Recursive is returning with the second edition of the state of AI in CEE – the most extensive research of the future of AI in the innovation ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe.

[Get the report!](https://therecursive.com/future-of-ai-in-cee-market-report/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/05/AI_2023.png) 

## STATE OF AI IN CEE Report 2023

The Recursive's first edition of the state of AI in CEE – the most extensive research of the future of AI in the innovation ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe.

[Get the report!](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HKHHOsitL4WBhqHB0jVrJdSnRafMR4bl/view?usp=sharing&ref=therecursive.com)
### Privacy Policy
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/privacy-policy-2/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T11:30:45.000Z
Recursive Media JSC (RECURSIVE MEDIA AD), (the “Company” “We“, “Us” and “Our”) is committed to

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Last updated: 2026-07-07T14:07:02.000Z
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## CEE Forum

The Recursive CEE Forum returned to ViennaUP on May 20, 2026, bringing together \~500 founders, investors, corporates, policymakers, and ecosystem builders from across Europe. The program spotlighted cross-border collaboration, scaling and tech transfer, market expansion, and the future of investing — with a special focus on energy, AI, robotics, and deep tech.  
  
***Save the date 12th of May 2027!**

[DISCOVER: What we did in 2026?](https://the-recursive-cee-forum.notion.site/?ref=therecursive.com)
### founder-files-banner
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/founder-files-banner/
Last updated: 2026-07-07T14:05:17.000Z
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## Founder Files

****The Recursive Founder Files** series brings together the brightest minds in the region to tackle the realities that founders and investors often shy away from. ****Every episode** focuses on the unique startup landscape in a given CEE country, while it may also bring in perspectives from other CEE markets.

[Check Estonian Edition!](https://www.linkedin.com/event/manage/7430874437203398656/?ref=therecursive.com)
### breaking grounds banner
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/breakingground-banner/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T18:55:29.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/03/Bulgaria--BG-Typeform.png) 

## #Breaking  
Grounds 

The Bulgaria ****#BreakingGrounds** initiative, led by the Bulgarian SME Promotion Agency & The Recursive, highlights Bulgaria’s tech ecosystem through strategic communications and activities, including public relations, an optimized digital presence, social media activation, and participation at leading international tech conferences.

[Learn more](https://breakinggrounds.eu/?ref=therecursive.com)
### The Recursive Group
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-recursive-group/
Last updated: 2026-06-18T05:49:55.000Z
Our work

## Three pillars,  
one mission. 

We build the relationship infrastructure for expanding tech ecosystems — connecting high-growth regions to the world's next leaders through media, new market entry services, and community events. 

01 / Media 

The Recursive Media 

### Journalism & market intelligence.

Breaking news, reports, analytical pieces, indices, market maps, and deep dives that help global decision-makers understand what's real and meaningful in emerging tech ecosystems. 

Editorial Research Newsletters 

[ newsroom@therecursive.com ](mailto:newsroom@therecursive.com) 

02 / Studio 

The Recursive Studio 

### Market entry & access.

A market-entry agency for scaleups, VCs, and government promotion bodies — from messaging strategy and credibility campaigns to network access and lead generation in new markets. 

Positioning PR Go-To-Market 

[ studio@therecursive.com ](mailto:studio@therecursive.com) 

03 / Events 

The Recursive Events 

### Curated rooms & delegations.

Community formats and country ecosystem delegations that put founders, investors, enterprises, and media in the same room — creating cross-border relationships. 

Cocktails Delegations Matchmaking 

[ events@therecursive.com ](mailto:events@therecursive.com) 

Bridging high-growth regions and connecting the world's next leaders — since 2021.

3.8M+ Readers worldwide 

550+ Clients supported 

5 Regions connected 

Where we work

## From CEE outward,  
to the world. 

We started in Central and Eastern Europe in 2021\. Today, we connect a global network of industry-defining founders, investors, and enterprises across DACH, the GCC, the US, and the UK. 

US UK DACH CEE GCC 

CEE — Where we started 

Core regions 

Partner network 

The team

## The Story  
Shapers. 

Editors, builders, organizers, and community-makers — working across CEE, DACH, the GCC, and beyond to bridge ecosystems. 

![Teodor Antonio Georgiev](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/size/w300/format/webp/2026/03/teodor.jpg) 

#### Teodor Antonio Georgiev

CEO

[ ](mailto:teodor@therecursive.com) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/teodor-antonio/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Etien Yovchev](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/size/w300/format/webp/2026/05/00.-ETIEN--1---1-.jpg) 

#### Etien Yovchev

Co-Founder & Managing Partner

[ ](mailto:etien@therecursive.com) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/etienyovchev/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Dilyana Haralanova](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/size/w300/format/webp/2026/03/00--dilyana-1-e1754229212409.jpg) 

#### Dilyana Haralanova

Managing Partner, COO

[ ](mailto:dilyana@therecursive.com) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dilyanaharalanova/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Ana Marija Kostanic](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/size/w300/format/webp/2026/03/435d8dbe12d6b74cf3ad041cc6cdf8bd-s-250-r-g-d-mp.png) 

#### Ana Marija Kostanic

Editor-in-Chief

[ ](mailto:anamarija@therecursive.com) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/amkostanic/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Teodora Atanasova](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/size/w300/format/webp/2026/03/taa.png) 

#### Teodora Atanasova

Senior News Editor

[ ](mailto:teodora@therecursive.com) [ ](https://bg.linkedin.com/in/teodora-atanasovaa?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Elena Ghinita](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/size/w300/format/webp/2026/03/vlad2949.jpg) 

#### Elena Ghinita

Startup Community Editor

[ ](mailto:elena.ghinita@therecursive.com) [ ](https://linkedin.com/in/elenaghinita/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Andrey Andonov](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/size/w300/format/webp/2026/03/andrey.png) 

#### Andrey Andonov

Video Director

[ ](mailto:andrey@therecursive.com) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreyandonov/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Kristiana Kuneva](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/size/w300/format/webp/2026/03/kk_cover_photo.jpg) 

#### Kristiana Kuneva

Chief Business Development

[ ](mailto:kristiana@therecursive.com) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristiana-kuneva?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Desislava Smokova](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/size/w300/format/webp/2026/03/desi-jpeg.jpg) 

#### Desislava Smokova

Brand & Events Specialist

[ ](mailto:desislava@therecursive.com) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/desislava-smokova/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Livia Rusu](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/size/w300/format/webp/2026/03/livia-e1774008391246-jpeg.jpg) 

#### Livia Rusu

Marketing Lead

[ ](mailto:livia@therecursive.com) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/livia-rusu/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Felicia Olteanu](https://studio.therecursive.com/assets/felicia-eye-DEX_bYSo.jpg) 

#### Felicia Olteanu

Matchmaking Lead

[ ](mailto:felicia@therecursive.com) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/feliciaolteanu/?ref=therecursive.com) 

![Manuella Borges](https://studio.therecursive.com/assets/manuella-eye-4MygKPgA.jpg) 

#### Manuella Borges

PR Lead

[ ](mailto:manuella@therecursive.com) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuellanborges/?ref=therecursive.com)
### Marketing Operations Build from Scratch Post-M&A
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/marketing-operations-build-from-scratch-post-m-a/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T09:45:37.000Z
_This page is for subscribers only._
### From pilot programme to pan-European impact story
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/from-pilot-programme-to-pan-european-impact-story/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T09:46:01.000Z
_This page is for subscribers only._
### Putting a fintech in the conversation with Europe's category leaders
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/putting-a-fintech-in-the-conversation-with-europes-category-leaders/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T09:45:07.000Z
_This page is for subscribers only._
### Lead generation in geographies without local presence
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/lead-generation-in-geographies-without-local-presence/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T09:46:16.000Z
_This page is for subscribers only._
### The Recursive Events
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-recursive-events/
Last updated: 2026-06-26T13:24:21.000Z
_No content available._
### Privacy Policy
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/privacy-policy/
Last updated: 2026-06-26T11:39:20.000Z
Recursive Media JSC (**RECURSIVE MEDIA AD)**, (the “Company” “We“, “Us” and “Our”) is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.

This policy sets out the framework on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you simply provide to us, is going to be processed by us. Please read the subsequent lines carefully to know our practices regarding your personal data and the way we’ll treat it. By visiting www.therecursive.com (our Site) or any related sub-domains like but not limited to join.therecursive.com, you’re accepting and consenting to the practices described below.

## **Information we may collect from you**

We may collect and process the subsequent data about you:

**Information you give us**. You could give us information about you by filling in forms on our Site or by corresponding with us by phone, e-mail or social media. This includes information you provide once you register to use our Site, invite our services, arrange a booking at an occasion or place an ad on our Site, join a discussion on our social media channels, enter a contest, promotion or survey, report a bug on our Site, and the other activities commonly administered on our Site. The data you give us may include your name, address, e-mail address, or details about the state of your business.

**Information we collect about you.** With reference to each of your visits to our Site we may automatically collect the subsequent information:

- technical information, including the web protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the web, browser type and version, zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, OS and platform;

## **Cookie Policy**

Our website uses cookies to differentiate you from other users of our website. This helps us to supply you with an excellent experience once you browse our website and also allows us to enhance our Site. By continuing to browse the location, you’re agreeing to our use of cookies, explained as follows.

We use the subsequent cookies:

Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our Site. They include, for instance, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our Site, arrange and manage bookings and make use of e-billing services.

Analytical/performance cookies. These allow us to recognize and count the amount of users and to ascertain how visitors move around our Site once they are using it. This helps us to enhance the way our Site works, for instance, by ensuring that users are finding what they’re trying to find easily.

Functionality cookies. These are wont to recognize you once you return to our Site. This permits us to personalize our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences.

Targeting cookies. These cookies record your visit to our Site, the pages you’ve got visited and therefore the links you’ve got followed. we’ll use this information to form our Site and therefore the advertising displayed thereon more relevant to your interests. We can also share this information with third parties for this purpose.

We can also allow our business partners to put cookies on your device. for instance, we use Hubspot and Google Analytics for web analytics, then Hubspot Google can also set cookies on your device. As further explained below, third parties can also place cookies on your device for advertising purposes.

There are two sorts of cookies used on our Site, namely “persistent cookies” and “session cookies”.

Session cookies will normally expire once you close your browser, while persistent cookies will remain on your device after you shut your browser, and may be used again subsequent time you access our Site.

Please note that third parties (including, for instance, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) can also use cookies, over which we’ve no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.

You can block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that permits you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you employ your browser settings to dam all cookies (including essential cookies) you’ll not be ready to access all or some parts of our Site.

We can change this Cookie Policy at any time. If we make material changes to the Cookie Policy, we’ll allow you to know either by posting the changed Cookie Policy on our Site or by sending you an email.

It’s important that you simply review the changed Cookie Policy. If you are doing not wish to comply with the changed Cookie Policy, then we cannot still provide our Site to you, and your only option is to prevent accessing our Site and deactivate your account.

## **How we’ll use the data we collect from you**

We use information kept about you within these ways:

- to respond to obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us and to supply you with the knowledge, products and services that you simply request from us;
- to provide you with information about goods or services we feel may interest you.
- to notify you about changes to our service and significant changes to our terms of use and service;
- to ensure that content from our Site is presented within the best manner to you.
- to administer and operate our Site and for internal operations, including debugging, data analysis, testing, research and statistical purposes;
- to improve our Site
- to make sure that content is presented within the best manner for you and for your computer;
- to keep our Site safe and secure;
- to track the effectiveness of advertising we serve to you and to deliver relevant advertising to you;

## **Disclosure of your information**

Data won’t be disclosed to 3rd parties without your explicit consent.

## **You have these rights**

You have the proper to ask us to not process your personal data for marketing purposes. we’ll usually inform you (before collecting your data) if we shall use your data for such purposes or if we shall disclose your information to any third party for such purposes. you’ll exercise your right to stop such processing by checking certain boxes on the forms we use to gather your data. you’ll also exercise the proper at any time by contacting us at office@therecursive.com

You also have the proper at any time to get information about your personal data stored by us, its origin and recipient and therefore the purpose of the info processing also as a right to correct, block or delete this data.

Our Site may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our partners and affiliates. If you follow a link to any of those websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies which we don’t accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check their policies before you submit any personal data to those websites.

## **Contact**

Questions, comments and requests regarding the Privacy Policy of RECURSIVE MEDIA AD are welcomed and must be addressed to office@therecursive.com.
## Posts
### 9 CEE Governments Sign a Declaration on AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-countries-unite-around-a-common-ai-agenda/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T15:22:14.000Z
Yesterday, September 3, the first edition of the **CEE AI Summit,** organized by [Poland's AI Chamber](https://aichamber.eu/?ref=therecursive.com) and the Czech National AI Platform, in cooperation with the Czech Ministry of Industry and Trade, took place at Prague’s Martinický Palace. The event brought together more than 250 policymakers, business leaders, researchers, and technology experts from across Central and Eastern Europe.

The summit focused on a central question: **how CEE can turn its strong technical talent and growing AI ecosystem into a more competitive position within Europe and the global AI race.** Discussions ranged from infrastructure and access to computing power to data, talent, regulation, investment, and the commercialization of research.

## Declaration on AI signed by 9 countries

One of the main outcomes was the adoption of the **Prague Declaration on Artificial Intelligence** by nine countries: Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, and Romania. The agreement commits participating countries to coordinate their positions on European AI policy, connect key computing infrastructure, and systematically exchange expertise and best practices.

The declaration is intended as a practical framework for strengthening CEE’s position within the EU and giving the region a stronger role in shaping emerging European AI rules. A particular focus is on connecting national technology capacities, including specialized **AI Factories and planned Gigafactories**. The declaration was accompanied by memoranda on AI cooperation designed to translate those commitments into joint projects.

> “The results of today’s summit show that our region can act confidently and unitedly. The adopted declaration and signed memoranda give us a strong tool for building infrastructure and developing talents. We are immediately transforming the agreed framework into specific pilot projects in key sectors of our economy."

— added **Lukáš Kačena**, the government’s AI Commissioner.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/09/CEE-28.jpg)

## Building CEE’s AI competitiveness

European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation **Ekaterina Zaharieva** opened the expert program and joined a discussion on moving CEE innovation from the lab to the market, alongside Czech Technical University rector **Michal Pěchouček** and Oxylabs CEO **Vytautas Savickas**.

**Infrastructure was another major theme**, with policymakers and industry representatives discussing what CEE needs to build. The conversation brought together representatives from Poland and Czechia alongside companies including [Skeleton Technologies](https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-estonian-skeleton-technologies-secures-e33m-ahead-of-us-ipo/) and Datum.

The afternoon broadened the discussion to **European technological sovereignty and competitiveness**. EU AI Office Director **Lucilla Sioli**, MEP **Diego Solier**, Hungarian Minister of Science and Technology **Zoltán Tanács**, Multiverse Computing's **Iraia Ibarzabal**, and Google DeepMind's **Jennifer Beroshi** examined Europe's ability to develop and retain strategic AI capabilities.

A panel titled *“From Brain Drain to Brain Gain: Building Europe’s Next AI Engineering Hub”* brought together experts from Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, and Romania to discuss how CEE can retain technical talent and position itself as an AI engineering center rather than primarily a source of talent for other markets.

## CEE’s emerging tech strengths

**Antoni Rytel of ElevenLabs** presented the company's perspective on CEE's role in the global AI race.

*“We will never compete just by market scale, but what we can do, and what we have been doing, is compete on the quality of the people who work here,”* said Rytel for The Recursive. 

Beyond [ElevenLabs](https://www.therecursive.com/poland-becomes-a-shareholder-in-elevenlabs/) itself, he argued that the emergence of globally successful companies can have a broader effect on the regional ecosystem. 

> *“The moment that someone does it for the first time, it becomes much, much easier for others to follow.”* 

Other success stories covered **precision oncology, biometrics, cybersecurity, and AI-powered autonomous systems**. A later panel explored how data could contribute to European economic growth, with representatives from Rohlik, Allegro, the European Parliament, and Estonia's AI program.

**Defense and dual-use technology** also featured in the program, including discussions around AI-powered autonomous systems and a closed-door session focused on dual-use technologies and the region's proximity to the war in Ukraine. Other closed sessions examined AI's impact on **healthcare, automotive industries, and IT infrastructure**.

Beyond individual technologies and companies, the summit also assessed progress since the **CEE AI Action Plan** [launched in June 2025](https://aichamber.eu/ai-action-plan-launches-june-17-in-gdansk-during-eu-digital-summit-2/?ref=therecursive.com), which set out ambitions to develop the region into one of Europe's AI hubs.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: New Capital Flows into AI, Biotech, Medtech and More
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-7/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T09:49:02.000Z
## Deals & news

**The Warsaw-based biotech Science4Beauty** [raised €1.6 million](https://www.therecursive.com/science4beauty-seed-round-botox-cream-expansion/), led by 4growth VC with Hard2beat, to scale its recombinant conotoxin platform, a clinically proven, needle-free alternative to botox, and expand internationally. Their flagship line is Miorelaxant Magic™ (clinically shown to cut wrinkle depth up to 48% and extend botox results \~60 days).

**Piney, a Cyprus-founded cleaning and operations provider** for short- and mid-term rental property managers, [has raised €1.6 million](https://www.therecursive.com/cyprus-founded-piney-raises-eur1-6m/). The round was funded by Uni.fund (lead) and 33East. Piney delivers a unified operating technology layer that automates cleaning, laundry, linen management, and amenity supplies through a single platform.

**Romanian medtech firm Rayscape** has secured a [€1.4 million (RON 7.67 million) EU grant](https://agerpres.ro/ots/proiect-de-2-milioane-de-euro-cofinantat-de-ue-pentru-dezvoltarea-rayscape-tap-ct-solutie-ai-dedicat--661565?ref=therecursive.com) toward a €2 million project to develop an AI-powered oncological imaging platform. Co-funded under the EU's Health Programme and STEP framework (with the company covering the remaining balance) the three-year initiative will fund Rayscape TAP-CT, a 3D algorithm designed to help radiologists detect and track cancer lesions across chest, abdomen, and pelvis CT scans.

**Tallinn-based regtech Instarc** has raised [€1.25 million](https://tech.eu/2026/09/01/instarc-raises-eur125m-to-scale-its-cloud-native-compliance-platform/?ref=therecursive.com) to launch its cloud-native compliance platform in South Africa. The round was led by HFO Investments, with Athena Capital and Option 3 Capital advising. Instarc provides compliance infrastructure for regulated businesses, helping South African institutions meet customer identification, due diligence, and reporting requirements under FICA.

## With teams in CEE

[Israeli-Dutch AI startup Wonderful](https://www.therecursive.com/wonderful-bar-winkler-vedran-bajer-interview-adriatic-expansion/) has raised [$550 million in Series C](https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/wonderful-more-than-doubles-its-valuation-to-5b-in-under-6-months/?ref=therecursive.com) funding at a $5 billion valuation, more than double its $2 billion valuation six months ago. Led by Insight Partners, the round also included existing investors and new backer Salesforce. Founded in 2025, Wonderful develops AI agents for customer service and enterprise workflows and now operates across more than 35 countries. Last year, the company launched its **Central and Eastern European hub in Zagreb**.
### Startup Revolution AI Summit 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/startup-revolution-ai-summit-2026/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T09:30:20.000Z
****Startup Revolution AI Summit** is one of Southeast Europe's fastest-growing startup and AI conferences, bringing together founders, investors, entrepreneurs, innovators, corporate leaders, researchers, and policymakers to shape the future of technology and entrepreneurship.

📅 **Date:** October 1–4, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Skopje, North Macedonia  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Macedonian Philharmonic](https://share.google/X6sXmQGx5zGwK23vc?ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda ](https://startuprevolution.ai/?ref=therecursive.com) 

Built around the theme “*Where the Next Unicorns Are Born*,” the Startup Revolution AI Summit 2026 will bring together founders, investors, operators, policymakers, and technology leaders shaping the next generation of products, companies, and industries.

More than **2,000 attendees, 100+ speakers, and 400+ startups from over 50 countries are expected to take part.**

## Four things attendees can look forward to

1. **Three stages with world-class speakers**, featuring dedicated tracks on AI & Emerging Tech, FinTech, HealthTech, Cybersecurity, Energy & Climate Tech, Marketing & the Creator Economy, Ecosystem Development, and Government & Policy.
2. **The Startup World Cup**, where startups will compete for a $1 million investment prize, alongside dedicated deal rooms and B2B matchmaking.
3. **A packed side-event program**, including Fuckup Nights Skopje, the Hack for Humanity Hackathon, Traditional Macedonian Brunch, Investor Kafana, Game Night, and a Women Founders & Investors Mixer.
4. **Curated experiences beyond the conference program**, including wine tasting, sightseeing, VIP brunch experiences, and the Wizz Air Skopje Marathon.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/09/54961361938_62ebe15ba7_k.jpg)

## Who can you meet?

The program brings together leading founders, investors, operators, and ecosystem builders working across AI, emerging technologies, company growth, investment, marketing, and innovation.

Confirmed speakers so far include:

- **Martin Hýravý** — Make
- **Gerard Pinar Quirós** — Preply
- **Jasper Deprez** — TerraSpark
- **Philipp Nieland** — PPRO Co-founder, Unicorn Founder and FinTech Investor
- **Rich Hayes and Adrien Hastert** — HelpBnk
- **Igor Bosilkovski** — Forbes
- **Biljana Rakić** — CAKE.com
- **Sara Miteva** — PostHog

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/09/54959584629_3fdbbd1a29_k-1.jpg)

## How was it last year?

The first Startup Revolution AI Summit took place from November 27–30, 2025, in Skopje and was positioned as the region’s first major gathering dedicated to connecting artificial intelligence with startup development.

Following the inaugural edition, Startup Club Skopje described the Summit as proof that the Balkans can be a launchpad rather than a limitation for regional founders:

> “The Summit united the region in ways we hadn’t seen before—the first investment already emerged directly from conversations that began at the event.”

**— Sašo Jovanovski, President, Startup Club Skopje**

> “This event completely changed how the Macedonian startup ecosystem is perceived regionally. The seriousness we demonstrated brings new responsibility, but also new partnerships.”

**— Ana Sekulovska, Program Director, Startup Club Skopje**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/09/54961360773_337f7a8421_k-1.jpg)

***Become*** [***part of The Recursive***](https://www.therecursive.com/signup/) ***community to access the exclusive discount.***
### Endeavor Catalyst Doubles Down on Europe with CEE in Focus
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/endeavor-catalyst-doubles-down-on-europe-with-cee-in-focus/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T11:11:59.000Z
European companies backed by **Endeavor Catalyst** raised more than [**$8.3 billion across 2025**](https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/09/02/3354813/0/en/endeavor-catalyst-backed-companies-in-europe-raise-more-than-8-3-billion-across-2025-and-h1-2026.html?ref=therecursive.com) **and the first half of 2026**, as the global investment fund continues to increase its exposure to a region it sees as both undercapitalized and increasingly capable of producing global technology companies.

Of that total, more than $3.2 billion came from rounds in which [**Endeavor Catalyst**](https://www.therecursive.com/from-service-to-product-endeavor-bulgaria-mapped-the-evolution-of-the-sofia-tech-sector/)participated directly, while another $5.1 billion was raised by its portfolio companies without the fund's participation. Combined, that is more than six times the amount raised in 2023 and 2024.

Europe accounted for 11% of deployed capital in Fund I; **by Fund IV, that share had climbed to 25%**. The fund has now directly invested $104.3 million across 84 European companies, representing around **20% of its global portfolio**.

For [Pete Benedetto](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pete-benedetto-4775b026/?ref=therecursive.com), Head of EMEA for Endeavor Catalyst, the shift is the result of both stronger European ecosystems and a deliberate expansion of Endeavor's presence on the continent.

*“We've increased quite a bit, and we'll continue to increase the amount of investing we're doing in Europe,”* Benedetto tells The Recursive. *“We see a lot of promise from the markets that we're in and from other markets across the continent as well. There are a lot of strong companies coming out of Central and Eastern Europe.”*

## Europe becomes a bigger part of Endeavor's map

Endeavor's roots are far from Europe. The organization began in **Latin America** almost three decades ago before expanding into the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Europe came considerably later, with **Greece becoming its first market on the continent** around a decade ago.

Since then, its footprint has expanded. Endeavor Catalyst is currently active across ten European markets, including **Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland**. Endeavor has also recently opened operations in Romania, Poland, and Ukraine.

For Benedetto, the expansion is driven by the companies and opportunities emerging in each market. *“We want to be pulled into markets in order to begin operating there and supporting entrepreneurs and supporting those ecosystems,”* he explains.

In markets such as Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria, Benedetto says that pull has been particularly strong. Once established, local **Endeavor chapters are locally led and funded**, while connecting entrepreneurs to the organization's international network.

> The founders Endeavor is looking for, Benedetto says, are **those who can move beyond their home markets**: entrepreneurs who may start locally but have ambitions to build companies across regions and ultimately globally.

## CEE engineering talent

Endeavor Catalyst itself has **co-invested with firms including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Sequoia.** According to Benedetto, there is now broad recognition among US investors of the technical talent available across Europe and particularly its eastern half.

*“There’s broad recognition that there’s incredible talent in Europe and all across Europe, especially from Eastern Europe,”* he says.

That influence is not always captured by looking at where a company is headquartered. Benedetto points out that **some companies perceived as American have founders or significant technical roots in CEE.**

> “You can name company after company that trace their legacy back there.”

Still, the global venture capital market remains heavily concentrated around Silicon Valley. Benedetto argues that this leaves an opening elsewhere.

> “There are incredible founders building companies across Europe that are undercapitalized and are under-recognized for their potential. Endeavor sees that as a core part of our mission — to support and identify those founders, help them grow and scale their companies, and serve as a platform for them.”

It is a thesis Benedetto has made publicly as well, arguing that many leading AI businesses rely on technical talent from Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Greece, and Turkey, and that **the next generation of global technology companies will not necessarily originate in Silicon Valley**.

## How Endeavor Catalyst actually chooses its investments

There is, however, an important **distinction between Endeavor and Endeavor Catalyst**. 

Endeavor is first a **global entrepreneurial network** that identifies and supports high-growth founders. Catalyst is its **investment arm**, and companies cannot simply pitch the fund in the same way they would approach a conventional VC. Endeavor Catalyst invests exclusively in companies led by entrepreneurs who have already been selected into the Endeavor network. It also operates as a rules-based co-investment fund rather than a lead investor.

> “We do not lead rounds. We only invest in the companies that are part of the Endeavor network, where there's a qualified lead investor who's leading the round.”

Benedetto explains that **Catalyst can invest a maximum of 10% of a round, up to approximately $2–3 million.** Half of the fund's profits go toward funding Endeavor's nonprofit organization.

*“The fund very much serves the mission of the broader organization,”* he says.

Before reaching that stage, Endeavor itself takes a deliberately broad approach to identifying founders. It is sector agnostic, with potential companies ranging from **fintech and software to edtech and other industries**. Geography is similarly flexible: a founder might build entirely from Poland, for example, or operate from San Francisco while retaining a large engineering operation in Warsaw.

The common denominator is what Endeavor calls the “**multiplier effect**”; the potential for successful entrepreneurs to strengthen the ecosystems around them.

> *“We're looking for the companies we think are going to have the greatest impact on their ecosystems, on their communities, on their economies*."

The European portfolio already includes some of the region's most recognizable technology companies. Fifteen European-founded companies backed by Endeavor Catalyst have reached valuations of at least $1 billion, according to the fund's latest figures, with names including **ElevenLabs, ICEYE, Fever, and Bending Spoons**.
### Science4Beauty Raises €1.6M to Bring Its "Botox in a Cream" Beyond Poland
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/science4beauty-seed-round-botox-cream-expansion/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T09:57:08.000Z
👯 **Founder(s):** Magdalena Janczewska (Co-founder & CEO), Anna Mazurkiewicz-Pisarek, PhD (Co-founder), Alina Mazurkiewicz (Co-founder), Agata Stefanek (Co-founder), alongside Prof. Tomasz Ciach (scientific advisor)

📅 **Founding year:** 2020

🏭 **Industry:** Biotech / cosmeceuticals

💥 **Problem:** People want the wrinkle-smoothing effect of botulinum toxin (Botox) without needles/injections, and to prolong the results of aesthetic procedures.

📣 **Solution:** A recombinant conotoxin, a bioactive molecule mimicking sea-snail venom that relaxes facial muscles and smooths wrinkles, delivering a needle-free "botox in a cream." Their flagship line is Miorelaxant Magic™ (clinically shown to cut wrinkle depth up to 48% and extend botox results \~60 days).

👥 **Customers:** Aesthetic medicine clinics, and individual consumers who can buy directly through the online store.

🎳 **Team size:** 2-10

🌱 **Stage:** Seed 

💰 **Investment amount:** €1.6M 

🚀 **Funded by:** 4growth VC (lead), Hard2beat, and business angels.

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor's perspective:** Tomasz Pasiewicz, Managing Partner at 4growth VC: *"At 4growth VC, we look for deep-tech companies – particularly in health and life sciences – that seamlessly combine breakthrough science with effective commercial execution. Science4Beauty meets these criteria entirely… We see immense potential in the innovative dermatology market and believe Science4Beauty has all the assets required to become a global player in the smart luxury segment."*

Konrad Trzyna, Managing Partner at Hard2beat: *"Science4Beauty is a prime example of leveraging synthetic biology and protein engineering for rapid commercialization… What attracted us is the platform potential of this technology and its entry into the medical-grade skincare market, combining the attractive margin profile of the beauty industry with the high entry barriers of the pharma sector."*

💡 **It will be spent on:** Scaling production/sales, accelerating R&D on additional bioactive molecules for dermatology and aesthetic medicine, and launching distribution in key international markets.

💬 **In their own words:** Magdalena Janczewska, CEO: *"Science4Beauty is not just a line of finished skincare products, but above all a complete and highly scalable biotechnology platform… We are working on new applications for our technology, including treatments for hyperhidrosis and dermatological conditions such as rosacea, as well as innovative delivery systems like microneedle patches."*

💪 **Their specialty:** Full in-house biotech platform that designs, produces and purifies recombinant proteins/peptides in its own certified Category I GMM genetic engineering lab; IP protected across 10 jurisdictions; clinically validated efficacy; pipeline into hyperhidrosis, rosacea and microneedle patches.

🔑 **Business model:** B2B sales to aesthetic clinics and DTC e-commerce

💸 **Funding so far:** €1.6M
### Cyprus-founded Piney Raises €1.6M
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cyprus-founded-piney-raises-eur1-6m/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T08:05:00.000Z
The newest funding secured by **Piney** based in **Cyprus**.

👯 **Founder(s):** Nikolas Chrysostomou (Founder & CEO)

📅 **Founding year**: 2022

🏭 **Industry**: PropTech

💥 Problem: Short- and medium-term rental property managers struggle to scale due to fragmented, manual coordination across multiple vendors for cleaning, linen, and supplies. This manual friction creates high operational workloads and inconsistent quality control across growing property portfolios.

📣 **Solution**: Piney delivers a unified operating technology layer that automates cleaning, laundry, linen management, and amenity supplies through a single platform. This enables property management services to scale with the efficiency and consistency of a software company.

👥 **Customers**: Professional short-term and medium-term rental property managers (currently serving \~5,000 properties across Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, France, and the United States).

🎳 **Team size**: 51-200

🌱 **Stage**: Seed

💰 **Investment amount**: €1.6 million

🚀 **Funded by**: Uni.fund (lead), 33East

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor’s perspective**: "*The short- and medium-term lease market is being professionalized rapidly and the operating part is the most difficult to do so. Piney has built the infrastructure this industry needs and we are excited to support the team as it escalates it globally."* — Yiannis Eftychiou, Partner at 33East 

💡 **It will be spent on…** Deepening market presence in existing European hubs, accelerating technology platform development (specifically expanding AI capabilities), and driving global market expansion, starting with its recent launch in Miami. 

💬 **In their own words:** "*This round is about getting what we’ve proven in Europe and taking it into the world. In less than two years we almost quadrupled the properties we serve, and our technology, with ever-increasing artificial intelligence, is what makes this pace possible. Property managers everywhere face the same operational challenges and with Miami we show that the Piney model is traveling*." — Nikolas Chrysostomou, Founder & CEO 

💪 **Their specialty…** Integrates computer vision AI to evaluate photos taken on-site by cleaners during turnover checks in real time, catching and correcting quality issues before staff leave the property rather than after a guest checks in. 

🔑 **Business model:** Operations-as-a-service — Piney charges short- and medium-term rental property managers to outsource turnover operations (cleaning, laundry, linen, and guest amenities), coordinated through its proprietary technology platform, allowing it to scale like a software company rather than a traditional hospitality business.

💸 **Funding so far:** €2.8 million
### How to Shine at Spotlight in Bucharest in Front of 250+ Investors
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-to-shine-at-spotlight-in-bucharest-in-front-of-250-investors/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T15:41:14.000Z
Hundreds of early-stage companies compete for a place in **Spotlight**, How to Web’s startup program and competition, but the first judgment begins with an application that must make the problem, product, market, and team credible within a limited amount of space.

For founders, this is a deceptively difficult task and for the selection team, it means distinguishing between a weak business and a strong company that has not yet learned how to explain itself.

We spoke with **Carmelina Lungu**, **Startup Relationship Manager** at **How to Web**, about how applications are evaluated, where founders tend to lose clarity, and what the strongest companies from previous Spotlight editions had in common.

[**Spotlight 2026**](https://www.howtoweb.co/?ref=therecursive.com) will select **20 early-stage startups** to pitch at **How to Web Conference**, taking place between **October 6-8** in Bucharest. The five finalists will advance to the main conference stage, while all selected companies will also receive exhibition space, mentoring, and access to investor matchmaking.

## When you look back at the startups selected for Spotlight in previous years, what did the strongest applications have in common?

We have consolidated three main criteria over the past few [editions](https://www.therecursive.com/how-to-web-conference-2025-agenda-ai-product-led-growth-and-the-future-of-european-startups/).

**The first is market size and the relevance of the problem**. We want to understand how large the addressable market is, whether it is local, regional, or global, and how real and urgent the problem is. That urgency matters because it influences the product’s potential to scale.

**The second criterion is the quality and capability of the founding team**. At a very early stage, traction may not yet be fully visible in the application. The founders still need to inspire confidence that they understand the problem and possess the technical or industry expertise required to solve it.

When I look at the winners of the 2024 and 2025 editions, both combined an ambitious vision and innovative technology with well-constructed founding teams. The founders had complementary skills, with responsibilities distributed across areas such as technology and sales. That gave investors confidence that the team could execute the plans it was presenting.

**The third criterion is clarity of thinking**. We want to understand how the founders arrived at their solution and what evidence led them to believe it was the right response to that particular problem. There should be a clear logic behind the way the product has been designed.

The strongest Spotlight applicants demonstrated all three qualities, although naturally at different levels: a relevant problem in a sufficiently large market, a capable team, and a clear line of reasoning behind the product.

## Strong companies do not always present themselves well. How do you distinguish a weak application from a weak underlying business?

The application gives us an initial description of the business, including its revenue, users, customers, and current stage of development. We then look more closely at the founders and their previous experience.

That can include their professional profiles, previous projects, industry expertise, technical background, and any relevant public information about their work. We want to see whether the team has a credible connection to the problem it is trying to solve.

Our work with founders also extends **beyond the application itself**. Through **Demo Nights** and other initiatives, we interact with companies throughout the year. Those conversations allow us to ask about their roadmap, current bottlenecks, industry challenges, and competitors.

A founder who understands the business will usually be able to **discuss the risks as clearly as the opportunity**. Awareness of what could prevent the company from succeeding can tell us as much as confidence in its potential.

## What makes an ambitious claim credible? Which claims tend to weaken an application because the founders have not substantiated them?

**Competition** is one area where founders frequently weaken their case. Some underestimate the alternatives already available to customers or suggest that they have no meaningful competitors. That is usually easy to identify and can indicate that **the company does not yet understand its market well enough**.

**Concrete numbers make a considerable difference**. We look for evidence concerning current revenue, customers, users, and realistic expectations for the following year. The numbers do not have to be enormous, but they should demonstrate that the founders understand the business they are building and the industry in which they operate.

Ambition becomes credible when it is supported by a clear understanding of the current position, the market, and the steps required to reach the next stage.

## Where do founders most frequently lose your attention?

The company description can either create a clear picture of the product or make the business harder to understand.

Some founders include as much information as possible, even when much of it is disconnected from the company’s **current** **stage**, **roadmap**, or **immediate** **objectives**. In other cases, the description appears to have been copied from an existing presentation without being adapted to the questions in the application.

The founding story can be relevant, but the essential information sometimes becomes buried inside a very long narrative. By the end, the reader knows more about the journey than about the company’s present position.

An application resembles a pitch in this respect. Founders have limited space and limited attention in which to demonstrate that they understand the problem, solution, market, and route forward. A **concise description** often shows that the founder knows exactly what the company is doing. Excessive information can produce the opposite effect.

## With so many startups now describing themselves as AI companies, what helps you distinguish genuine differentiation from a familiar product presented through current terminology?

This requires **a** **deeper technical analysis**. We examine the tools the startup uses, which elements have been built internally, and how original or defensible the underlying technology is.

The How to Web team brings together people with different areas of expertise, so applications can also be reviewed by colleagues with stronger technical backgrounds when necessary. That helps us understand whether AI is integral to the product or simply part of the way it is being presented.

The commercial questions are equally important. How is the market likely to receive the solution? Could a larger competitor replicate or eliminate its advantage quickly? Is there meaningful potential to scale? How distinctive is the technology?

There is no universal answer because **the assessment depends heavily on the company and sector**. The objective is to understand whether the technology creates **a credible advantage i**n the market the startup wants to enter.

## When founders have only a few minutes to present, which parts of the business deserve the most attention?

The **problem** and the **solution** need to be stated clearly, together with the features or capabilities that **distinguish** the product from its competitors.

Founders should also explain **the road ahead**. That includes the company’s financial plans, hiring needs, expansion objectives, and, if it is raising capital, how much it is seeking, how the money will be used, and what period of development that investment will support.

The team deserves **dedicated time** as well. Even thirty seconds or one minute can provide important context about the founders’ backgrounds and expertise. The person presenting may lead sales, for example, while the company is building a highly technical product. Investors need to know that the team as a whole has the capabilities required to deliver what is being proposed.

A good pitch gives the audience enough clarity to understand the company and enough reason to continue the conversation afterward.

## For the 20 selected startups, winning the final competition is only one possible outcome. What other results should founders deliberately work toward?

The pitch is one part of a broader program. Each of the 20 selected startups also receives a one-day booth in the exhibition area, with ten companies exhibiting on the first conference day and ten on the second. This creates an opportunity to demonstrate the product and speak directly with potential customers, partners, and investors.

The **mentoring** component takes place **after the pitch competition**, giving founders an hour of one-to-one feedback from investors and experienced operators. Because it follows the pitch, the conversation can be **more specific** and address both the business and the way it was presented.

Founders also receive access to the conference matchmaking system. We share information about the participating startups with investors and provide startups with the investor list ahead of the event, allowing both sides to arrange relevant meetings rather than spending the conference searching for contacts.

There are also sessions dedicated to **fundraising** and **sales**, including practical formats such as **live pitch-deck analysis**. Even when one company’s deck is being discussed, other founders can use that feedback to identify weaknesses in their own material.

The **investor meetings** are important, but founders should look more broadly at the **people attending the conference**. The same environment can produce customer relationships, commercial partnerships, and conversations with founders facing similar challenges.

Sometimes the most useful advice comes from **another founder**, including someone working in a different sector or at a later stage. How to Web brings together companies from across Central and Eastern Europe, from pre-seed startups to more mature businesses. That creates **a compressed learning environment** in which founders can compare experiences and exchange information that is difficult to obtain elsewhere.

## What are you most looking forward to at this year’s edition?

I am excited to bring some of **the strongest early-stage products in the region** onto the How to Web stage through **Spotlight**. I am also looking forward to working with startups at different stages and helping them find the part of the conference that is most relevant to what they need now.

The conference creates **several possible paths** for founders. What matters is that they arrive knowing what they want to accomplish and use the programs, meetings, and conversations accordingly.

Spotlight applications are open to early-stage Eastern European startups that are less than five years old, have raised **under €700,000**, and already have a launched product with some traction. Founders can apply for [**Spotlight**](https://www.howtoweb.co/spotlight-2026/?ref=therecursive.com) and **Dealflow** through the same startup application form. The deadline for Spotlight applications is **September 11**.
### 18 Acquisitions, 100+ People in CEE: Scaling European Software With AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/18-acquisitions-100-engineers-in-sarajevo-scaling-european-software-with-ai/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T11:48:45.000Z
Circeus is betting that Europe’s established software companies can scale further with the right shared infrastructure.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### The Lessons Behind a Decade of Self-Funded Growth
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-lessons-behind-a-decade-of-self-funded-growth/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T08:50:30.000Z
Most founder stories get told through fundraising, where they mention the round that changed everything or the investor who believed in them. After successful rounds, the company becomes a unicorn and enriches everyone involved in a short time.

But I don't have that story, as none of my current projects took a dollar of outside money. Every product and every mistake was paid out of what the business made. That kind of setup changes things, so in this article, I wanted to share lessons and mistakes that we had along the way, so that new founders don’t step on a rake.

## Where this started

It's hard to say exactly when we began, but I think it was somewhere between 2013 and late 2014\. Our company started because one person asked to build a personal cabinet after buying MetaTrader. And that, surprisingly, turned into our first product in 2014\. 

That was not an immediate success. **At our first expo, we did not even have a stand.** So we bought visitor tickets instead of service-provider ones, and security followed us around the whole time because we were handing out booklets we technically were not allowed to hand out. Long story short, we were learning the rules by getting caught breaking them. And now, for 10 consecutive years, we have not missed a conference.

One decision that helped us reach more was aiming to have it global, for sure. Aiming for the stars has brought the company further than staying small and comfortable ever would have. Who knows, maybe this was one of the most important lessons for the business. 

## Poor choices are unavoidable

But that size of ambition came with the same size of mistakes, and from my experience, the biggest one was hiring. Early on, it was hard to tell a senior engineer from a junior one. Juniors were disguising themselves as seniors, so choosing the right one was not always efficient. 

There was also **the fear of making expensive hires.** When the company is self-funded, a high salary feels like a commitment, and the easier way is to say no and look for someone cheaper. But I realised that hiring less-experienced workers costs the company, so we changed the approach. *If an engineer who costs thousands brings in millions, why not?* 

**Delegation was another failure**, but it is not commonly discussed as a business mistake. For the first five or six years, my workday ran around fourteen hours, with hands in nearly everything. Then, it became clear that delegation and more independence for the team can bring better results. 

There is research showing that [79%](https://openup.com/blog/psychological-effects-of-micromanagement/?ref=therecursive.com) of autonomous workers are highly engaged and tend to leave companies much later. That was exactly the case, so founders had better stop having a hand in everything they could. 

The other issue was similar, and it was trying to build everything at once. Our original idea was an ecosystem, but what got underestimated was how every product pulls a massive amount of resources. People were splitting time across two or three products simultaneously, and none of them got the focus it needed.

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## Staying close to the product, does it help?

The same instinct to hold everything close reached the top of the company, as a result. A few years ago, I completely rebuilt it, so that I became the CTO myself. Now, our technical expertise is much more advanced, and we have automated many processes, which increases control over engineers and frees them from routine tasks.

However, **I would not recommend that every founder occupy a C-level role in their company**, especially if you plan to seriously scale. Yes, staying close to the technical side mattered during transitions, but that closeness can eventually become a bottleneck. 

Once a company is large enough, the founder should not be the one who approves every process. When it’s the opposite, it becomes close to micromanagement and the lack of delegation we discussed above. So, it’s better to figure out which processes can be handed off entirely and which still need the founder in it.

## What self-funding does to accountability

The upside of no outside money is having nobody else to answer to and no investor clock pushing decisions you don't believe in. Self-funding also helps you get new results, since you don’t have to repeat someone else’s old methods.

In 2017, as crypto started getting built into the Forex infrastructure, the reaction from the market was that it was a scam that would pop. But I didn’t believe it. We expected at the time that exchanges would essentially become exchangers, with transactions moving toward USDT, and the system was built around that. 

It was a risky bet, but it did pay off. We became one of the first to accept USDT for our own services and liquidity. And it was a smart move competitors took three to four years to copy. 

But **self-funding also narrows the tolerance for mistakes** in a different way. Every poor choice is capital drawn directly from client revenue rather than someone else's funds. That's a heavier form of accountability than a board meeting, where you have to report to investors.

Anyway, I still do believe that **success comes from trying new things**, even when you make serious mistakes. If you take 10 steps and 7 are wrong, the 3 right ones cover the losses in the long run.
### Unicorns, Centaurs and Dragons: A Field Guide to the CEE Startup Zoo
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/unicorns-centaurs-and-dragons-a-field-guide-to-the-cee-startup-zoo/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T08:41:27.000Z
Centaurs and unicorns have been all over the startup headlines again lately. And they are just two of the animals investors talk about. Over the past few years, investors have come up with many other animal terms, with a different creature for almost every kind of company and the way it is built and funded. Some of these are just marketing nicknames. A few actually tell you something real about how the company is built. Here are the ones worth knowing, each with a Central and Eastern European example, because the region has produced one of almost every species. 

## Unicorn — a $1 billion valuation

The original mythical creature, coined by investor Aileen Lee in 2013 for a privately held startup worth more than $1 billion. It was genuinely rare back then and much less so now, though the shine has come off the "grow at any cost" mindset that came with it. Some of the biggest belong to founders from this part of the world. ElevenLabs, the voice-AI company built by two Polish founders, Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, [reached an $11 billion valuation in late 2025](https://www.therecursive.com/elevenlabs-500m-series-d-11b-valuation/), barely three years after it launched. Grammarly, the AI writing assistant founded by a Ukrainian team, was valued at $13 billion in 2021, and in 2025 it [rolled its products into a new parent company called Superhuman](https://betakit.com/grammarly-rebrands-to-superhuman-as-it-expands-from-catching-typos-to-ai-productivity/?ref=therecursive.com).

## Centaur — $100 million and real revenue

Bessemer Venture Partners popularised the centaur around 2022 to describe something a valuation can't fake: $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Where a unicorn measures what investors think a company is worth, a centaur measures money that comes through the door every year. 

Bulgaria's Payhawk crossed that line in July 2026\. The spend-management fintech — already the country's first unicorn after a $1 billion round in 2022 — reported passing [$100 million in ARR with 159% year-on-year growth](https://www.therecursive.com/payhawk-becomes-a-centaur-after-surpassing-100m-in-arr/), which it credits to a two-year rebuild of its product around AI.

## Zebra — profit with a purpose

Zebras were a deliberate answer to unicorn mania: companies that set out to be profitable and to do some good in the world, instead of chasing scale and dealing with the consequences later. They usually grow more patiently. [Lithuania's Vinted](https://siliconcanals.com/vinted-reaches-double-digit-profitability/?ref=therecursive.com) fits the description. The secondhand fashion marketplace built a real business out of keeping clothes in circulation rather than in landfill, became the country's first unicorn, and turned its first profit in 2023.

## Camel — built to cross the desert

Silvio Kutić started Infobip in 2006 with a [€25,000 loan](https://www.infobip.com/news/infobip-20-years-foundation-day?ref=therecursive.com), working out of Vodnjan, a small town in Croatia, with just enough money to build the first product. That's the camel in one story. Infobip stayed bootstrapped for more than a decade, reinvesting its own profits instead of chasing outside capital. When it finally raised money in 2020, it was already at a billion-dollar valuation — Croatia's first unicorn, on its very first round. By then it was a global cloud communications platform, working with the likes of WhatsApp and Uber across dozens of countries.

## Gazelle — fast, and consistently so

A gazelle is an older, more technical term for a company that grows revenue quickly for several years in a row. The classic definition is at least 20% a year over four years. Plenty of these labels overlap, and Rohlík is a good case in point. The Czech grocery-delivery company is already a unicorn by valuation, but it earns the gazelle tag through its growth rate: it reported around [€700 million in revenue in 2023](https://www.rohlik.group/rohlik-group-achieves-another-strong-year-2023-eu700-million-revenues-25-growth-and-profitability?ref=therecursive.com), roughly 25% growth, and profitability in its more mature markets such as Munich, and it is now preparing for a public listing. 

## Dragon — the one that pays for everything

The rarest animal here, and for investors the most valuable. A dragon single-handedly returns an entire fund, enough, on its own, to cover every bet that fund ever made. Romania's UiPath is the CEE dragon. The automation company was founded in Bucharest and went public in New York in April 2021, in what was then the [third-largest software IPO in the city's history](https://www.therecursive.com/uipath-writes-european-history-with-the-third-biggest-new-york-software-ipo/), valued at around $30 billion. Its earliest backers were reportedly on track for a return of roughly 220,000%. One company, and a whole fund is paid off many times over. 

Of course, none of this is an exact science, the labels blur and overlap. What's clear is that CEE now has a real example for these terms.

## Cockroach — built to survive anything

If the camel is about crossing the desert, the cockroach is about surviving whatever comes next. The term became startup shorthand during the leaner funding years, for a company that optimises for resilience — profitable, hard to kill, and largely indifferent to whether the market is up or down. The Serbian-Hungarian insurtech Ominimo is a fitting example. It turned profitable early and reached a [$1.6 billion valuation just two years after launch](https://www.therecursive.com/1st-serbian-unicorn-ominimo-1-6b-valuation-ebrd-series-b/), on a Series B of only $22.5 million — becoming Serbia's first home-grown unicorn without the huge cash burn that usually comes with the title.
### Why Dariusz Zuk Wants to Build a VC Platform, Not Just a Bigger Fund
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/why-one-of-the-creators-of-polands-startup-ecosystem-wants-to-build-a-vc-platform-not-just-a-bigger-fund/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T10:03:51.000Z
With world-class engineers powering global giants like OpenAI and decacorns such as [ElevenLabs](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/elevenlabs/) and [ICEYE](https://www.therecursive.com/polish-finnish-iceye-reaches-decacorn-status/), Poland has cemented its place on the European innovation map. But for [Dariusz Zuk](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariusz-zuk/?ref=therecursive.com), CEO of private VC fund [AIP Seed](https://www.aipseed.vc/?ref=therecursive.com) and a key architect of the Polish ecosystem for over two decades, the job is far from over.

He has the track record to bring a unique perspective to the table. In 2004, he founded the **Academic Entrepreneurship Incubators**, which have since spawned over 20,000 ventures. In 2011, he launched **business.link**, Poland's first coworking network, growing it to more than 30,000 square metres and a CEE-wide leadership position. In 2017, the venture landed the largest VC round in Poland that year, €20 million from Skanska. Two years later, Skanska acquired a stake in the business outright, marking a major entrepreneurial exit for Żuk.

Today Zuk sees an ecosystem that has made extraordinary progress but now faces a new, more complex challenge. *"Poland was in a completely different place when I started over 20 years ago,"* Zuk recalled in an interview with The Recursive co-founder Etien Yovchev. *"Entrepreneurship was still at the beginning... it was not about startups, about venture capital, but more about basic entrepreneurship. My motivation at that time was to figure out *how to create an entrepreneurs' mindset*, how to build an entrepreneurs' ecosystem from scratch."*

Today, **the mission has evolved**. *"We have great founders, we have great talents,"* he notes. *"But now the issue is how to create from those talents and from those founders truly global companies. This is the next stage of my life that I want to dedicate to."*

## The missing flywheel

While Poland boasts second-time founders, a growing pool of venture capital, and two decacorns, Zuk points to **critical gaps that are holding the ecosystem back from its full potential**. The primary issue, he argues, is a lack of *"density at the very top."* To achieve this, several key ingredients are still missing.

First is the need for **more founders who have successfully scaled** companies from zero to millions in revenue. This hands-on experience is invaluable and currently in short supply. Second, while capital is more available, much of it comes from public sources. *"Yes, such a system is developing and is animated by functioning organisations, but I believe that the *supply of private capital* is still too small,"* Zuk explains. This is tied to a third, crucial missing piece: **big exits**.

*"We didn't have any big exits in our ecosystem still,"* he states. *"And you know, the exits make all the flywheel work. Because you have new founders from that company, let's say a ‘mafia’, who become experienced angel investors. You have more private capital in the market from people who know how to invest not only in real estate but into new technologies. This is the engine."*

Finally, Zuk stresses the need for stronger, more strategic relationships with the US market. *"The venture capital ecosystem in the US is still number one. And we need stronger connections."*

## Not a bigger VC fund, but a VC platform

Zuk’s answer to these challenges is not simply to raise a larger fund. Instead, his ambition for the next 20 years is to build a **comprehensive VC platform designed to provide founders with more than just money**.

*"My aim and my dream for the next few years is not just to create a bigger VC fund, because money alone is not the solution,"* he shares. *"The goal is to create a comprehensive VC platform that provides founders with the deep operational support they truly need to go global."*

This platform has three core pillars. The first is a "**founders factory**," where a core team provides hands-on support. This is complemented by a dedicated board of directors, currently ten members - experienced founders, executives, and investors who bring operating expertise, networks, and their own capital.

The second pillar is the "**Founders House**," envisioned as an exclusive community and physical space for the best Polish founders to connect and collaborate both in Warsaw and Silicon Valley. *"Unlike a standard coworking space, the goal for Founders House is different,"* Zuk says. *"Here, we want to create a very special, exclusive place for the best Polish founders, a community where they can connect, share challenges, and collaborate away from the noise."*

The third pillar is a **flexible and evergreen capital structure**. The platform is designed to provide patient, long-term support. *"This is something that is also missing: very flexible, very fast capital that can support a company for the long term,"* Zuk adds. *"We have the ability to do secondaries, buy out other investors, and offer debt or equity, all while being able to invest in US jurisdictions like Delaware to remove friction for startups with global ambitions."* As part of this strategy, AIP Seed has announced plans to pursue a future listing on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The ambition is to broaden private investors’ access to early-stage venture investing and create a permanent capital base that can support founders across market cycles.

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## Fuelling the next generation of unicorns

To bridge the gap for later-stage companies, Zuk is also a board member at [Endeavor Poland](https://poland.endeavor.org/?ref=therecursive.com) (led locally by Bartosz Lipnicki). He sees the global non-profit, which focuses on supporting high-impact entrepreneurs in the scale-up phase, as a crucial part of the ecosystem’s future. 

For Zuk, the organization’s mission aligns perfectly with his own. *"I decided to join the Endeavor Poland board because we share a common mission of supporting ambitious Polish entrepreneurs in achieving success in global markets,"* he explains.

Endeavor operates on a "pay-it-forward" model, building a community where successful founders mentor the next generation, creating a powerful "multiplier effect." 

This philosophy directly addresses the gaps Zuk identified, cultivating the very "density at the top" he believes is essential. By connecting Polish scale-ups with a global network of mentors and peers, Endeavor helps them navigate the challenges of international expansion, a crucial step in creating the large exits that will fuel the ecosystem’s flywheel for years to come.

**His five-year goal** is to establish one of the most important platforms for ambitious Polish technology founders and to have two or three global companies in his portfolio that he has backed from the pre-seed stage. But the ultimate vision extends far beyond personal or fund-related success.

*"I want to build a platform, an institution, that can outlive me,"* Zuk concludes.
### Bits & Pretzels 2026 Returns to Munich with "Human After All" Theme
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bits-pretzels-2026-returns-to-munich-with-human-after-all-theme/
Last updated: 2026-08-28T15:34:58.000Z
Europe's largest startup gathering is coming back to Munich. From September 28 to 30, 2026,[ Bits & Pretzels](https://www.bitsandpretzels.com/?ref=therecursive.com) will once again coincide with the city's famed Oktoberfest, drawing 7,500 participants, including 2,000 investors, alongside founders, corporate leaders, and policymakers from across Europe and beyond. This year's edition runs under the theme *Human After All*, keeping the conference's founding mission intact: to help founders connect, learn, and grow.

The 2026 program puts the people behind the technology at the center of the conversation. Headlining the event are media entrepreneur and *The Diary of a CEO* host **Steven Bartlett** and comedian, producer, and *The Daily Show* host **Trevor Noah**, whose conversations on leadership and society have reached millions worldwide. 

[Bits & Pretzels 2026Bits & Pretzels hosts 7,500 founders, investors, and industry leaders for three days full of learning, networking, and doing business during Munich Oktoberfest.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/icon/PNG_recrop_resize_logo_only-d5db49ed-a507-4799-9d04-72da6a09d8e0.png)The RecursiveLenka Vranová![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/thumbnail/bits-and-pretzles-a827401e-60a2-45af-8202-865c8f09f8d3.png)](https://www.therecursive.com/innovation-with-a-bavarian-twist-bits-pretzels-2026/)

> "In line with the *Human After All* theme, the 2026 program spotlights founder resilience, the human qualities that drive success, and how entrepreneurs can build the mindset to achieve their goals," 

— said co-founder **Bernd Storm vans Gravesande**.

They are joined by leaders from some of Europe's fastest-growing tech companies, including Legora, n8n, Dash0, and Langdock, for discussions spanning applied AI, defense, fintech, deeptech, and space technology.

Co-host **Felix Haas** pointed to Munich's momentum: "*The city is growing fast, especially in deeptech and defense, with outstanding startups and record funding rounds. Munich is clearly becoming one of Europe's leading tech hubs."*

True to its "for founders, by founders" ethos, the conference offers a Startup Exhibition for early-stage companies, structured networking sessions, a flagship investor program bringing together more than 2,000 capital providers, and the CIO AI Summit connecting corporate leaders with the startup ecosystem.

*"Our mission every year is to give startups the access and visibility they need to succeed,"* said co-founder **Andy Bruckschlögl**.

As always, the event will close with its signature tradition: attendees gathering in Munich's Schottenhamel tent at Oktoberfest, where conversations continue over beer.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: New SpaceTech Bets
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-6/
Last updated: 2026-08-28T14:21:46.000Z
## Deals & news

**The Hungarian edtech company** [BOOKR has raised](https://www.therecursive.com/hungarian-edtech-bookr-raises-eur6-1m-series-a-to-expand-global-reach/) **€6.1 million in a Series A** funding round led by TCEE Fund IV, advised by 3TS Capital Partners, with participation from international and strategic investors. The transaction includes a primary investment, secondary share purchases, and the conversion of existing financial instruments.

**Croatian gaming-café franchise Friendly Fire** [has raised €4 million](https://www.therecursive.com/croatian-friendly-fire-raises-eur4m-to-franchise-its-gaming-cafe-network-across-europe/), led by AYMO Ventures, to fund international expansion across 11 countries. The company develops a franchise model that standardizes gaming cafés — combining physical locations with a proprietary software platform and centralized management, so each new café plugs into one network.

**Embedd, founded by three Ukrainian entrepreneurs** whose previous hardware company was disrupted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has secured a **€2.31 million** [pre-seed funding led by Seedcamp](https://www.therecursive.com/embedd-raises-eur2-31m-to-build-software-infrastructure-for-physical-ai/), with participation from Cocoa, Connect Ventures, 2100 Ventures, Vesna Capital, U.ventures, Underline Ventures, Common Magic and Roosh Ventures. Embedd builds a digital twin of the hardware, giving AI agents the context to run the integration themselves and automatically generate the code that makes each chip usable by the software layer above it.

**Czech venture capital firm DEPO Ventures** is expanding its SpaceTech portfolio with an investment in French startup ArcSpace, leading the company’s latest funding round of more than **€2 million**. The round was led through the DEPO Ventures One fund, with participation from SCE Freiraum Ventures, IRDI Capital Investissement, and a network of French business angels. Paris-based ArcSpace is developing technology designed to make it possible to repair, modify, and assemble satellites directly in space.

**Jet Ventures, the venture arm of Prague-based Jet Investment**, has **invested $750,000 (€644,110)** into the $1.6 million round of Hermetiq, a San Francisco startup building an AI platform that diagnoses and repairs failed software builds. Hermetiq's technology brings AI into the software build process, the compiling and testing that stands between code and a working product. 

## Other updates on CEE related ventures

Toronto-based **Veeda AI,** co-founded by Slovenian researchers Sanja Fidler and Bojan Vučković,[has raised more than $90 million](https://www.therecursive.com/ex-nvidia-stars-from-slovenia-raise-90m-to-build-the-matrix-for-robots/) (€83.7 million) in seed funding, in one of the largest seed rounds recorded in Canada. The round was **led by Khosla Ventures** and will support Veeda AI’s work on simulation technology designed to help AI systems learn how to operate in the physical world.

The U.S. Army's 2nd Infantry Division has selected **Croatian drone maker** [**Orqa**](https://orqafpv.com/news?ref=therecursive.com) to supply its first-person view (FPV) drones following a detailed technical evaluation. The Croatian manufacturer enters a formation that actively tests competing FPV technologies, instead of introducing drones as an isolated experimental capability. This milestone follows Orqa's earlier partnership with the Red River Army Depot in Texas to scale up U.S.-based manufacturing capacity.

**REGENT Craft**, the Rhode Island maker of Seaglider hydrofoiling wing-in-ground vessels, has closed a $240 million Series B split evenly between equity and debt, co-led by maritime investment firm Mare Liberum and AE Ventures, with the debt provided by Erebor Bank. For the region, the thread worth following is Poland: **REGENT is partnering with dual-use investor Balnord** to bring Seagliders to the Baltic Sea, where NATO navies want fast, distributed capability to protect ports and critical infrastructure. Balnord's Marcin Kowalik, who also participated in the deal, sees Poland's established base in boat, yacht and catamaran manufacturing as the foundation for a European hub that could build and service the craft. REGENT is pursuing parallel expansion in Greece and the UAE, and already holds an expanded US Marine Corps contract for its Viceroy platform.

## EnduroSat Germany to lead ESA Consortium

[**EnduroSat**](https://www.therecursive.com/endurosat-104m-funding-expand-satellite-production/) Germany has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) to lead a consortium developing a new Earth observation mission designed to strengthen Europe’s ability to monitor the planet independently of daylight conditions.

The project, called **LLARS (Low Luminance Resilience from Space)**, is being developed under the first phase of ESA’s **European Resilience from Space for Earth Observation (ERS-EO) programme**. It will serve as an in-orbit demonstration and validation mission for the programme’s Earth observation component.

According to the company, LLARS is intended to contribute to the EU’s planned **European Earth Observation Governmental Service (EOGS)** and support Europe’s push for more secure and independent access to Earth observation data. The initiative also aligns with the EU’s **Defense Readiness Roadmap 2030**, which puts greater emphasis on strengthening European capabilities in security and defense.
### Czech Startup Association Pushes Prague Parties to Prioritize Startups
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/czech-startup-association-pushes-prague-parties-to-prioritize-startups/
Last updated: 2026-09-01T10:01:36.000Z
[Two years after launching](https://www.therecursive.com/czech-startup-association-launch-martin-jiranek/) to push startup-friendly reforms at the national level, the [**Czech Startup Association**](https://startupczechia.cz/?ref=therecursive.com) **is turning its attention to Prague**, bringing the city’s main political candidates together around a question the ecosystem has been raising for years: how can the Czech capital make better use of its concentration of startups, investors, universities, and tech talent?

Ahead of Prague’s municipal elections, the Association gathered representatives of seven leading political groups for **Praha Inovační (Prague Innovates)**, a pre-election debate focused specifically on the future of startups and innovation in the capital.

The event, held on August 26 at Prague’s Opero business hub, brought together 130 representatives of startups, technology companies, investors, universities, and the wider innovation ecosystem.

**Among the areas attracting support were:** 

- stronger innovation infrastructure,
- greater startup participation in public procurement and city-owned companies,
- closer cooperation with universities and the Central Bohemian Region,
- and faster adoption of digitalization and AI within the city administration.

The debate featured ****Tomáš Portlík** representing SPOLU for Prague (ODS & TOP 09), ****Jan Hušbauer** for ANO, ****Jaromír Beránek** for the Pirates, ****Adam Scheinherr** for Praha sobě, ****Petr Hlaváček** for STAN, ****Milan Urban** for SPD, and ****Adam Paclt** for Motoristé sobě. Representatives of all major Prague candidate lists were invited based on a June poll by the NMS agency. The most notable outcome was a broad political consensus that ****Prague needs to significantly strengthen its support for startups and innovation**.

## Prague as a part of the national startup push

When Czech Startup Association was established in 2024, it set out to give Czech founders, investors, and other ecosystem players a **stronger collective voice** in discussions with the government and political parties.

At the time, the Association identified **seven structural obstacles** holding back Czech startups: 

1. inadequate ESOP structures,
2. rigid employment rules,
3. tax complexity,
4. bureaucracy,
5. restrictions around startup investment,
6. limited access to public data,
7. and the absence of a comprehensive national startup strategy.

Two years later, several of the issues the Association has been advocating for have moved onto the national policy agenda.

Speaking at Praha Inovační, **Martin Jiránek, Startup Envoy at the Ministry of Industry and Trade**, pointed to the Startup Act currently being finalized, planned changes to the country's ESOP framework, preparations for a fund of funds aimed at strengthening access to capital, and the development of regional innovation centers. Jiránek said:

> “Importantly, startups, investors, innovation centers, business associations, and industry organizations are working together with the government on these changes. I would therefore very much like to see the City of Prague become a strong and active partner in developing the startup environment as soon as possible."

## The Association now wants Prague to catch up

For the Czech Startup Association, Prague represents something of a paradox. The capital is the natural center of the Czech technology ecosystem, concentrating founders, venture capital, universities, research institutions, and talent. Yet the Association argues that **municipal-level support and innovation infrastructure have not kept pace with the ecosystem that has developed around them**.

Other Czech regions already provide potential models. South Moravia has built an established innovation ecosystem around JIC, which ranked [50th in the Financial Times](https://www.ft.com/content/ab05487c-72f9-4c1c-9acf-07768693b105?ref=therecursive.com) ranking: Europe’s leading start-up hubs 2026.

Prague, meanwhile, lacks a comparable publicly backed innovation center with a strong international profile. This gap was one of the main reasons behind Praha Inovační.

> “Prague is home to the largest number of Czech startups, and these companies account for a significant share of the city’s economy. Yet systematic support from the city is lacking, as is a strong innovation center of the kind found in most European capitals."

\-- commented **Jiří Vicherek, Chairman of the Czech Startup Association**.

According to Vicherek, the debate produced agreement across the political spectrum on several of the ecosystem’s priorities. He singled out three in particular: **closer cooperation with universities, a flagship technology event, and a strong innovation center**.

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## What Czech startups want from their capital

The Association brought founders, investors, universities, and innovation organizations into the discussion to formulate concrete expectations for Prague’s next administration.

**Founders** called for less bureaucracy, a clear one-stop shop for startups, and access to city spaces that could be used for coworking hubs and accelerators.

**Investors** highlighted the need to build Prague’s international innovation brand, establish a physical startup hub, and develop a major flagship technology event capable of attracting international attention.

**University representatives** focused on shared infrastructure for technology transfer and better conditions for turning scientific research into companies. The Central Bohemian Innovation Center emphasized another requirement: **long-term political continuity and measurable KPIs**, rather than innovation policies changing with every election.

The discussion included proposals to make public procurement more accessible to young technology companies and encourage city-owned businesses to work with startups. 

**The next test will come after the municipal elections**: whether the cross-party commitments made at Praha Inovační translate into a stronger innovation center, easier access to the city for startups, and a more coordinated long-term strategy for turning Prague into a European startup hub.
### Venture Intelligence Day Prague 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/venture-intelligence-day-prague-2026/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T13:20:29.000Z
Venture Intelligence Day (VID) Prague 2026 is Europe's flagship data-driven VC event, gathering 150+ venture capital professionals, CFOs, COOs, CTOs, data leads and GPs, for two days on how data and AI are reshaping venture investing. This edition features 20+ practitioner-led sessions and hands-on workshops built around running better, data-centric funds.

📅 **Date:** 13–14 October 2026  
📍 **Location**: Prague, Czech Republic  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Scott.Weber Workspace – PernerKarlín ](https://www.google.com/maps/search/?api=1&query=Scott.Weber%20Workspace%20%E2%80%93%20PernerKarl%C3%ADn&query%5Fplace%5Fid=ChIJgyz%5F6hqVC0cRX2pClyvixWo&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda ](https://vcday.vestberry.com/conferences/prague-2026?ref=therecursive.com) 

Vestberry, the portfolio intelligence platform behind data-centric venture capital, brings Venture Intelligence Day (VID) back to Prague on October 13–14, 2026\. Now regarded as the flagship European gathering for VC teams focused on operational excellence and data strategy, **VID pulls together leaders across finance, technology and venture** to share the practices shaping tomorrow's investment landscape. This edition follows last year's Prague success and the U.S. debut in New York earlier this spring.

The two-day program centres on the practical application of data and technology in venture investing — not theory, but what actually works inside a fund. Attendees can expect deep dives into the next **evolution of portfolio intelligence**, **how data and AI are reshaping the entire investment lifecycle**, how to build an intelligence function inside a VC firm, and how to establish a **single source of truth for portfolio data**. Alongside the main-stage sessions, hands-on workshops walk teams through automating portfolio monitoring and unlocking agent skills for VCs.

**Expect candid, practitioner-led conversations rather than sales pitches**: sessions explore AI as a force multiplier for lean teams, what portfolio data reveals about VC performance, and whether data is quietly creating a new tier of VC firms. 

Whether you're a finance or operations lead under pressure to deliver cleaner insights, a partner chasing more predictable portfolio performance, or a data and tech specialist building scalable systems, VID is built for you — and beyond the stage, informal meetups and networking evenings bring the community together in more relaxed settings.

**On the agenda:**

- The next evolution of portfolio intelligence
- How data and AI are reshaping the entire investment lifecycle
- Building an intelligence function inside a VC firm
- Establishing a single source of truth for portfolio data
- AI as a force multiplier for lean teams
- What portfolio data reveals about VC performance
- Whether data is creating a new tier of VC firms
- Workshops: automating portfolio monitoring & unlocking agent skills for VCs

**Featured speakers:**

- Philipp Spenger — EIC Fund
- Rob Hicks — Giant Ventures
- Lars Hansen — Atomico
- Iohan Dessard — Contrarian Ventures
- Ryan Stevens — IQ Capital
- Nataša Ralević — Angelini Ventures
- Iuliana Prundurel — EIC Fund
- Yun Yun Lin — Trinsik
- Harry Uglow

…and other leaders building the next generation of venture infrastructure. 

***Become part of The Recursive community to see the discount code.***
### Celebrities That Became Venture Investors Part 2
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/celebrities-that-became-venture-investors-part-2/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T08:39:01.000Z
For years, the celebrity–startup deal followed a simple script. A brand paid a famous person to use the product, post about it and put a face to the campaign. That still happens all the time. But a growing number of celebrities now want **equity in the company** itself rather than a one-off fee.

That shift has made actors, athletes and entertainers into a real category of startup backers. What gets them onto a cap table is everything that comes with the name: **distribution, cultural pull, a direct line to customers and industries**, and an audience most funds struggle to reach on their own. The most ambitious of them have gone further and started building, launching funds, hiring partners and writing their own investment thesis.

Here’s how some of the most [recognizable names actually invest](https://www.therecursive.com/celebrity-investors-making-waves-in-vc/).

## Actors

### Eva Longoria: 

Eva Longoria has been investing well beyond Hollywood for years, across consumer brands and technology. In 2026 she joined the group backing ElevenLabs, the AI voice company that passed [$500 million (about €460 million)](https://www.therecursive.com/elevenlabs-500m-series-d-11b-valuation/) in annual recurring revenue at a valuation above $11 billion (about €10 billion). Her value to a company like that comes from her audience and her connections inside entertainment, the exact industry ElevenLabs is reshaping as its technology changes how voices and content get made. Her check is small next to the institutional investors on the round, and she still earns a place on the cap table because of everything else she carries with her. She also builds businesses of her own, among them the female-founded [Casa Del Sol Tequila](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/eva-longoria-backed-casa-del-115344908.html?ref=therecursive.com) brand she co-founded in 2021.

**Investor Type:** Angel (individual)

**Investment Focus:** Consumer, beauty, technology

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** [ElevenLabs](https://www.therecursive.com/polish-elevenlabs-series-c-funding-round-open-positions/), Casa Del Sol Tequila (co-founder)

### Matthew McConaughey: Early believer

Matthew McConaughey was already in ElevenLabs before the 2026 round turned its investor list into a red carpet. His portfolio spans consumer and tech, and it includes [Workrise](https://austin.culturemap.com/news/innovation/05-25-22-matthew-mcconaughey-austin-startup-investor/?ref=therecursive.com) (formerly RigUp), the Austin workforce platform for the energy and infrastructure industries. That early ElevenLabs position still stands out, because he backed the company well before it became one of the most-talked-about names in AI. Getting in that early can matter as much for a celebrity investor as the name recognition does.

**Investor Type:** Angel (individual)

**Investment Focus:** Consumer, technology

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** [ElevenLabs](https://www.therecursive.com/poland-welcomes-a-new-unicorn-elevenlabs-voice-cloning-startup-lands-80m-series-b-to-release-new-voice-ai-products/), Workrise (formerly RigUp)

### Jamie Foxx: 

Jamie Foxx joined the 2026 wave of investors in ElevenLabs, the AI voice company. Away from tech, he has also moved into consumer brands, buying a [majority stake in BSB–Brown Sugar Bourbon](https://www.just-drinks.com/news/jamie-foxx-buys-majority-stake-in-bsb-spirits-brown-sugar-bourbon/?ref=therecursive.com) in 2021\. Beyond those, his startup portfolio stays thin on the public record, with most of his business activity in entertainment and consumer ventures rather than tech.

**Investor Type:** Angel (individual)

**Investment Focus:** AI, entertainment

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** ElevenLabs, BSB–Brown Sugar Bourbon (majority owner)

## Kevin Hart: Comedy money, run like a fund

Kevin Hart has turned comedy money into a structured venture operation. He launched [HartBeat Ventures](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/kevin-harts-venture-firm-gets-investment-from-j-p-morgan-1235245737/?ref=therecursive.com) in 2021 with a clear mission — backing minority and underrepresented founders, and drew an early investment from J.P. Morgan. The firm has already invested in at least 14 companies, including Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty and the art-investing marketplace Masterworks, and its first fund had raised at least $28 million (about €25.8 million) by early 2024\. It runs with the structure and thesis of a real fund, well beyond ad-hoc angel checks.

**VC Founded In:** HartBeat Ventures (2021)

**Investment Focus:** Minority and underrepresented founders; consumer, culture, tech

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** Savage X Fenty, Masterworks

## Gwyneth Paltrow: From newsletter to tech

Gwyneth Paltrow turned a newsletter into Goop, a wellness, beauty and media brand that outlasted most of its early skeptics, and she was an early Uber investor along the way. She has since moved into technology through [Kinship Ventures](https://www.kinshipventures.co/?ref=therecursive.com), the firm she co-founded in 2021 with Moj Mahdara, which has backed AI companies including, reportedly, OpenAI. 

**VC Founded In:** Kinship Ventures (2021)

**Investment Focus:** Consumer, AI, technology

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** OpenAI (reported), Uber (early)

## Athletes

### Mario Götze: The World Cup winner turned serious angel 

Mario Götze scored the goal that won Germany the 2014 World Cup, and he has spent the years since building a second career as one of Europe’s more serious footballer-investors. Through his vehicle [Companion M](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-cup-champion-mario-g-181802176.html?ref=therecursive.com) he has backed more than 70 companies, usually writing €25,000–€50,000 (about $29,000–$58,000) checks at pre-seed and seed. Two of them — the fintech Flatpay and the AI company Parloa — turned into unicorns in 2025\. He also invests as an LP in venture funds across Europe and the US.

**VC Founded In:** Companion M (personal investment vehicle)

**Investment Focus:** B2B SaaS, software infrastructure, cybersecurity, health & biotech

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** Flatpay, Parloa, Sanity Group, Qualifyze

### David Beckham: Turning reach into equity

David Beckham has built a business career on one of the most recognizable personal brands in the world. His investments include the esports company Guild Esports and a range of consumer businesses. His main asset is reach: few backers can offer a startup an audience that runs from football fans to shoppers across the globe. 

**Investor Type:** Angel / DB Ventures

**Investment Focus:** Consumer, esports

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** Guild Esports

### Dimitar Berbatov: When the investor knows the industry

Dimitar Berbatov is one of those celebrity investors whose experience lines up directly with the company he backs. In 2025 the former Manchester United and Bulgarian national-team striker put money into Footium, a UK football-management startup, as part of [a roughly $600,000 strategic angel round](https://www.founderstoday.news/footium-secures-600k-in-funding?ref=therecursive.com) (about €550,000). Any investor could write that check. What Berbatov adds on top is a career spent inside professional football, with all the knowledge of the people and culture around it, which for a football startup can be worth as much as the money. 

**Investor Type:** Angel (individual)

**Investment Focus:** Sports tech

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** Footium

### Gerard Piqué: The athlete as an operator

Gerard Piqué stopped being an occasional startup dabbler some time ago. The former Barcelona defender founded Kosmos, an investment and media group with interests across sport, entertainment and technology, and took it deep into tennis, including a deal to overhaul the Davis Cup that has since ended. His second career now looks a lot more like a full-time businessman’s than a footballer’s side project.

**VC Founded In:** Kosmos (2017)

**Investment Focus:** Sport, media, technology

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** Kosmos Tennis / Davis Cup (partnership ended), sports & media ventures

## Musicians 

### Beyoncé: Equity instead of a fee

Beyoncé made one of the smartest celebrity moves in tech almost by accident. In 2015 she [took Uber stock instead of a cash fee for a performance](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2019/05/09/beyonce-ashton-kutcher-gwyneth-paltrow-uber-ipo-celebrity-investments/?ref=therecursive.com). She has since put money into a run of consumer and beverage startups, including Lemon Perfect, WTRMLN WTR and [the music-merch app Sidestep](https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/29/stackin-money-everywhere-she-goes/?ref=therecursive.com).

**Investor Type:** Angel (individual)

**Investment Focus:** Consumer, beverage, technology

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** Uber (early), Lemon Perfect, WTRMLN WTR, Sidestep

### Katy Perry: One of the busiest celebrity angels 

Katy Perry has become an active angel investor, with a portfolio that leans heavily into food tech, consumer goods and, more recently, AI. Her bets include Impossible Foods, the food-preservation company Apeel Sciences and the virtual-reality chain Sandbox VR, and she got in early on Core Hydration before Keurig Dr Pepper [bought it for $525 million](https://startupintros.com/people/katy-perry?ref=therecursive.com) (about €480 million) in 2018.

**Investor Type:** Angel (individual)

**Investment Focus:** Food tech, consumer goods, health, AI

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** Impossible Foods, Apeel Sciences, Sandbox VR, Core Hydration (exit)

### will.i.am: The musician who never stopped investing in tech

will.i.am has been putting money into technology for about as long as he has been making records. He was an early investor in Beats Electronics, and has since backed a string of startups across music tech, fintech and consumer hardware. Recently, [he joined a $4.5 million seed funding round](https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly/) for **imagi** (Imagilabs), a Swedish-Hungarian edtech startup.

**Investor Type:** Angel / founding shareholder

**Investment Focus:** Music tech, fintech, consumer hardware, AI

**Notable Portfolio Investments:** Beats Electronics (founding shareholder), Atom Bank, Music Messenger, Honest Dollar, imagi
### Stop Treating Fundraising Like the Finish Line
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/stop-treating-fundraising-like-the-finish-line/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T10:08:02.000Z
Based Collective co-founder Jonas Bartasius on why fundraising is over-glamorized, what Europe can learn from Silicon Valley without copying it, and why stronger founder networks could help the continent build bigger companies.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Croatian Friendly Fire Raises €4M to Franchise Its Gaming-Café Network Across Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/croatian-friendly-fire-raises-eur4m-to-franchise-its-gaming-cafe-network-across-europe/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T13:33:10.000Z
👯 **Founder(s):** David Kosir, Founder & CEO

📅 **Founding year:** 2017 

🏭 **Industry:** Gaming / esports (gaming-café franchise)

💥 **Problem:** The gaming-café market is fragmented and dominated by inconsistent "mom-and-pop" venues with no shared standards, technology, or brand.

📣 **Solution:** A franchise model that standardizes gaming cafés — combining physical locations with a proprietary software platform and centralized management, so each new café plugs into one network.

👥 **Customers:** Generation Z gamers; 220,000+ platform users and 1,000+ amateur esports competitions hosted to date.

🎳 **Team size:** 11-50

🌱 **Stage:** Series A 

💰 **Investment amount:** €4M

🚀 **Funded by:** AYMO Ventures

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor's perspective:** *"The technology layer transforms a good gaming café into a network that strengthens with each new opening."* — AYMO Ventures 

💡 **It will be spent on:** Accelerating international expansion, further developing the proprietary technology platform, and supporting franchise partners.

💬 **In their own words:** *"Now we have real momentum and the conditions to achieve our vision of becoming the world's largest gaming café chain."* — said David Kosir. 

💪 **Traction:** 31 signed franchise agreements covering 178 locations across 11 countries, and three simultaneous openings in Limassol (Cyprus), Rijeka (Croatia), and Vienna (Austria).

🔑 **Business model:** Franchise 

💸 **Funding so far:** Unknown amount from crowdfunding campaing in 2022, and prior early-stage, plus the most recent €4M
### How Sales-Led B2B AI Companies Are Reaching $100M in Revenue So Fast
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-sales-led-b2b-ai-companies-are-reaching-100m-in-revenue-so-fast/
Last updated: 2026-08-25T08:49:48.000Z
How do sales-led B2B AI companies manage to go from virtually 0 to $100 million in ARR in just a few years? **For most of the history of B2B software development, reaching this scale required years** to build out sales teams, accumulate referrals from key market players, and earn the trust of major clients. Today, some AI companies are cutting that timeframe down to 2 or 3 years.

**Glean**, a company that develops AI-powered search for corporate data, reached $100 million in revenue within 3 years, and by May 2026, that figure had grown to $300 million. **Harvey**, which creates AI tools for lawyers, went from zero to, according to available data, $195 million in ARR in 36 months. **Abridge**, whose AI automatically converts a doctor’s conversation with a patient into medical records, grew from $6 million to more than $100 million in about 30 months. They solve completely different problems, but all are growing at rates that seemed unimaginable just a short time ago.

One question has intrigued me: What sets these companies approach apart? The obvious answer is that **they work with artificial intelligence**. The market is growing rapidly, and businesses are forced to experiment. 

But there are many companies operating in promising markets that **haven’t** reached nine-figure revenue in 3 years.

So I decided to investigate how these companies grow. **I analyzed the 17 fastest-growing AI companies across several industries**, reviewing 500 primary sources, including interviews with founders, public speeches, and comments from executives and leaders on bringing products to market. I expected to see completely different stories, but instead I was surprised by how often the same patterns recurred.

## They make the initial decision incredibly simple

The fastest-growing companies don’t ask customers to transform their entire process. **15 of the 17 companies I studied entered the market with a single, narrow use case** in which the value was clear.

For example, Sierra started by automating a small amount of support requests, charging about $1 per request. Resolving the same request with human assistance could cost $7–10\. Harvey initially provided lawyers with a specialized AI assistant that had been trained on legal sources. Clients could test a single process, verify its effectiveness, and scale up from there.

What interested me most was what happened next. **For a long time, the standard approach for a B2B SaaS startup** was to first gain a foothold among small and medium-sized customers, prove the products viability, and only then move on to large corporations. 

Many leading companies now take a different approach: they **start working with large, high-profile enterprise clients much earlier**. This is partly possible because they offer fundamentally new solutions that simply don’t exist on the market. 

> And having a well-known client helps win over the rest more quickly: if a large company is already using the new product and seeing results, it seems much less risky for the next potential client to give it a try.

## They replace promises with proof

Another pattern was how little these companies ask buyers to use their imagination. **About three-quarters of the companies studied showcase their products using real-world case studies** or data from potential customers, rather than relying solely on pre-prepared examples.

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For example, Harvey’s managers come to meetings with law firms armed with an analysis of cases those firms have already handled. Instead of having to imagine the value of the solution, potential buyers could assess it for themselves.

Another emerging trend is that **experts in specific fields are increasingly taking a direct role in sales**: lawyers talk to lawyers, doctors to doctors, and specialists in their field to people who do the same work they once did. Before this study, I had underestimated just how important this “peer-to-peer” element of interaction had become. 

> Salespeople still play an important role, but most of the persuasion takes place between **people who understand the same line of work**.

### They change who exactly is taking the risk

This latest trend may have the most significant long-term value. [Traditional SaaS services](https://www.therecursive.com/saas-business-models-vc-perspective-on-building-a-successful-subscription-business-in-cee/) sell seats, licenses, or subscriptions, regardless of whether the software will ultimately prove to be meaningful and valuable.

**AI enables a fundamentally different type of relationship**, as programs are increasingly capable of independently performing specific work tasks. As a result, some companies now charge based on deliverables: a closed support ticket, a signed non-disclosure agreement, a completed medical form, or another outcome whose importance is clear to the client. When payment is tied to the work performed, the provider assumes responsibility for the products effectiveness.

Together, these trends have changed my perception of the growth metrics. The fastest-growing companies in the AI sector are **systematically removing uncertainty from the purchasing process**: starting with a narrow use case, demonstrating value through real-world projects, engaging industry practitioners to build trust, and, increasingly, tying pricing to results.

For founders operating in small ecosystems, there is another takeaway.

Historically, the path to global customers might have seemed linear: first grow in the local market, build credibility, and only then move up to the next level. These companies show that **this sequence is becoming less rigid**. 

> Tangible use cases and compelling evidence can spread faster than reputations once did. You may not need the largest ecosystem around to become valuable to the biggest clients.

AI is transforming the capabilities of software. What I didn't expect when I began this research was just how much it could change the path a company takes to become a major player.
### Ex-Nvidia Stars From Slovenia Raise $90M to Build "The Matrix" for Robots
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ex-nvidia-stars-from-slovenia-raise-90m-to-build-the-matrix-for-robots/
Last updated: 2026-08-25T08:50:54.000Z
A large language model can draft your yearly business plan or write a sonnet, but it cannot reliably help a robot pick up a cup from your table. This gap between cognitive and physical ability represents one of the biggest bottlenecks in technology today, a **challenge rooted not in algorithms, but in data**. 

While language models feasted on trillions of words scraped from the internet, a comparable dataset for physical interaction simply does not exist. **There is no public library of how a hand twists a doorknob** or how a foot navigates a cluttered floor.

Into this void steps Veeda AI, a Toronto-based, Slovenian co-founded startup armed with one of the largest seed rounds in Canadian history. Founded by a trio of elite researchers who recently departed chip giant Nvidia, **the company has secured over $90 million (€83.7M), led by Khosla Ventures,** to tackle the physical world not by interacting with it, but by perfectly simulating it. 

Their mission is to build the foundational infrastructure for physical AI, creating infinitely scalable virtual worlds where robots can learn, fail, and master tasks millions of times over before making their first move in reality.

## “The next breakthrough is around the corner”

Veeda AI is led by **CEO Sanja Fidler**, a towering figure in Canadian AI who, until last month, served as Vice-President of AI Research at Nvidia, heading its Toronto-based **Spatial Intelligence Lab**. Fidler, who grew up in Slovenia and completed her doctorate at the University of Ljubljana, announced her departure after eight years, declaring in a [LinkedIn post](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanja-fidler-2846a1a/?ref=therecursive.com) that “*world models is where the next breakthrough lies, and it is around the corner*.”

She is joined by co-founders **Zan Gojcic**, another Slovenian researcher and former Nvidia research director in Zurich who serves as CTO, and Huan Ling, a former colleague from the Spatial Intelligence Lab and Fidler’s past doctoral student, who is now Veeda's Chief Scientist. The team, which incorporated Veeda Innovation in early June, possesses a **rare concentration of expertise in spatial intelligence, simulation, and generative AI.**

Their vision quickly attracted heavyweight backers. The $90 million seed financing was co-led by Toronto’s **Radical Ventures** and Silicon Valley’s **Khosla Ventures**, placing the round in the 99th percentile of all seed deals in the industry. More than with *just* the capital, this investment will also serve as a strategic endorsement. As part of the deal, Radical partner **Tomi Poutanen** and Khosla partner **Sven Strohband** have joined Veeda’s board, signalling deep operational involvement from two of the most influential firms betting on the future of AI.

## It is unsafe, expensive, and time-consuming

The central premise behind Veeda is a direct response to the intractable data problem in robotics. As [Fidler explains](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sanja-fidler-2846a1a%5Fim-incredibly-excited-to-introduce-veeda-share-7495860194095165440-WDxB/?ref=therecursive.com), training a robot through physical trial and error is fundamentally unscalable. “*The real world is simply not a practical training ground for robots to learn through trial and error. It is unsafe, expensive, and time-consuming*,” she wrote. A mistake from a language model results in a bad sentence; a mistake from a multi-tonne industrial robot can be catastrophic.

> Veeda’s solution is to build what it calls “***simulated reality***” powered by generative world models. 

These are not simple video game environments. They are multimodal foundation models that learn the physics and mechanics of reality from colossal amounts of sensor data, including images, video, and text. **The goal is to create a digital twin of the world so rich and responsive that an AI agent can learn within it**, experiencing millions of scenarios and consequences in parallel. Fidler unabashedly calls it building *the Matrix*:

> As envisioned in pop culture, this means building “the Matrix” for Physical AI, where, through a virtual embodiment, robot intelligence can interact with an entirely virtual world in a million possible ways, learning from its own mistakes.

The approach mirrors the evolution of language models, which only unlocked their full potential when they began training in interactive environments, learning from reinforcement and feedback rather than just passively observing internet text. Veeda is betting the same paradigm shift is necessary for embodied intelligence.

## A well-worn playbook

For the founding team, this is not a new frontier. 

> At Nvidia, Fidler, Gojcic, and Ling were central to the company’s efforts in spatial intelligence and simulation. 

Fidler’s Spatial Intelligence Lab developed software to simulate how autonomous vehicles and humanoid agents would interact with the real world. **She and Ling were part of the team that created Nvidia’s flagship world model, Cosmos**, a platform used by companies like **Uber** and **Figure AI** to build their own physical AI systems.

Their research has consistently pushed the boundaries of generating and editing three-dimensional digital content, from AI models that could reproduce a video game from gameplay footage to driving simulators built from real-world dashcam video. 

**Even though they went out of stealth just last week**, this extensive background means Veeda isn’t starting from scratch. Veeda team is accelerating a [research agenda they have pursued for the better part of a decade](https://thelogic.co/news/exclusive/veeda-ai-sanja-fidler-nvidia/?ref=therecursive.com), now with the focus and funding of a dedicated startup. 

The company is already [hiring aggressively](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/veeda-ai?ref=therecursive.com) for its offices in Toronto, Zurich, Singapore, and Mountain View, seeking scientists and engineers to manage the massive chip clusters required to train its ambitious models.

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## The investors betting on the same ticket

The investor syndicate behind Veeda is perhaps as telling as the technology itself. 

**Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures** have developed a clear thesis around backing elite, research-led teams building foundational AI models. [Earlier this year](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/05/jeff-dean-and-other-top-ai-researchers-are-leaving-google-to-launch-their-own-startup/?ref=therecursive.com), the two firms co-led a founding round for **Discovery Loop**, an AI-for-science startup launched by former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean.

Their portfolios are heavily weighted towards Veeda’s specific domain. Khosla co-led the massive $750 million round for autonomous trucking company **Waabi**, which develops its own world models for self-driving (founded by Raquel Urtasun, another U of T professor). Radical was a participant in that deal and is also an investor in **World Labs**, a spatial intelligence company founded by its own scientific partner, Fei-Fei Li. 

This pattern confirms important conviction of some of the most prominent investors: that the next wave of AI might be defined by models that understand and interact with the physical world, and that the talent emerging from top corporate labs and academic institutions is the best bet to build it.

While the first wave was defined by large language models, Veeda joins a cohort including **Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and General Intuition**, all chasing the holy grail of physical intelligence. 

With its $90 million war chest, Veeda is now positioned to compete for the two most critical resources in this race: elite research talent and the vast amounts of computing power needed to bring their simulated worlds to life. For roboticists everywhere, the message is clear. As Fidler concluded in her announcement, “*Help us understand what you need, we’re building this for you*.”
### Hive 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/hive-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-24T11:15:54.000Z
Hive (Кошер) 2026 is Bulgaria's largest business event, gathering 4,000+ participants and 100+ leading voices from business, technology and finance. This edition looks to the next ten years of the Bulgarian economy through open discussions and hands-on workshops that put the visitor at the centre.  
  
📅 **Date:** 17–18 September 2026  
📍 **Location**: Sofia, Bulgaria  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Inter Expo Center](https://www.google.com/maps?ll=42.649053,23.395195&z=15&t=m&hl=en&gl=BG&mapclient=embed&cid=7787347438780542780&ref=therecursive.com) (Day 1) & [Toplocentrala, Sofia](https://www.google.com/maps?ll=42.679779,23.315487&z=15&t=m&hl=en&gl=BG&mapclient=embed&cid=9913572789179903358&ref=therecursive.com) (Day 2)

[Check the agenda ](https://hive.bg/?ref=therecursive.com) 

**Hive (Кошер)**, Bulgaria's biggest business event, returns on 17 and 18 September with a new format built around one big question: what will define the country's economy over the next ten years. Organised by **Tuk-Tam**, the forum brings together 4,000+ participants — established entrepreneurs and professionals, young people looking for direction, and companies that want to help shape what business in Bulgaria looks like next.

This edition puts the visitor at the centre. Instead of a one-way stage, the programme is built from open discussions and workshops where attendees can ask questions and talk directly with the people behind real business decisions. More than 100 of the most recognisable names in business, technology and finance take part, including:

- **Tsvetanka Mincheva** — CEO of UniCredit Bulbank and one of the leading figures in Bulgarian banking
- **Orlin Radev** — founder & CEO of AMPECO, a Bulgarian company building EV charging management software for international markets
- **Svetozar Georgiev** — co-founder of Telerik Academy and Campus X, behind some of Bulgaria's most visible entrepreneurial and educational projects
- **Diana Stefanova** — partner at BrightCap Ventures, a fund investing in tech companies with growth potential beyond Bulgaria

### What to Expect

Day one (17 September, Inter Expo Center) tackles how Bulgarian companies can grow amid talent shortages, rapid technological change and intensifying international competition — looking not just at growth itself, but the conditions behind it: talent, capital, markets and new skills. 

Day two (18 September, Toplocentrala) shifts to who moves those changes forward, bringing together business, institutions and education around how Bulgaria stays competitive and attractive over the coming decade. On site, visitors can also meet leading employers to understand where the job market is heading and which skills will be in demand, while exhibition spaces showcase Bulgarian innovations with potential for the next ten years.

Registration is open at [hive.bg](https://hive.bg/?ref=therecursive.com), where visitors choose access based on their goal — career or business. **Young attendees get a 90% discount**, and the business format includes individual consultations and specialised meetings.
### Embedd Raises €2.31M to Build Software Infrastructure for Physical AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/embedd-raises-eur2-31m-to-build-software-infrastructure-for-physical-ai/
Last updated: 2026-08-25T08:59:37.000Z
👯 **Founder(s):** Michael Lazarenko (Co-founder & CEO), Maxim Gorinov (Co-founder & CPO), Valentin Gololobov (Co-founder & CTO).

📅 **Founding year:** 2023 

🏭 **Industry:** Deep tech / dev tools — software infrastructure for physical AI and semiconductor enablement.

💥 **Problem:** Every intelligent machine depends on software that must talk reliably to dozens of different chips, none of which share a common language. Engineers currently read through thousands of pages of documentation and hand-write the integration code, which slows down physical AI development.

📣 **Solution:** Embedd builds a digital twin of the hardware, giving AI agents the context to run the integration themselves and automatically generate the code that makes each chip usable by the software layer above it.

👥 **Customers:** Semiconductor companies — Embedd is already working with multiple chipmakers, most recently Microchip Technology, for whom it is enabling Zephyr support. The end markets it points to span robotics, manufacturing, healthcare and automotive.

🎳 **Team size:** 2-10

🌱 **Stage:** Pre-seed

💰 **Investment amount:** €2.31M ($2.7M)

🚀 **Funded by:** Led by Seedcamp, with participation from Cocoa, Connect Ventures, 2100 Ventures, Vesna Capital, U.ventures, Underline Ventures, Common Magic and Roosh Ventures.

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor's perspective:** *"AI's next chapter will play out in the physical world, but today's software stack was never designed for that reality. Embedd is tackling one of the fundamental challenges facing industries from robotics and manufacturing to healthcare and automotive, and we're excited to back Michael and the team as they build the infrastructure underpinning the next generation of intelligent machines."* said Carlos Eduardo Espinal MBE, General Partner at Seedcamp. 

💡 **It will be spent on…** Continuing to develop the platform and expanding its work with semiconductor companies.

💬 **In their own words:** Michael Lazarenko, co-founder and CEO: *"The next wave of AI will power factories, vehicles, robots and critical infrastructure, but today, every change in hardware creates huge complexity for software teams and that friction is already massively slowing innovation. We built Embedd to address exactly that, and we're thrilled to have the backing of Seedcamp as we scale." He added: "The promise of physical AI is enormous, but today's hardware fragmentation is slowing innovation. This funding enables us to expand our platform and help more semiconductor companies bring their devices into emerging software ecosystems."*

💪 **Their specialty…** Embedd was founded by three Ukrainian entrepreneurs whose previous hardware company was hit by chip shortages during Covid and later disrupted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It works directly inside chipmakers' own ecosystems, as with its Microchip Technology partnership, rather than asking developers to switch platforms, getting customers to production-ready chip software up to six times faster than the current approach.

🔑 **Business model:** B2B

💸 **Funding so far:** €2.31M ($2.7M)
### Hungarian EdTech BOOKR Raises €6.1M Series A to Expand Global Reach
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/hungarian-edtech-bookr-raises-eur6-1m-series-a-to-expand-global-reach/
Last updated: 2026-08-25T08:59:52.000Z
The Hungarian edtech company [BOOKR ](https://bookrclass.com/?ref=therecursive.com)has raised **€6.1 million in a Series A** funding round led by TCEE Fund IV, advised by 3TS Capital Partners, with participation from international and strategic investors. The transaction includes a primary investment, secondary share purchases, and the conversion of existing financial instruments.

The company builds digital tools for reading, language learning, and literacy, with the aim of helping children strengthen their ability to read with understanding and work with information.

Its BOOKR Class product is a platform for schools that gives teachers and students a range of learning resources, including interactive books and exercises for students, along with various tools for teachers.

> “The next generation will not compete with AI on speed. They will need to compete on depth: comprehension, curiosity, judgement and the ability to ask better questions. This investment allows BOOKR to build the learning infrastructure behind those capabilities, and to take it to millions more children around the world.”

— said **Dr Dorka Horváth**, PhD, CEO and Co-Founder of BOOKR Kids

# Where BOOKR stands today 

The company already has more than 600,000 paying students, over 3,000 schools, and a presence in more than 30 countries. Its main market is English teaching, but it also offers German and Hungarian language courses.

Its offering includes a wide range of interactive digital books built around the school curriculum, along with over 50,000 learning activities, and its books reach students across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.

The company reported around $2.7 million in revenue. BOOKR [has been shortlisted](https://bettawards.com/winners-2024/?ref=therecursive.com) for Bett Award, an annual international awards recognizing technology and innovation in education, and holds strong evidence of impact in UNICEF's assessment framework for EdTech.

# More about the investment 

Together with 3TS Capital Partners, the investor group also includes Leib Lurie, co-founder and former CEO of the U.S. literacy nonprofit "Kids Read Now"; Robert Iskander, chairman and CEO of "SchoolDay"; "Infinit Capital Oy," the Finnish investment fund of the Kopponen family; and Hungarian angel investor Albert Sarospataki, CEO of "Billingo," who invested through his angel syndicate "FusionWise." 

The investment will help BOOKR expand into markets across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas through stronger partnerships and distribution. The company also plans to launch new products: BOOKR Next, aimed at learners aged 10–18, and BOOKR Phonics, an eight-phase program of decodable texts designed to support early literacy. 

BOOKR also plans to expand its Teacher Dashboard and Speaking Studio internationally, and to keep investing in research linking product use to real learning results. 

> *“BOOKR pairs outstanding content and rigorous pedagogy with something few companies from our region achieve: a genuinely international business. Through established partner networks across markets including Turkey, the UAE, Jordan and China, it has built a geographically diversified revenue base rather than depending on a single home market. That proven cross-border traction positions BOOKR to help define how literacy and language learning evolve in the AI era.”*

— said Barnabás Vincze, Investment Manager at 3TS Capital Partners
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Major Exit for Bulgaria
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-5/
Last updated: 2026-08-25T09:00:23.000Z
## CEE Deals

European private equity investor **Oakley Capital** [acquired a majority stake](https://www.therecursive.com/oakley-capital-acquires-a-majority-stake-in-graphwise/) in **Graphwise**, [a company formed in 2024](https://www.therecursive.com/a-content-management-platform-and-a-graph-database-come-together-in-the-new-company-graphwise/) through the merger of Bulgarian Ontotext and Austrian Semantic Web Company. According to the companies, the deal marks one of the biggest exits in the Bulgarian software industry, although **the financial terms have not been disclosed**.

Vince Gaydarzhiev, the Bulgarian founder behind biometric security company Alcatraz AI, [has raised **$10 million**](https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-founder-vince-gaydarzhiev-raises-10m-for-ai-vehicle-inspection-startup/) (€8.62 million) for his second venture, **Self Inspection**. The round was led by **Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners**, the family office of Sheryl Sandberg, with strategic investments from **U.S. AutoForce** and **Westlake Financial**. **BrightCap Ventures**, a Bulgarian fund, also participated in the round, making it the only European fund among the investors.

**Lithuanian** **deep-tech startup Litilit** has secured an [€8 million loan](https://www.therecursive.com/lithuanian-litilit-secures-eur8m-loan-to-scale-femtosecond-laser-technology/) from ILTE to advance R&D and make its femtosecond laser technology more scalable for industrial applications. Litilit's technology is based on an internationally patented method for generating ultrashort pulses, discovered by co-founder Kęstutis Regelskis with researchers at FTMC. 

**Astute**, a B2B platform with a **Serbian founder** at the helm, [has raised an oversubscribed](https://www.therecursive.com/belgrade-born-founders-astute-raises-over-eur1-m-pre-seed-to-reshape-b2b-media/) €1.3 million pre-seed round, with launching its new platform. The company uses two AI agents to automate creator partnerships for B2B companies. The round was backed by Flyer One Ventures, Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, and strategic angel investors.

**Vilnius-based** **Guideless** [has raised €1 million](https://www.therecursive.com/lithuanias-guideless-raises-eur1m-to-cut-software-training-time-by-up-to-10x/) in pre-seed funding. The company uses AI to capture a workflow as someone performs it, then automatically generates a step-by-step guide, creating editable training guides up to 10x faster than screen recordings. The round was led by **Superhero Capital**, with participation from FIRSTPICK VC and angel investors.

## Defense tech investment updates

**Ukrainian Forland Systems**, developing and manufacturing UGVs in cooperation with the Achilles unmanned systems brigade, [has raised investment](https://thedefender.media/en/2026/08/forland-systems-raised-invesmtemt-from-grenadyr/?ref=therecursive.com) from UK venture platform Grenadyr. The amount was not disclosed. Forland Systems is working on the development of next-generation unmanned ground platforms for logistics, inspection, and mission-support applications. 

**Polish-founded DefendEye**, developer of fully autonomous drone systems,[ has closed a major investment round](https://startupkitchen.community/defendeye-secures-major-investment-led-by-novacapital-to-scale-production-of-the-worlds-first-autonomous-ai-drone-designed-for-first-responders/?ref=therecursive.com) led by **NovaCapital**, with participation of Polish ff Venture Capital, and Hard2beat, German Sunfish Partners as well as US-based In-Q-Tel. The new funding aims to help DefendEye scale production of its flagship Overwatch Drone, an advanced aerial intelligence system built primarily for first responders. The amount was not disclosed.
### Robotics Strategy Forum 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/robotics-strategy-forum-2026/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T12:52:02.000Z
The Robotics Strategy Forum 2026 brings together Bulgaria’s robotics, automation, AI, engineering and manufacturing ecosystem to explore how technology is transforming local industry. The eighth edition focuses on the “Renaissance of Bulgarian Industry,” showcasing real-world technologies, companies and engineering solutions.  
  
📅 **Date:** September 10th, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Sofia, Bulgaria  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Sofia Tech Park, John Atanasov Hall](https://www.google.com/maps/place//data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x40aa8679286c7ed7:0x4a9d96383bfc10e5?sa=X&ved=1t:8290&ictx=111&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda ](https://rsf2026.para.expert/?ref=therecursive.com) 

On **September 10, 2026**, Sofia Tech Park will host the eighth edition of Robotics Strategy Forum, bringing together Bulgaria’s industry, robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, engineering and technology companies. This year’s theme, **“Renaissance of Bulgarian Industry,”** will focus on the people, companies, engineers, universities and technology teams developing products, machines, robots, electronics, software and engineering solutions in Bulgaria.

The event will explore how technology is transforming Bulgarian industry across different sectors — from the modernization of traditional manufacturing and electronics to aviation, industrial AI, robotics, 3D printing and engineering solutions for extreme environments such as Antarctica. The programme will also look at the connection between Bulgarian engineering and Japanese technologies, the role of Bulgaria in aviation, and the latest developments in humanoid robots and artificial intelligence.

Alongside the main programme, RSF 2026 will feature an expo zone with more than 50 innovative companies, live technology demonstrations and Additive Days 2026, a dedicated zone focused on additive manufacturing. Visitors will be able to explore the latest 3D printing technologies, materials and applications across industries including manufacturing, engineering, medicine, education, architecture and design.

The forum will also include free practical training sessions focused on different aspects of industrial production. Inova Group will present a hands-on session covering ESD protection, manual soldering and visual inspection, while Würth Elektronik will offer practical training on EMI noise filtering, including component selection, simulations and live EMC measurements. A separate session will look at how AI can support production planning by optimizing resources, deadlines and capacity while reducing downtime and delays.

## What topics can you expect?

- How Bulgarian industry is transforming through engineering, automation and new technologies;
- The connection between Bulgarian engineering and Japanese technologies;
- Bulgaria’s role in aviation and engineering solutions for Antarctica;
- The development of humanoid robots and the use of artificial intelligence;
- Additive manufacturing, 3D printing technologies and their real-world applications;
- Industrial AI and its role in production planning and optimization;
- Electronics manufacturing, ESD protection, soldering, EMI filtering and EMC measurements;
- New opportunities for partnerships between companies, engineers, entrepreneurs and other players in the Bulgarian industrial ecosystem.

The event will bring together managers, engineers, entrepreneurs, academics, students and young technology enthusiasts, while creating opportunities to explore new technologies, exchange knowledge and build partnerships across sectors.
### AI Everything Abu Dhabi: From AI Enterprises Worth $10 Trillion to the World's First AI-Native Government
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-everything-abu-dhabi-from-ai-enterprises-worth-10-trillion-to-the-worlds-first-ai-native-government/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T09:49:22.000Z
[Register for AI Everything Abu Dhabi →](https://visit.aieverythingabudhabi.com/register?utm%5Fsource=The-Recursive&utm%5Fmedium=MediaPartner&utm%5Fcampaign=visprom) *The Recursive is a media partner and will be present on the ground at the event.*

On 6 and 7 October 2026, more than 350 AI enterprises will fill the ADNEC Centre in Abu Dhabi, carrying a combined market capitalisation of roughly $10 trillion between them. With the Department of Government Enablement Abu Dhabi (DGE) as Host Partner, [the conference](https://www.therecursive.com/ai-everything-abu-dhabi/) will also showcase global approaches to redesigning public services, administration and policymaking around AI.

Exhibitors and attendees are arriving from more than 60 countries, and the mix is wide: established cloud and hardware names like AWS, Microsoft, Dell, Alibaba Cloud and Nokia share space with more than 150 younger companies chasing narrower problems: voice generation, autonomous agents, drug discovery, cyber defence. Roughly 200 investors, managing close to $50 billion between them, are on-site too.

That range matters because the unicorns on site read like a map of where AI capital is actually moving this year, and it's a wider Applied AI map than the usual two or three names. Mistral AI, Europe's highest-valued AI start-up, now worth roughly $23 billion, sits down the aisle from Alibaba's Qwen, an open-weight model family with more than 700 million downloads. Voice AI has its own name in [Polish ElevenLabs](https://www.therecursive.com/elevenlabs-500m-series-d-11b-valuation/), enterprise agents in Uniphore, drug discovery in Owkin, industrial AI in IFS. 

## **The AI Government Case Study**

Most governments at AI conferences bring a speech. The Department of Government Enablement Abu Dhabi (DGE) will bring one of the largest actual concentrations of deployed use cases for AI in government.

In January 2025, DGE launched the [Abu Dhabi Government Digital Strategy](https://www.dge.gov.ae/en/news/adg-digital-strategy-update-2025?ref=therecursive.com) 2025-2027, committing AED13 billion (roughly $3.5 billion) to digitise and automate government processes and move every operation onto sovereign cloud infrastructure, with one explicit target: become the world's first fully AI-native government by 2027\. 

Chairman H.E. Ahmed Tamim Hisham Al Kuttab has described the goal as building AI into how government already works, not adding it as a layer on top. The strategy is projected to add more than AED24 billion to Abu Dhabi's GDP by next year and create over 5,000 jobs tied to the emirate's Emiratisation goals, and its flagship platform, TAMM 4.0, is built to anticipate a resident's needs rather than wait for a request to be filed. 

## **Compute, energy and chips** 

None of this runs without power, chips and cooling, and the show doesn't pretend otherwise. A co-located event on data centres and energy sits next to a dedicated quantum computing show — a reminder that a growing share of the AI story now happens below the model layer, in grid contracts and cooling systems rather than chatbots. Estonia's Skeleton Technologies, which runs Europe's largest automated ultracapacitor factory, represents the energy side of that. Spain's Multiverse Computing, a $1.7 billion quantum-AI firm, represents the compute side. Physical AI, semiconductors and cybersecurity all get dedicated space too. The part that looks most like a typical AI conference - banks, hospitals and manufacturers talking through deployment is just one part.

That European thread is worth flagging for anyone tracking the corridor between CEE and the Gulf: Besides The Recursive, Bulgaria's AI cluster sits among the show's ecosystem partners, and Estonia's national AI hub, AIRE, has its own seat on a stage covering how it has transformed Estonia's national AI and robotics hub into a high-impact innovation engine

**AI Everything Abu Dhabi** runs 6-7 October at ADNEC Centre, Abu Dhabi.[ Register here](https://visit.aieverythingabudhabi.com/register?utm%5Fsource=The-Recursive&utm%5Fmedium=MediaPartner&utm%5Fcampaign=visprom).
### Lithuania's Guideless Raises €1M to Cut Software Training Time by Up to 10x
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/lithuanias-guideless-raises-eur1m-to-cut-software-training-time-by-up-to-10x/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T08:50:59.000Z
👯 **Founder(s):** Evaldas Bieliūnas (CEO & Co-founder), Dovydas Remeika (Co-founder)

📅 **Founding year:** 2025 

🏭 **Industry:** Enterprise software / SaaS — AI-powered software training, knowledge management & workflow automation

💥 **Problem:** Companies waste huge amounts of time and money on repetitive, low-value work creating and maintaining software and workflow training materials, which employees then ignore in favour of asking colleagues or raising support tickets. Keeping documentation updated after every UI change is costly and cumbersome.

📣 **Solution:** Guideless uses AI to capture a workflow as someone performs it, then automatically generates a step-by-step guide — visual sequence, refined text instructions, highlights and zoom effects, transcript, captions and natural-sounding narration with company branding — creating editable training guides up to 10x faster than screen recordings.

👥 **Customers:** Companies and teams across industries (training, onboarding, knowledge management). Already used by Vinted, Masan Consumer Holdings (Vietnam's FMCG giant) and Nevada Hospital Association (US); 3,000+ users and paying customers across 15 markets.

🎳 **Team size:** 2-10

🌱 **Stage:** Pre-seed

💰 **Investment amount:** €1M 

🚀 **Funded by:** Led by Superhero Capital with participation from FIRSTPICK VC and angel investors *—* Thomas Plantenga (Group CEO of Vinted), Vytautas Atkočaitis (CEO of Vinted Go) and Mantas Mikuckas (Vinted co-founder)

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor's perspective:** *"Workflow and training automation is going to be a huge market over the next decade, but most of the current tech isn't forward-thinking enough to get there. We backed Guideless early because they do more than eliminate the grunt work of creating and updating training videos — they're fixing problems companies don't yet realize they have. That's why they'll lead this new wave of workplace training.",* said Audrius Milukas, Partner at Superhero Capital and lead investor. 

💡 **It will be spent on…** Product development, team growth, and planned expansion into the US, UK and European markets.

💬 **In their own words:** *"Leading commercial teams and onboarding employees across multiple countries for over a decade, including at Vinted Go, I saw firsthand how much time and money gets wasted on inefficient workflow training. Another standard documentation tool wasn't going to solve this, so we designed Guideless to convert every workflow it captures into structured operational context, eventually forming an evolving memory layer that preserves institutional knowledge as teams, tools, and processes change. AI unlocked Guideless' potential to become the default workflow intelligence layer for software-driven organizations, and now we provide training to employees, customers, partners, and AI agents based on a single source of truth.",* said Evaldas Bieliūnas, CEO and co-founder:

💪 **Their specialty…** The platform combines browser-based capture, computer-vision step detection, generative AI and multilingual text-to-speech in a single automated pipeline. Every tutorial is a series of fully editable individual steps, so a single captured workflow can be updated, duplicated, translated and localised into 40+ languages without re-recording. Because guides are captured at step level rather than as fixed recordings, the same operational context can also feed reliable, up-to-date context to AI agents — positioning Guideless as an evolving operational memory layer, not just a documentation tool.

🔑 **Business model:** SaaS

💸 **Funding so far:** €1M
### Can EU Inc. Survive Europe’s Political Divisions?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/can-eu-inc-survive-europes-political-divisions/
Last updated: 2026-08-25T09:00:05.000Z
A landmark proposal to create a single European company form is caught between its promise of radical simplicity for startups and a parliamentary push for safeguards that critics fear could dilute its very purpose.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Oakley Capital Acquires a Majority Stake in Graphwise
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/oakley-capital-acquires-a-majority-stake-in-graphwise/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T09:52:25.000Z
European private equity investor [Oakley Capital](https://www.oakleycapital.com/?ref=therecursive.com) acquired a majority stake in [Graphwise](https://graphwise.ai/use-cases/graph-rag/?cq%5Fsrc=google%5Fads&cq%5Fcmp=22242874935&cq%5Fcon=175660703752&cq%5Fterm=graph%20based%20retrieval%20augmented%20generation&cq%5Fmed=&cq%5Fplac=&cq%5Fnet=g&cq%5Fplt=gp&utm%5Fterm=graph%20based%20retrieval%20augmented%20generation&utm%5Fcampaign=Graphwise+-+Content+and+Data+AI+Ready+%5BFoundation%5D&utm%5Fsource=adwords&utm%5Fmedium=ppc&hsa%5Facc=5361285845&hsa%5Fcam=22242874935&hsa%5Fgrp=175660703752&hsa%5Fad=765229121726&hsa%5Fsrc=g&hsa%5Ftgt=kwd-2431345619723&hsa%5Fkw=graph%20based%20retrieval%20augmented%20generation&hsa%5Fmt=b&hsa%5Fnet=adwords&hsa%5Fver=3&gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=22242874935&gbraid=0AAAAA-4mb5bc0ZBPtlrKjwXxMvWvSNrUe&gclid=CjwKCAjwqJXUBhBNEiwA8BgG7hZ1YmTOU7PmyOgy6lmnMpHexiHk1qKNF7KwbpwrjFirGdq1jMhopRoCCfQQAvD%5FBwE), [a company formed in 2024](https://www.therecursive.com/a-content-management-platform-and-a-graph-database-come-together-in-the-new-company-graphwise/) through the merger of Bulgarian Ontotext and Austrian Semantic Web Company. According to the companies, the deal marks one of the biggest exits in the Bulgarian software industry, although **the financial terms have not been disclosed**.

Graphwise is an enterprise AI and data platform specializing in knowledge graphs and semantic layer technology. It provides data infrastructure for AI and serves more than 200 international blue-chip clients across the financial services, pharmaceutical, and public sectors.

Graphwise was formed in 2024 through the merger of [Ontotext and Semantic Web Company](https://www.therecursive.com/a-content-management-platform-and-a-graph-database-come-together-in-the-new-company-graphwise/). Ontotext was founded in Sofia in 2000, while Semantic Web Company was established in Vienna in 2004.

[A Content Management Platform and a Graph Database Come Together in the New Company: GraphwiseIn a nutshell Bulgarian Ontotext merges with Austria’s Semantic Web Company to form the new Graphwise, focusing on strengthening its global presence in AI![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/icon/PNG_recrop_resize_logo_only-3129d08d-0883-4ea9-a423-144f7b305fb4.png)The RecursiveTeodora Atanasova![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/thumbnail/new-social-media-template-8-dc886d31-8901-43ad-afea-b2f02952bb52.png)](https://www.therecursive.com/a-content-management-platform-and-a-graph-database-come-together-in-the-new-company-graphwise/)

Budapest-based Portfolion invested in Ontotext as part of a consortium led by Integral Capital Group, alongside Carpathian Partners. The European Investment Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development also co-invested in the company.

The investors later pursued a buy-and-build strategy, which led to the 2024 merger with Semantic Web Company.

> “This transaction is clear proof that domestic and regional private equity can achieve breakthrough successes in a globally competitive deep tech market,” said Jenő Nieder, Deputy CEO and Partner at Portfolion Capital Partners.

*“Through the international buy-and-build strategy implemented together with Integral Capital Group and Carpathian Partners, we successfully built an internationally dominant platform out of two regional pioneers, avoiding short-term AI hypes and creating genuine, commercially sustainable value.”*

Following the acquisition, Graphwise plans to accelerate its international expansion and pursue further acquisitions.
### Q2B26 Copenhagen
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/q2b26-copenhagen/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T08:41:10.000Z
📅 **Date:** September 9-10, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Copenhagen, Denmark  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Øksnehallen](https://www.google.com/maps/place/%C3%98ksnehallen/@55.6694724,12.5621014,399m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x4652537317cadaf9:0x6cf4f082e58b0f8!8m2!3d55.6694724!4d12.5621014!16s%2Fm%2F010qtc06?entry=ttu&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI2MDgxNi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D&ref=therecursive.com)

**Register with code* ****TR-20-CP** *for 20% off.*

[Register here ](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/q2b26-copenhagen-the-roadmap-to-quantum-value-tickets-1988090729891?aff=oddtdtcreator&ref=therecursive.com) 

Q2B Copenhagen is presented in partnership with a Danish Consortium comprising the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Novo Holdings, and 55 North. It's the first time the conference series, organized by QC Ware, has been held in the Nordic region, and organizers expect it to be one of the largest quantum business events ever held in continental Europe.

## The Room

600+ attendees and 80+ speakers are expected across the two days. Confirmed speakers include Matt Johnson (CEO, QC Ware), Lene Oddershede (CSO, Novo Nordisk Foundation), Peter Krogstrup (CEO, NQCP & Quantum Foundry Copenhagen), Lauri Sainiemi and Dr. Nathan Baker (Microsoft Quantum), Ellen Devereux (Fujitsu), Anders Broo (AstraZeneca), and Hiro Mori (Q-STAR), alongside diplomatic voices including the US, UK, and Korean ambassadors to Denmark. Industry sessions bring in AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Merck, and NTT Data Group, alongside quantum hardware and software players including IQM, Atom Computing, NVIDIA, Multiverse Computing, HPE, and Chicago Quantum Exchange.

## The Agenda

The [two-day program](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/q2b26-copenhagen-the-roadmap-to-quantum-value-tickets-1988090729891?aff=oddtdtcreator&ref=therecursive.com) runs across six quantum technology themes:

- QC & HPC
- Error Correction
- Quantum AI
- Communications & Security
- Sensing & Timing
- Computing

Day one opens with keynotes and the BioInnovation Institute-led startup pitch competition, followed by tracks on Computing HW & SW, Error Correction & Quantum AI, and Life Science. Day two shifts to Case Studies, Quantum & HPC, and a Government, Analyst & VC track, including a venture capital panel hosted by Needham & Company.

## What to Expect 

- Two days, full quantum ecosystem: hardware vendors, software developers, VCs, researchers, and government agencies in one place
- A startup pitch competition by BioInnovation Institute, judged by Novo Holdings, 55 North, QuNorth, and Playground
- A VC panel with 55 North, Quantonation, Firgun Ventures, and Qbeat Ventures
- An opening panel of ambassadors on international quantum cooperation, moderated by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- 600+ attendees, 80+ speakers, six technology tracks

## Why It's Different 

Most of the quantum conversation still runs through Western Europe and the US. This is the first time Q2B, the industry's standard-bearer event, has run in the Nordics, and it lands at a moment when CEE countries, Romania, Poland, and Czechia among them, are bringing real quantum hardware online for the first time. For a region still working to connect its infrastructure build-out to global capital and commercial partnerships, Copenhagen is a rare chance to be in the room where that conversation happens.
### 18 Organizations Connecting the CEE and GCC Tech Ecosystems
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/18-organizations-connecting-the-cee-and-gcc-tech-ecosystems/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T05:55:43.000Z
In late July 2026, His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan made[ a working visit to Belgrade](https://gulfnews.com/uae/government/uae-and-serbian-presidents-discuss-strengthening-comprehensive-strategic-partnership-1.500625761?ref=therecursive.com), where one of his stops was the EXPO 2027 Playground, the multimedia centre for the world exposition Serbia hosts next year. It is the same exposition around which GITEX will stage its first Southeast European edition. He had arrived from Bratislava in Slovakia, another country from the CEE region.

Underneath that layer sits a commercial relationship that has been compounding for years. Roughly[ 17,400 Central and Eastern European companies now operate in the UAE](https://www.moet.gov.ae/en/-/cee-uae-investopia-strategic-economic-forum-launched-to-advance-investment-in-ai-space-defense-and-energy?ref=therecursive.com), a figure given by H.E. Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri, the UAE's Minister of Economy and Tourism, in Dubai last November.

What has changed in the past two years is the institutional layer between the two regions. A Dubai chamber has opened its first Eastern European office. A Gulf free zone has run a roadshow in Warsaw. A UAE ministry has launched a dedicated CEE forum. A Slovak fund has expanded to Abu Dhabi. The EBRD has built a Gulf market-entry programme for founders from its regions. A Sharjah innovation park has gone looking for partners in Cluj.

> Do you know any other organizations that should be on this list? Reach out to etien@therecursive.com

---

## **Events**

### **1\. GITEX**

The largest physical meeting point between the two regions, and the only event brand building permanent capacity inside CEE.[ GITEX Global 2026](https://www.gitex.com/gitex-global-2026?ref=therecursive.com) runs 7 to 11 December, moving for the first time in 46 years from Dubai World Trade Centre to the[ Dubai Exhibition Centre at Expo City](https://www.dubaiexhibitioncentre.com/en/whats-on/gitex-global-2026?ref=therecursive.com). The 2025 edition drew[ over 200,000 attendees from 180+ countries and 6,800+ exhibitors](https://www.frenus.com/event/gitex-global-2026?ref=therecursive.com).

The CEE-facing move is Belgrade.[ GITEX Ai Serbia debuts at Belgrade Fair on 26 and 27 May 2027](https://meatechwatch.com/2025/10/15/global-tech-economy-expands-gitex-ai-serbia-to-debut-in-2027-powering-southeast-europes-digital-future/?ref=therecursive.com) as the official tech event of EXPO 2027 Belgrade, organised by DWTC and KAOUN International in strategic partnership with the [Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Serbia](https://en.pks.rs/?ref=therecursive.com). Its president, **Marko Čadež**, who is also the connective figure behind Serbia's business council in Dubai and its chamber-to-chamber structure with Dubai Chamber, has framed the timing around EXPO as a chance to put Serbian digital transformation in front of a global investor audience. Serbia's ICT sector contributes[ around 10% of national GDP, with $4.31 billion in 2024 exports and roughly 110,000 professionals](https://ourdailynewsonline.com/2025/10/16/gitex-ai-serbia-expo-2027/?ref=therecursive.com).

### **2\. Doers Summit, The Doers Company**

One of the most explicitly CEE-to-Gulf event brands, [Doers Summit](https://doerssummit.com/?ref=therecursive.com) was built by people from the corridor. **Stylianos Lambrou** and **Dušan Duffek**, one Cypriot and one Slovak who met at Cambridge,[ started it in 2018 as a 300-person gathering in Limassol](https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-ae/news-and-trends/doers-summit-debuts-in-dubai-this-week-heres-everything/500028?ref=therecursive.com). It became Reflect Festival, then Doers, and now runs across Athens, Limassol and Dubai.

The first Middle East edition landed at Dubai Silicon Oasis in November 2025 under DIEZ patronage, pulling[ more than 4,000 attendees from 115 countries](https://www.khaleejtimes.com/kt-network/dubai-silicon-oasis-concludes-doers-summit-2025-spotlighting-global-economic-trends?ref=therecursive.com). The second[ returns to DSO on 24 to 26 November 2026](https://www.middleeastevents.com/news/page/dubai-silicon-oasis-to-host-second-middle-east-edition-of-doers-summit-dubai-2026-from-2426-november/36672?ref=therecursive.com), targeting[ 5,000+ founders, investors, operators and corporate decision-makers](https://luma.com/r4oed190?ref=therecursive.com) from Europe, the GCC, Asia and the Global South, with the format deliberately weighted toward masterclasses, roundtables and private sessions rather than stage time. Underneath sits Doers United, an invitation-only network built city by city through founder dinners across Greece, Cyprus, Central Europe and the UAE.

### **3\. Investopia**

The UAE's state investment platform, and the only Gulf government initiative with a dedicated CEE track. On 20 November 2025 it convened the[ CEE-UAE Investopia Strategic Economic Forum in Dubai](https://www.moet.gov.ae/en/-/cee-uae-investopia-strategic-economic-forum-launched-to-advance-investment-in-ai-space-defense-and-energy?ref=therecursive.com), focused on AI, space, defence and energy, organised with Euro Atlantic Consulting under its chairman **Dr. Tamás Fellegi**. The stated outcome was a directive to host new editions of Investopia Global Dialogues across Central and Eastern Europe.

The seniority is the point. **H.E. Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri**, Minister of Economy and Tourism and Investopia's chairman, shared a stage with Montenegro's deputy prime minister, and state secretaries from Slovakia and Hungary sat on panels moderated by Investopia COO **David Tabet**.

The fifth flagship edition, originally set for 31 March to 2 April 2026, was[ rescheduled](https://investopia.ae/topics/abu-dhabi/?ref=therecursive.com). Abu Dhabi now hosts[ Investopia Bridge 2026 on 7 October](https://investopia.ae/events/investopia-bridge-2026/?ref=therecursive.com) under the theme "Investing in a More Resilient World." The[ 2026 Global Talks host cities are Athens, Berlin, Tashkent and Milan](https://www.moet.gov.ae/en/-/investopia-hosts-partners-event-to-announce-strategic-partners-for-2026-and-launch-its-fifth-edition-in-abu-dhabi-on-31-march?ref=therecursive.com), with the[ Berlin edition deliberately co-located with GITEX Europe](https://www.moet.gov.ae/en/-/investopia-europe-announces-next-edition-in-berlin-in-june-2026-to-advance-uae-europe-partnerships-in-the-new-economy-tourism-entrepreneurship-and-energy?ref=therecursive.com).

### **4\. Web Summit Qatar**

The Gulf's highest founder density, and increasingly where CEE delegations land, including the EBRD's Gulf market-entry cohort. The third edition ran in Doha from 1 to 4 February 2026 with[ more than 30,000 participants from 124+ countries, over 1,600 startups, 800+ investors and 400+ speakers](https://www.gco.gov.qa/en/media-centre/top-news/prime-minister-inaugurates-web-summit-qatar-2026/?ref=therecursive.com).[ 85% of the startups came from outside Qatar](https://www.gco.gov.qa/en/media-centre/top-news/web-summit-qatar-2026-draws-strong-international-startup-participation/?ref=therecursive.com). Prime Minister **Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani** used the opening to announce an additional $2 billion for Qatar's Fund of Funds, the extension of Qatar Development Bank's Start from Qatar programme, and a 10-year residency programme for entrepreneurs, founders and senior executives. **Sheikh Jassim bin Mansour bin Jabor Al Thani** chairs the permanent organising committee.

---

## **Investors and accelerators**

### **5\. EBRD**

The bank runs the Star Venture Arabian Gulf Market Entry Programme with growth strategy partner **StrategEast**, led by **Anatoly Motkin**, which exists to move companies out of EBRD regions and into GCC markets. In February 2026 the cohort,[ Aspichi, Alaqan, VanOnGo, UvU, Investbanq and SpaceLab](https://www.strategeast.org/strategeast-supports-startups-at-web-summit-qatar-2026-under-the-ebrd-arabian-gulf-market-entry-program/?ref=therecursive.com), went to Web Summit Qatar, then to a[ Riyadh Ecosystem Exposure Day on 5 February](https://www.strategeast.org/strategeast-hosts-riyadh-ecosystem-exposure-day-to-support-eurasian-startups-entering-saudi-market/?ref=therecursive.com) built with Monsha'at, Saudi Arabia's SME Authority, and Saudi venture advisory platform Parachute16, with support from the Saudi Ministry of Investment. Investor meetings, regulatory briefings, Monsha'at hub visits.

Capital moves the other way too. **Amine Chabane**, Principal at EBRD Venture Capital, led the[ $17.4 million Series B of RemotePass](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/remotepass-raises-17-4m-series-b-led-by-ebrd-venture-capital-as-global-employment-and-fintech-converge-302777193.html?ref=therecursive.com) in May 2026, the UAE-founded global employment and payroll platform built by **Kamal Reggad** and **Karim Nadi**, already profitable, with 35,000+ workers across 150+ countries and $800 million in cross-border payroll processed. 500 Global joined the round.

Institutionally, the UAE became the[ EBRD's 72nd shareholder in September 2021](https://www.ebrd.com/who-we-are/structure-and-management/shareholders/uae.html?ref=therecursive.com) as a contributing member.

### **6\. Zero One Hundred (0100 VC)**

One of the very few CEE venture firms with a physical Gulf presence. The[ fund](https://www.0100.vc/?ref=therecursive.com) invests at early stage across CEE and the Middle East, with Fund II going all-in on Emerging Europe:[ 21 countries, a 200 million population, from the Baltics through Central Europe to the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean](https://sk.linkedin.com/company/zeroonehundred?ref=therecursive.com).

Managing Partner **Dušan Duffek** is based in Abu Dhabi, where he describes his work as connecting the dots between Europe and the Middle East. In late 2024 he opened the fund's Abu Dhabi office and[ signed an MoU with Investopia](https://therecursive.com/zero-one-hundred-signs-agreement-to-connect-cee-startups-with-uae-investors/?ref=therecursive.com) to connect CEE startups with UAE investors, with offices across Slovakia, Czechia, Cyprus and the UAE. The fund went on to co-organise a satellite Investopia edition in Hungary, and appears among the[ fifteen institutional partnerships Investopia signed](https://www.moet.gov.ae/en/-/%C2%A0investopia-announces-the-4th-edition-of-its-annual-summit-in-abu-dhabi-signs-15-new-partnerships-with-leading-national-international-institutions?ref=therecursive.com) alongside Emirates Development Bank, Standard Chartered and DHL. Partner **Michal Csonga** covers the fund's CEE deal flow.

Duffek is also co-founder of The Doers Company and a co-founder and board member of 0100 Conferences: three organizations on this list, one person, one Abu Dhabi desk.

### **7\. 500 Global**

The only venture platform with funded programmes on both ends of the corridor. In the Gulf, **Amjad Ahmad** and **Amal Dokhan**, Managing Partners at 500 Global, lead 500 MENA L.P., backed by Jada Fund of Funds and Saudi Venture Capital with support from Sanabil, deploying up to $10 million per investment across Saudi Arabia and the UAE, alongside the[ Sanabil 500 MENA Seed Accelerator](https://500.co/mena?ref=therecursive.com) and a regional headquarters in Riyadh. 

On the CEE side, partner **Pedro Santos Vieira** runs the[ 500 Eurasia](https://500.co/eurasia?ref=therecursive.com) accelerator out of Georgia with Georgia's Innovation and Technology Agency (GITA) and Bank of Georgia, investing at pre-seed and seed across the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Baltics, with funding up to $100,000 and applications open to founders across 29 European countries.

### **8\. VentureFriends**

Proof that the flow runs in both directions inside a single firm. Founded in Athens in 2016 by **Apostolos Apostolakis** and **George Dimopoulos**, VentureFriends now manages[ over €300 million across four funds](https://superscout.co/investor/venturefriends?ref=therecursive.com), writing[ first cheques of €500K to €3M at pre-seed and seed](https://www.venturefriends.vc/?ref=therecursive.com) with a mandate that has always covered Europe and MENA.

The clearest corridor result is Huspy, the Dubai proptech founded by **Jad Antoun** and **Khalid Ashmawy** that VentureFriends backed early. Huspy[ handles roughly a quarter of Dubai's residential mortgages](https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/uae-proptech-huspy-raises-59m-to-scale-in-europe/?ref=therecursive.com), has raised over $100 million including a[ $59 million Series B in 2025](https://www.menabytes.com/huspy-series-b/?ref=therecursive.com), and has expanded into Spain and Saudi Arabia. The Dubai-born grocery marketplace InstaShop sits in the same portfolio.

Capital has also flowed the other way. During the Greek prime minister's 2022 visit to the UAE,[ Mubadala and the Hellenic Development Bank of Investments extended their €400 million co-investment partnership to cover VC and PE, and made VentureFriends Fund III their first deal under it](https://emeastartups.com/hdbi-strategic-partnership-with-mubadala-investments/10505?ref=therecursive.com).

### **9\. Endeavor**

The only organization with formal chapters on both sides of the corridor running a single shared selection standard, which means a founder in Sofia and a founder in Riyadh sit inside the same system, vetted the same way.

On the Gulf side, **Lateefa Alwaalan** has led[ Endeavor Saudi Arabia](https://www.linkedin.com/company/endeavorsaudi?ref=therecursive.com) as Managing Director since the chapter launched in 2012, and Endeavor UAE runs Entrepreneur Experience with Thais Malauzat. Careem's co-founders, including **Mudassir Sheikha**,[ came through the UAE office in 2018](https://endeavor.org/stories/behind-endeavor-expansion/?ref=therecursive.com). Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon complete the regional map.

On the CEE and Southeast Europe side, **Panagiotis Karampinis** has run[ Endeavor Greece](https://www.endeavor.org.gr/team/panagiotis-karampinis?ref=therecursive.com) since 2018 and became Endeavor's Regional Managing Director for Europe in 2026; **Momchil Vassilev** leads[ Endeavor Bulgaria](https://www.trendingtopics.eu/the-first-5-years-of-endeavor-bulgaria-impact-results-and-next-steps/?ref=therecursive.com), which has extended into Serbia, North Macedonia and Kosovo; **Mihnea Crăciun** set up[ Endeavor Romania](https://therecursive.com/the-building-of-endeavor-romania-a-passport-for-the-global-innovation-ecosystem-with-mihnea-craciun/?ref=therecursive.com) in 2021, coming to the role from the EBRD; **Bartosz Lipnicki** heads[ Endeavor Poland](https://poland.endeavor.org/about-us/?ref=therecursive.com) from Warsaw with **Wiktor Schmidt** as board chair; and **Sviatoslav Sviatnenko** is founding Managing Director of[ Endeavor Ukraine](https://kyivindependent.com/ukrainian-edtech-company-headway-joins-global-entrepreneur-network-endeavor/?ref=therecursive.com), launched in 2024 with financial backing from the EBRD and the Ukraine-Moldova American Enterprise Fund.

The chapters already work the corridor directly. Endeavor Greece[ activated initiatives in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh in 2025](https://yearinreview2025.endeavor.org.gr/?ref=therecursive.com) alongside European and US cities. And **Endeavor Catalyst**, the rules-based co-investment fund with[ over $500 million under management](https://scroll.media/en/2025/07/22/endeavor-catalyst/?ref=therecursive.com), puts capital behind the same founders: it backed **Fahmi Al-Shawwa's** Immensa in a[ $20M Series B earmarked partly for Saudi expansion](https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/endeavor-uae/?ref=therecursive.com), and sits on the cap table of UAE-founded RemotePass alongside EBRD and 500 Global.

---

## **Gulf-based corridor builders**

### **10\. Dubai International Chamber**

In October 2025, the chamber[ opened its first representative office in Eastern Europe, in Warsaw](https://www.dubaichambers.com/en/w/launches-its-first-eastern-europe-representative-office-in-poland-to-support-growth-of-mutual-trade-and-investments?ref=therecursive.com), inaugurated with the UAE Ambassador to Poland **Mohamed Ahmed Salem Farea Alharbi** and **Michał Jaros**, Secretary of State at Poland's Ministry of Economic Development and Technology.

The office runs both directions: supporting Polish companies expanding through Dubai, and giving Dubai-based companies market intelligence, opportunity identification and vetted local partners for entering Poland. Dubai's non-oil trade with Poland reached AED 7.2 billion in 2024, up 5% year on year, with 453 Polish companies registered as active Dubai Chamber of Commerce members by the end of H1 2025.

**H.E. Mohammad Ali Rashed Lootah**, President and CEO of Dubai Chambers, has positioned Warsaw as part of Dubai Global, the initiative launched by Crown Prince **Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum** targeting[ 50 international representative offices by 2030](https://gccbusinesswatch.com/news/dubai-international-chamber-expands-global-reach-with-first-office-in-eastern-europe-opened-in-warsaw/?ref=therecursive.com) across 30 priority markets. **Salem Al Shamsi** runs global markets and **Noora AlSuwaidi** covers Europe and the Americas. On the inbound side, **Maha Al Gargawi**, VP of Business Advocacy, oversees the[ network of 60+ national business councils](https://www.dubaichambers.com/en/w/dubai-chamber-of-commerce-launches-bulgarian-business-council-to-strengthen-economic-ties-and-boost-mutual-investment?ref=therecursive.com) that includes the Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, Czech and Polish structures below.

### **11\. DMCC**

The Dubai free zone has gone to CEE directly. Under Executive Chairman and CEO **Ahmed bin Sulayem**,[ DMCC](https://dmcc.ae/?ref=therecursive.com) ran its first[ Made for Trade Live roadshow in Warsaw](https://dmcc.ae/latest-news/dmcc-hosts-made-trade-live-roadshow-poland-promote-trade-and-investment-opportunities-dubai?ref=therecursive.com), addressing over 139 Polish business representatives in partnership with the Polish Investment and Trade Agency following an MoU between the two. DMCC is also the physical home of CzechTrade's Dubai office.

### **12\. SPARK, Sharjah Research, Technology and Innovation Park**

The clearest statement of intent from the Gulf side. **H.E. Hussain Al Mahmoudi**, appointed CEO by royal decree of the Ruler of Sharjah, runs an ecosystem of[ roughly 13,000 companies across a 20-million-square-foot site](https://www.therecursive.com/hussain-al-mahmoudi-why-sharjah-is-building-a-tech-corridor-to-cluj-napoca/) in Sharjah's University City, and has been travelling to Central and Eastern Europe to build what he calls a technology corridor.

He appeared at Techsylvania in Cluj-Napoca in 2026 making the case for partnership over competition between the two regions. It is his second attempt at Romania: fifteen years ago, as Director General of the Sharjah Chamber of Commerce, he set up a Romanian regional trade centre that did not last. This time the vehicle is technology rather than trade, and the target is Cluj's R&D base as it matures out of IT outsourcing. 

---

## **Councils and trade agencies**

### **13\. Bulgarian Business Council in Dubai (BGBC)**

[Launched in December 2025](https://www.dubaichambers.com/en/w/dubai-chamber-of-commerce-launches-bulgarian-business-council-to-strengthen-economic-ties-and-boost-mutual-investment?ref=therecursive.com) under Dubai Chamber of Commerce and chaired by entrepreneur **Milo Borissov**, BGBC is[ the only business council officially backed by Dubai Chambers to represent Bulgarian interests](https://bgbc.ae/?ref=therecursive.com). At launch there were 243 active Bulgarian member companies of Dubai Chamber, 54 of which joined in the first nine months of 2025\. Dubai-Bulgaria non-oil trade hit AED 777 million in 2024, and[ bilateral trade reached roughly €281 million in 2025, up about 17%](https://www.capital.bg/en/economy/2026/06/25/4928821%5Fat%5Fleast%5F243%5Fbulgarian%5Fcompanies%5Fare%5Fdoing%5Fbusiness%5Fin/?ref=therecursive.com).

In July 2026 Borissov opened a[ Bulgarian-Emirati Business Forum in Sofia](https://www.voiceofemirates.com/en/business/business-reports/2026/07/23/sofia-bulgarian-uae-business-forum-enhances-prospects-for-economic-and-investment-partnership-between-the-two-countries/?ref=therecursive.com), organised with the UAE Embassy, convening Deputy Minister of Economy **Mihaela Karadimova** and Bulgaria's Consul General in Dubai, **Stanislav Dimitrov,** around technology, energy, infrastructure, logistics, healthcare and real estate. Minister of Innovation and Growth **Ivan Vasilev** has since been in talks with the UAE Ambassador on a potential strategic agreement covering digital technologies, AI and robotics.

### **14\. Serbian Business Council (UAE)**

[Established in July 2023](https://www.dubaichamber.com/en/media-center/news/dubai-chamber-of-commerce-marks-significant-step-in-strengthening-bilateral-trade-and-investments-with-launch-of-serbian-business-council/?ref=therecursive.com) with Dubai Chamber of Commerce, with **Dr. Marko Selaković** elected chairman at the first AGM, attended by 17 Serbian company representatives. 207 Serbian companies were registered with the chamber at launch, and Dubai-Serbia non-oil trade reached $73.4 million in 2022, up 42% year on year.

Serbia runs the most stacked playbook in the region, and **Marko Čadež** of the Serbian Chamber of Commerce is the thread running through it: the council, a[ joint chamber structure with Dubai](https://serbia-business.eu/the-serbian-chamber-of-commerce-pks-and-the-dubai-chamber-of-commerce-will-form-the-first-joint-business-council/?ref=therecursive.com), a Dubai economic mission to Belgrade, a bilateral trade agreement, and GITEX Ai Serbia in 2027.

### **15\. Romanian Business Connect UAE**

The operator-driven version, a community rather than a chamber structure, and the[ self-described most trusted Romanian business community in the Emirates](https://romanianbusinessconnect.com/?ref=therecursive.com).

Its co-founder **Milentina Marcus** is Co-Founder and CEO of Dubai-based **BridgeX ME**, and works as a market entry and expansion strategist for the UAE and wider Middle East, positioning her practice around helping European companies decide if, when and how to enter the UAE. She serves as Ambassador of the Romanian Business Community in the UAE and brings[ more than twenty years in leadership and business growth](https://rouaesummit.com/speakers/milentina-marcus/?ref=therecursive.com) to the role, with a stated focus on connecting Romanian entrepreneurs to the Emirati business ecosystem.

The community's flagship output is the[ Romania-UAE Business Summit](https://rouaesummit.com/?ref=therecursive.com) in Dubai, built for owners and decision-makers exploring expansion and combining summit content, matchmaking and sector-specific company visits. For a founder who is not yet ready for a chamber-level credential, this is the layer that answers the practical questions first.

### **16\. CzechTrade United Arab Emirates**

The longest continuously operating CEE trade agency presence in the Gulf. **Stefani Neymon Myslovich** directs[ the Dubai office](https://www.czechtradeoffices.com/ae?ref=therecursive.com), established in 2007 and operating from Jumeirah Lakes Towers inside DMCC as part of CzechTrade's 65-country network. The Gulf mandate covers Czech export strengths in glass, porcelain, construction and building materials alongside ICT, AI, IoT, healthcare and electrical engineering, with Czech pavilions at exhibitions including The Big 5 and INDEX, and[ services running from company formation support to accounting, legal and digital marketing referrals](https://czechtrade.gov.cz/zahranicni-kancelare/spojene-arabske-emiraty?ref=therecursive.com). Czech companies have used it as a launchpad into both the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

It is paired with the[ Czech Business Council in Dubai](https://www.cbcdubai.cz/about?ref=therecursive.com), founded in May 2014 under the Dubai Chamber umbrella with backing from the Czech Embassy and CzechTrade.

### **17\. PAIH Dubai and the Polish Business Council**

Poland's state investment and trade agency runs a[ Foreign Trade Office in Dubai](https://www.paih.gov.pl/rynki-zagraniczne/zea/?ref=therecursive.com) and located inside the Dubai International Financial Centre. Maciej Białko also initiated and served until recently as[ founding chairman of the Polish Business Council in Dubai](https://paihforumbiznesu.gov.pl/eng/?ref=therecursive.com), having previously worked at the Polish Embassy in Abu Dhabi and run the Upper Silesian Fund's Abu Dhabi office, Poland's first regional economic representation in the Middle East.

The office has convened Polish ICT and new-technology companies with[ **Dubai Internet City**](https://www.paih.gov.pl/20201125/webinarium%5Fdubai%5Finternet%5Fcity?ref=therecursive.com), the TECOM district that anchors much of Dubai's software and platform economy, to walk founders through what expansion into the emirate actually requires. PAIH also co-hosted DMCC's Warsaw roadshow.

Poland is now the only CEE market with institutional presence running in both directions: PAIH and the Polish Business Council in Dubai, Dubai International Chamber in Warsaw.

---

## **Relationship Infrastructure**

### **18\. The Recursive**

Full disclosure: this is us.

The Recursive is building the relationship infrastructure between European and Gulf tech ecosystems. Founded in Central and Eastern Europe, its tech media, market intelligence and events platform has reached more than 3.8 million people worldwide over the past six years, connecting thousands of founders, VCs, enterprises, policymakers and HNWIs shaping tech across Europe, DACH, the UK and the US.

The company is now expanding its on-the-ground coverage into the UAE and Saudi Arabia, building a two-way bridge with Europe so that ecosystem players in both regions can find, understand and connect with each other more effectively. **Etien Yovchev**, Co-founder and Managing Partner, soon to be based between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, is leading the expansion.

The Recursive operates across three lines, Media, Studio and Events, with the goal of building a stronger bridge between the ecosystems and supporting tech founders, investors and ecosystem builders expanding between CEE, GCC and DACH with market intelligence, new market entry and relationship building.
### Lithuanian Litilit Secures €8M Loan to Scale Femtosecond Laser Technology
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/lithuanian-litilit-secures-eur8m-loan-to-scale-femtosecond-laser-technology/
Last updated: 2026-08-18T14:15:15.000Z
**👯 Founder(s):** Nikolajus Gavrilinas (co-founder and CEO) and Kęstutis Regelskis (co-founder and CSO) 

**📅 Founding year:** 2015

🏭 **Industry:** Deep tech / photonics 

**💥 Problem:** Femtosecond lasers can deliver extremely precise material processing, but traditional systems have often been complex, expensive, difficult to automate and dependent on highly skilled specialists. This has limited their adoption in mass-production environments.

**📣 Solution:** Litilit develops and manufactures femtosecond lasers based on a patented architecture designed to make them more reliable, affordable and suitable for automated serial production. Its modular design and higher level of automation are intended to simplify assembly, testing and quality control.

**👥 Customers:** Industrial manufacturers and companies operating in semiconductors, electronics, displays and battery technologies, as well as medical applications such as ophthalmology. The company's lasers are also used for precision material processing, medical-device manufacturing and other high-tech applications.

**🎳 Team size:** 11–50 employees 

🌱 **Stage:** Series A / growth stage

**💰 Investment amount:** €8M

**🚀 Funded by:** ILTE

**👁️‍🗨️ Investor’s perspective:** *“Investments in scientific research and experimental development are necessary for Lithuanian companies to be able to create high value-added products and remain competitive in global markets,”* said Giedrė Gečiauskienė, a member of the ILTE board.

**💡 It will be spent on…** Research and development activities related to Litilit's femtosecond laser technology. 

💬 **In their own words:** *“Until now, femtosecond lasers have been complex, expensive, and difficult to integrate. We aim to change this – to make them a reliable and affordable tool suitable for mass production,”* said Nikolajus Gavrilinas, CEO of Litilit.

**💪 Their specialty…** Litilit's technology is based on an internationally patented method for generating ultrashort pulses, discovered by co-founder Kęstutis Regelskis with researchers at FTMC. Unlike many traditional femtosecond laser architectures, the company uses less complex components, a modular design and a higher degree of automation, making the systems more suitable for serial manufacturing.

🔑 **Business model:** B2B

**💸 Funding so far:** €13.3M and €2.5M EU R&D subsidy
### CEE Is Building Quantum Hardware. Q2B Copenhagen Is Where It Gets a Seat at the Table
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-is-building-quantum-hardware-q2b-copenhagen-is-where-it-gets-a-seat-at-the-table-2/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T09:05:20.000Z
Central and Eastern Europe doesn't usually get mentioned in the same breath as the quantum computing race. Germany, France, and the usual western hubs dominate that conversation. But **the hardware tells a different story.** 

In October, **IBM** **will** [**physically install**](https://www.romania-insider.com/iasi-based-freeya-mind-campus-bring-ibm-quantum-computer-romania?ref=therecursive.com) **a Quantum System Two at the FreeYa Mind Campus in Iași, Romania**, the first private quantum computer in CEE, backed by an investment north of €100 million. 

Poland has had one running since June 2025: [PIAST-Q](https://www.eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/inauguration-piast-q-leap-european-quantum-computing-2025-06-23%5Fen?ref=therecursive.com), a 20-qubit trapped-ion machine built by Innsbruck-based AQT and hosted at the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center, the first of eight quantum systems EuroHPC is rolling out across the continent. Czechia followed in September 2025 with its [own EuroHPC machine, VLQ, in Ostrava](https://www.eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/vlq-europes-next-leap-towards-quantum-powered-research-and-innovation-2025-09-23%5Fen?ref=therecursive.com).

**That's three CEE countries with sovereign or EU-backed quantum infrastructure** in production within an 18-month window. What the region hasn't had is a natural venue to connect that hardware build-out to the capital, corporates, and commercial partnerships that turn infrastructure into an industry.

[**Q2B Copenhagen**](https://q2b.qcware.com/conference/2026-copenhagen?ref=therecursive.com)**, running September 9-10, may be that venue**. It's the first time the conference series, organized by QC Ware and the benchmark event for quantum practitioners globally, has been held in the Nordics. We sat down with QC Ware CEO [Matt Johnson](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-johnson-71a1761/?ref=therecursive.com) ahead of the event to talk about where the quantum industry actually stands, where the real commercial value is likely to land first, and why he thinks this edition could be the largest quantum business event ever held in continental Europe.

[Q2B26 CopenhagenThe industry’s benchmark quantum computing conference lands in the Nordics for the first time, bringing the full quantum ecosystem, hardware vendors, capital, corporates, and government, into one room for two days.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/icon/PNG_recrop_resize_logo_only-76d9dc0c-de48-409f-97cb-7f90131d53f1.png)The RecursiveLenka Vranová![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/thumbnail/money-europe-75e22ce6-12eb-4cae-9804-3d58a0f8bf91.png)](https://www.therecursive.com/q2b26-copenhagen/)

## The gap between the hype and what's real

Johnson doesn't dress up where the industry currently stands. "*No enterprise is running production problems on quantum hardware today*," he told us. 

**The core issue is economic, not just technical**: for a quantum computer to make sense for a business, it has to solve a problem faster or more efficiently than the company could on classical hardware, including an NVIDIA GPU. 

> "There are over 90 quantum hardware companies racing to be first to provide enterprises with something useful, and none of them have actually produced a machine with production value yet."

What's happening instead is **research-stage experimentation**: enterprises running small versions of production problems to build familiarity and figure out how quantum fits into their workflows.

The upside, in Johnson's telling, is that **the gap is closing fast**, and the driver is competitive pressure among hardware vendors racing for capital and credibility. "*If they say they're going to have 100 logical qubits by a certain point, a competitor says, well, we might get to 200*," he said. 

> "We've seen more advances in the past 12 to 18 months than in the previous five years."

## Where the commercial value actually lands first

Ask Johnson where real value shows up first, and **cryptography** comes up, but he's quick to frame it as a sideshow. 

**Shor's algorithm** has been proven to crack encryption efficiently once machines scale, which matters to the security and crypto-asset communities, but it isn't where enterprise value concentrates. That's in chemistry and materials: **drug** **discovery, new catalysts, anything with a molecule or a crystal structure at its core**. "*Those industries will be the first to see true value*," Johnson said. **Finance** follows, particularly quantitative work like derivatives pricing and portfolio hedging, and further out, **supply chain and manufacturing optimization.**

He points to a broad, unglamorous body of work rather than a single flagship case study: IBM, hardware vendors, national labs, universities, and startups all modeling physical systems, building the incremental evidence that gets the industry closer to commercial relevance. It's slower and less headline-friendly than a breakthrough announcement, but it's the actual substance behind the acceleration he's describing.

## Why CEE's hardware build-out matters for the conversation

Johnson's read on Europe's institutional advantage is relevant well beyond Denmark, the host country and, alongside its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Novo Holdings, and 55 North, co-host and Platinum Sponsor of this year's conference. 

"*European states tend to be more concentrated, not as spread out, and that lends itself to industry and government collaboration more readily*," he said, pointing to Denmark's coordinated program across government, industry, and academia as an exemplar. He was clear this isn't unique to one country: **most EU member states are pursuing a version of the same thing**, with governments directly backing national champions at the hardware level. Romania's Iași investment, Poland's PIAST-Q, and Czechia's VLQ all fit that pattern.

> That's the opening for CEE. **The region has the infrastructure and the government-backed sovereignty push** Johnson describes as a European strength. 

What it's missing is **talent at scale**. A 2024 workforce analysis by the European Physical Society put the [number of people in the EU with advanced quantum computing expertise](https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/europe-quantum-computing-market?ref=therecursive.com) at under 3,500, against projected **industry demand of more than 20,000 specialists by 2030**. 

Closing that gap will take exactly the kind of **connective tissue Q2B is designed to provide**: a room with hardware vendors, software developers, venture capital, academic researchers, and government agencies together, rather than dispersed across separate national conversations.

## What's actually on the agenda

The conference opens with a panel of ambassadors on international cooperation in quantum, moderated by **Louise Lund Henneberg**, Acting Director of the Department for Techplomacy at the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

From there, it runs **through keynotes, business seminars, and technical workshops** covering optimization, chemistry simulation, pharmaceutical and materials discovery, error correction, and machine learning, with speakers including Microsoft Quantum's **Lauri Sainiemi** and **Dr. Nathan Baker**, **NQCP** and Quantum Foundry Copenhagen CEO **Peter Krogstrup**, and Novo Nordisk Foundation CSO **Lene Oddershede**.

Day two includes a **venture capital panel** hosted by Needham & Company's Steven Camp with investors including **55 North, Deep33, Quantonation, Firgun Ventures, and Qbeat Ventures**, alongside a startup pitch competition organized by BioInnovation Institute and industry sessions from **AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Merck, and NTT Data Group**, among others. None of the listed VC panelists are CEE-dedicated funds, so the region's pitch here is less about a direct funding line and more about visibility: a chance for CEE-based teams to get in front of global quantum capital that isn't otherwise looking east.

For anyone attending for the first time and still deciding whether quantum deserves their attention yet, **Johnson's advice is to treat it as a fast, dense way to meet the entire ecosystem at once**, rather than to look for a single killer use case. "*The whole purpose is to help amplify application discovery*," he said. 

> "*You get the hardware vendors and their supply chain, the software developers, the VC community, the academic researchers, and the government agencies all in one place. You'd otherwise need months to meet that many relevant people*."

## What comes next

Johnson expects the next 24 months to bring utility-scale quantum computers online, and **describes the current moment as a hundred world-class sprinters lined up at the start of a race that's already begun.** 

His stated ambition for this edition, sponsorship and participation considered, is for it to be the largest quantum industry event held anywhere in continental Europe. Whether or not it clears that bar, it's the first time this specific conversation, hardware vendors, capital, corporates, and government, is happening in a room CEE companies and researchers can walk into without having to fly to Silicon Valley or Munich first.

For a region that now has real infrastructure to point to, that's the opening worth showing up for.

[**Q2B Copenhagen*](https://q2b.qcware.com/conference/2026-copenhagen?ref=therecursive.com) *runs September 9-10, 2026, in Copenhagen, Denmark.*

**Register with code* ****TR-20-CP** *for 20% off.*

[Get tickets ](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/q2b26-copenhagen-the-roadmap-to-quantum-value-tickets-1988090729891?aff=oddtdtcreator&ref=therecursive.com)
### The ScaleupFest 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-scaleupfest-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-28T15:26:13.000Z
****The 5th edition brings 250 CEE and SEE scaleup founders, C-level operators and investors to Budapest for two days of working sessions.**

📅 **Date:** September 16-17, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Budapest, Hungary  
🏢 ****Venue:** Multiple venues across Budapest, announced to participants

[Check the agenda ](https://thescaleupfest.com/agenda?ref=therecursive.com) 

The format is built for depth rather than volume. Sessions run 60 to 90 minutes instead of the usual 20-minute panels, and the two days mix roundtables, masterclasses, and topic-specific meetups with curated city experiences across multiple downtown Budapest venues. 

The event exists because the regional conversation has changed. For years, the story was young tech scenes, the first wave of angel investors, engineering talent, and heavy outsourcing for the West. Central and Eastern Europe now has companies that have outgrown the "startup" label. They have product-market fit, a team that works, and revenue on the books. The harder question is how to scale: crossing borders, building enterprise-grade sales machines, attracting later-stage international capital. That conversation has to go past fundraising and into the mess of growing an organisation.

## Tracks for 2026

The programme is organised around three dedicated tracks, plus a new one added for this edition.

- **Scaling and go-to-market**, from winning enterprise customers to building a sales engine that outlives the founder
- **Transactions, funding and exits**, including later-stage capital, M&A and the fine print of European tax law
- **Founders, team and organisation** at scale, centred on the shift from a founder-led company to a system-driven one
- **Defence tech**, a new track for 2026 covering what is opening up for CEE companies in a fast-expanding sector

A theme that keeps coming back is the shift from a founder-led organisation to a system-driven one, the point where a lot of promising companies stall. As one planned speaker said ahead of the event, when the founder is the entire sales system, it works until it suddenly doesn't. The agenda is built around those growing pains. The 2026 festival will also add a new track on defence tech, and what's opening up for CEE companies in a fast-expanding sector.

For a region with plenty of ambition, The ScaleupFest is a working forum for the difficult conversations that turn promising startups into companies that last. It's where CEE's next generation of leaders come to work out how to scale.

## How the organisers see it 

> The 5th edition of The ScaleupFest combines serious conversations about scaling with networking and a real taste of Budapest, great food, rooftop drinks, curated city experiences and a ruin bar or two. At its heart are CEE and SEE scaleup founders and leaders sharing what they've achieved, what they're struggling with and what comes next as they scale beyond the region. We go beyond scratching the surface: no 20-minute panels or inspiration talks, but 60 to 90 minute sessions built around concrete stories, practical insights and real interaction, things you can actually take back and use in your company.

said [Lénárd Horgos](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lenardhorgos/?ref=therecursive.com), the founding father of the event, on what the two days are built to do.

## 2025 edition throwback

The 2025 edition brought approximately 350 participants from 10 countries, almost one-third of them investors and 60% startup and scaleup founders.

One of the liveliest panels was on the AI boom. CEE isn't going to out-build Silicon Valley on foundational models. Its advantage, as Enis Hulli of e2vc and Balogh Petya of STRT put it, is a dense concentration of world-class engineering talent. Investors want defensible AI applications in niche markets that solve tangible problems, and they're tired of AI wrappers. 

On fintech, Noemi Szabo of Elevator Ventures made the case that regulation cuts both ways. Fragmented local compliance blocks cross-border scaling, while frameworks like PSD2 open doors. 

Deep tech got a message about patience and validation. Karol Szubstarski of OTB Ventures and Istvan Petak of Genomate Health said the founders who succeed fall in love with the problem, not the technology. R&D cycles are long, so patient capital is essential, and credibility comes from strategic partnerships with universities and industry players on the long road from lab to market.
### Bulgarian DiscreteStack Secures Seed Funding for European AI Infrastructure
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-discretestack-secures-seed-funding-for-european-ai-infrastructure/
Last updated: 2026-08-17T16:23:41.000Z
Bulgarian AI infrastructure startup **DiscreteStack has raised €800K in seed funding** to expand its technology across regulated industries and increase its access to GPU computing capacity.

The round was led by **CleverPine Ventures**, with participation from strategic angel investors **Milen Manev of Next Solutions** and **Stoil Vasilev of Paypercut**, alongside several other investors.

DiscreteStack was founded eight months ago by Hristo Todorov, a software engineer and entrepreneur. The company is developing infrastructure that allows businesses to **run open-source AI models on their own servers**. The company says its patent-pending engineering optimizations enable even large AI models to operate on a single standalone server.

The infrastructure can also be completely disconnected from the internet when required, allowing organizations to keep sensitive data within their own systems. This makes the technology particularly relevant for industries such as **financial services, insurance and the public sector**, where data security, regulatory compliance and infrastructure control are increasingly important.

The fresh capital will be used to enter these regulated sectors and secure additional GPU computing capacity for further technology development.

## From first customers to international partnerships

Despite being less than a year old, DiscreteStack says it has already secured its first enterprise customers in Bulgaria and international markets.

The company has also received the **Seal of Excellence from the European Innovation Council Accelerator** and joined Canada-based **AI Partnership Corporation**, a network bringing together more than 190 companies working in artificial intelligence.

In June, DiscreteStack was also accepted into the **NVIDIA Inception Program**, which supports technology companies developing AI-based products.

*“European AI does not mean an American product hosted on a server in Frankfurt. It means organizations controlling the infrastructure on which their artificial intelligence runs, owning their own data, and setting their own rules,”* said **Hristo Todorov, founder and CEO of** [**DiscreteStack**](https://discretestack.com/?ref=therecursive.com).

> “We believe AI will become critical infrastructure for businesses, and companies should be able to own it rather than simply rent it.”

## Betting on European AI sovereignty

There is a growing focus on European technological sovereignty, as companies and governments pay increasing attention to where data is processed and who controls the underlying infrastructure.The European cloud market remains heavily dependent on US hyperscalers. According to figures cited by DiscreteStack, around **70% of Europe’s cloud infrastructure market is controlled by US technology companies**, with many widely used AI services relying on the same infrastructure.

For DiscreteStack, this creates an opportunity for an alternative model in which companies own and operate the infrastructure behind their AI systems. The startup argues that as AI becomes embedded deeper into business operations, the question of **who controls the infrastructure on which AI runs** could become as important as which model organizations choose to use.
### Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-everything-abu-dhabi/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T08:22:49.000Z
AI Everything Abu Dhabi returns this October, uniting ****thousands of global leaders, startups, policymakers, investors, and visionaries**.

📅 **Date:** October 6-7  
📍 **Location**: Abu Dhabi, UAE  
🏢 ****Venue:** ADNEC

[Register here ](https://www.aieverythingabudhabi.com/home?ref=therecursive.com) 

The 2026 edition of conference is built around Abu Dhabi's goal of becoming the world's first AI-native government, with public services redesigned around AI from the ground up. The [Department of Government Enablement](https://www.linkedin.com/company/department-of-government-enablement/?ref=therecursive.com) (DGE) is deploying those systems now, and it will have a significant presence at the conference, incl. H.E. Ahmed Tamim Hisham Al Kuttab, chairman; H.E. Wesam Lootah, director general, GovDigital; H.E. Dr Mohamed Al Askar, director general, TAMM; H.E. Ruba Yousef Al Hassan, director general, strategic affairs and future foresight; H.E. Dr Yasir Al Naqbi, director general, GovAcademy; H.E. Najyb Al Maskari, executive director; and Faisal Al Hawi, director, AI Factory.

## Conference tracks

**AI Summit: New Intelligence.** Sovereign AI and compute partnerships, global AI governance, intelligence as sovereign infrastructure, quantum-powered AI, and AI for drug discovery. Speakers include Gautier Cloix, CEO of French agentic AI company H Company, and Prof Dr Virginia Dignum, professor of responsible AI at Umeå University.

**Intelligent Infrastructure and New Energy.** Sovereign compute, neoclouds and hyperscalers, energy and sustainable scale, new digital borders, and embodied and physical AI. Gauri Singh, deputy director general of IRENA, speaks on this track.

**AI Government Excellence Forum.** Building the AI-native state, AI in education and workforce, and agentic intelligence. Speakers include Mario Nobile, director general of Italy's digital agency AGID, Ramanan Ramanathan of the India AI Mission, and Yonghua Lin, vice president and chief engineer at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.

**AI 360.** Enterprise deployment across finance, healthcare, energy, retail and manufacturing, with sessions on banking, AI agents for customer experience, and industrial operations. Speakers include Mohamed Jamal Eddine, group CDIO at AD Ports Group, Alexander Haywood, CEO of MetisJean, and Umesh Sachdev, co-founder of Uniphore.

Session times are not published on the public site. The full agenda sits on the organiser's [delegate portal](https://dwtcem.powerappsportals.com/?conferenceid=cea9cd1f-40e8-ef11-be20-6045bddec12d&ref=therecursive.com).

## The European and CEE presence

- **Katre Eljas**, CEO of AI and Robotics Estonia (AIRE), the national hub that reports over 64 million euros in added value across more than 300 partner engagements
- **Taavi Madiberk**, CEO of Skeleton Technologies, Estonia, co-founder of three deep tech companies with a combined valuation above one billion euros
- **Dima Gazda**, the Ukrainian founder and CEO of Esper Bionics, the AI prosthetics company named to the TIME100 Health List
- **Dr Grzegorz Ombach**, senior vice president and head of disruptive research, technology and innovation at Airbus
- **Enrique Lizaso Olmos**, founder and CEO of Multiverse Computing, Spain
- **Prof Dr Virginia Dignum**, professor of responsible AI at Umeå University, member of the EU High Level Expert Group on AI
- **Thomas Clozel**, co-founder and CEO of Owkin, which is building clinical AI scientists in Abu Dhabi
- **Mario Nobile**, director general of AGID, Italy's digital agency
- **Axel Badalian**, principal at Alpha Intelligence Capital, France.
### Bulgarian Founder Vince Gaydarzhiev Raises $10M for AI Vehicle Inspection Startup
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-founder-vince-gaydarzhiev-raises-10m-for-ai-vehicle-inspection-startup/
Last updated: 2026-08-17T11:15:48.000Z
Vince Gaydarzhiev, the Bulgarian founder behind biometric security company [Alcatraz AI](https://www.alcatraz.ai/?ref=therecursive.com), has raised $10 million (€8.62 million) for his second venture, [Self Inspection](https://www.selfinspection.com/?ref=therecursive.com). The round was led by **Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners**, the family office of Sheryl Sandberg, with strategic investments from **U.S. AutoForce** and **Westlake Financial**. **BrightCap Ventures**, a Bulgarian fund, also participated in the round, making it the only European fund among the investors.

The investment comes just months after [Gaydarzhiev’s first company, Alcatraz AI](https://www.therecursive.com/future-of-biometric-security-alcatraz-ai/), raised a **$50 million Series B**, co-led by **BlackPeak Capital, Cogito Capital and Taiwania Capital**. The round included a [$35 million investment](https://www.therecursive.com/blackpeak-capital-alcatraz-series-b-investment/) from the three lead investors and an additional $15 million commitment, bringing Alcatraz AI’s total funding to more than $100 million.

Now, with Self Inspection, Gaydarzhiev is turning his attention from biometric security to the automotive industry. The San Diego-based startup uses AI and smartphone cameras to automate vehicle inspections, allowing users to capture a vehicle’s condition without specialized hardware.

## Building an AI-powered system of record for vehicle condition

Founded in 2021, Self Inspection combines computer vision, mobile-first data capture and expert validation to assess vehicle condition. Its platform can detect and classify damage, generate standardized condition reports, and produce repair cost estimates.

Self Inspection aims to build what it calls a “System of Record for Vehicle Condition” — a trusted digital record that can follow a vehicle throughout its lifecycle. Its platform captures, verifies and analyzes vehicle condition data through a smartphone-based inspection process, generating condition reports and repair cost estimates. 

*“It is not enough for an AI model to simply recognize damage. The product needs to be accurate, easy to use, and integrated into the workflows of banks, leasing companies, rental car companies, and dealerships. The results need to be reliable enough to support real financial decisions,”* said Gaydarzhiev.

The company has now completed more than **1 million vehicle inspections**, helping customers save more than **$80 million in costs and 300,000 operational hours**, according to Self Inspection.

One of its significant customers is **Stellantis Financial Services**, which uses the platform for corporate vehicle management and end-of-lease inspections. The financial services arm of Stellantis works across the automotive group’s brands, including Peugeot, Fiat, Jeep and Opel. 

> “The potential of this partnership is for millions of inspections per year.”

## Why the investor mix matters

Alongside Sheryl Sandberg’s Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, the round brings together strategic players with deep ties to the automotive and financial sectors, including **U.S. AutoForce** and **Westlake Financial**. It also includes **DVx Ventures**, founded by former Tesla president Jon McNeill, alongside early-stage investors Costanoa Ventures, Rebellion Ventures and BrightCap Ventures.

Beyond providing capital, these investors bring industry expertise and access to automotive and financial networks that could help Self Inspection expand its enterprise customer base.

## Looking Ahead to European Expansion 

Self Inspection plans to use the new funding to develop new products, expand its enterprise customer base, and enter European markets. The company already serves customers in several markets and sees Europe as a key part of its next stage of growth.

> “We have already proven that the technology works at scale. The next step is to reach more corporate clients and accelerate our growth in the U.S. and Europe.”

For Europe, the opportunity is similar to that in the U.S., [Gaydarzhiev](https://www.therecursive.com/the-vast-potential-of-ai-in-the-access-control-and-security-industry/) says, with vehicle inspections still often being slow, costly and subjective. Self Inspection is betting that smartphone-based AI can make the process faster, more standardized and easier to scale.
### Belgrade-Born Founder’s Astute Raises Over €1M Pre-Seed to Reshape B2B Media
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/belgrade-born-founders-astute-raises-over-eur1-m-pre-seed-to-reshape-b2b-media/
Last updated: 2026-08-17T08:46:39.000Z
**👯 Founder(s):** Vida Stanić, Founder & CEO and Abhishek Manikandan, Founder & CTO

**📅 Founding year:** 2025

🏭 **Industry:** B2B marketing / creator economy

**💥 Problem**: B2B companies struggle to identify, access, and manage partnerships with relevant newsletter, podcast, and social media creators. The process is fragmented, manual, and time-consuming.

**📣 Solution:** Astute uses two AI agents to automate creator partnerships for B2B companies. One manages partnership administration for creators, while the other monitors creator content, identifies relevant conversations, develops creator strategies, secures partnerships and tracks results.

**👥 Customers**: B2B companies and independent newsletter, podcast, and social media creators

**🎳Team size:** 2–10 employees

🌱 **Stage:** Pre-seed

**💰 Investment amount:** €1.03M ($1.2M)

**🚀 Funded by:** Flyer One Ventures, Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, and strategic angel investors.

**👁️‍🗨️ Investor’s perspective:** *“There is no better team to be building this company,”* said Vital Laptenok, general partner at Flyer One Ventures. *“Vida has been the marketer who needed this and could not buy it. Abhishek has been the creator on the other end of the table. But beyond the founder market fit, as a team they have a winning combination of ambition, resilience and talent that we love backing at F1V.”*

**💡 It will be spent on…** The company is launching its new platform and building infrastructure to help B2B companies grow their brands and audiences through independent media channels.

💬 **In their own words:** *“For years, B2B marketing relied on ads, PR and SEO. But audiences have moved to new media channels - newsletters, podcasts, LinkedIn, X. In direct-to-consumer space, that shift turned influencer marketing into one of the biggest line items in the budget. B2B is next”*, said Vida Stanić, Founder and CEO of Astute. 

**💪 Their specialty…** Astute combines two AI agents to automate both sides of creator partnerships. Its company-side agent monitors more than one million creator posts per minute, identifies mentions of a company and its competitors, recommends creators and partnerships, and measures impressions, conversions, brand score and visibility in AI search engines.

**🔑 Business model:** B2B new media platform

**💸 Funding so far:** €1.03M ($1.2M)
### Dr. Andreas Liebl: Back Europe's AI frontrunners and create a pull effect for everyone else
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/dr-andreas-liebl-back-europes-ai-frontrunners-and-create-a-pull-effect-for-everyone-else/
Last updated: 2026-08-18T05:39:23.000Z
[appliedAI](https://www.appliedai.de/en/company/?ref=therecursive.com) started in 2017 as a department inside UnternehmerTUM, the Munich innovation and entrepreneurship centre. [Dr. Andreas Liebl](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-andreas-liebl/?ref=therecursive.com) had taken the concept to the EMEA leadership at Nvidia, to Google, to a string of other companies, and the answer kept coming back the same way. We need this, let's do it. 

Nine years later, appliedAI acts as two organisations that work towards the same goal with a different focus. appliedAI Initiative GmbH supports companies, from large corporations to large mid-sized enterprises, through their AI transformation, from strategy to AI solutions their teams can run and develop independently. The non-profit appliedAI Institute for Europe offers orientation in the age of AI, from learning about the AI Act, and makes knowledge more widely available to business, public administration, policymakers and society. 

Liebl is unusually blunt about the arithmetic. Europe does not have the compute. It does not have the electricity. It does not have the model providers. On his own team's projections, none of that changes inside three years. What interests him is the question that follows from accepting all of it. So what do we do now?

His answer starts with pace. *Building world champions, he says, means not focusing on the slowest ones in order to keep everyone together*. It means selecting those with the highest potential and giving them the support to get there. With 27 member states and 27 sets of strengths, he sees that as something Europe can work with rather than a problem to solve.

We spoke to him about the adoption gap, the four trajectories his team tracks, and why he thinks the hunger now sits with the younger economies rather than the established ones.

## The Recursive: AI sovereignty is one of the biggest topics right now. What does it actually mean for Europe, and in 2026, how close or how far are we from it?

**Dr. Andreas Liebl:** To understand this, we developed something we call the Observatory. It maps growth trajectories of AI across a range of dimensions, and we think it gives us the best probability estimate of what is going to happen.

For all of those estimates, the picture for the next three years is the same. We do not have the compute capacity in Europe to keep up. We do not have the electricity to keep up. We do not have the model providers to keep up. Everything happening inside that three-year window happens under those conditions. There is no competition coming from Europe. Whatever we do is a factor of a hundred to a thousand smaller than what is in China and in the US. Even if you are ten times more productive, that still leaves a factor of at least ten.

So that is the framing condition, and the real question becomes how we can be sovereign inside it. Even if we decided tomorrow to build the next OpenAI and gave them a hundred billion, it would take one to two years before they were growing and had access to the compute. Possibly longer. So what do we do now?

We split the trajectories into four disciplines. In at least two of them we can still do something, although it will be hard.

The first is model capabilities, meaning the intelligence of individual models. The scaling laws still hold, more is better, and we cannot compete there. Maybe we talk about world models, what Yann LeCun is doing, what others are doing, and maybe we get to different architectures that are more efficient. But even then I would assume the US leads, and once something is there, it is globally there. It grows outside Europe, because there are simply more resources available to drive it. On the capability side, we have to take whatever is there. Luckily, there are enough open-source models that keep up.

The second is agentic orchestration, and this is the interesting one. It is the ability to build complex multi-agent systems that can do much more complex work. Think of the difference between a single human genius who develops a car, and an organisational structure where average humans work together to develop a car. The organisation manages it because intelligence lies in the structure: in the processes, in the roles, in how tasks get distributed. That is what we now need to do with AI systems. Not the single most intelligent system, but how to separate and split tasks so that organisations can produce very complex outcomes. That is the application side. We can be good at that. We can build these orchestrators, there is a lot of innovation happening, and we should want to be in that game.

The third is recursive self-improvement, and I doubt we get there, to be fair. There are a few players. Sakana in Japan, one or two in the US, and the large providers like Anthropic. It will obviously be a massive driver, but potentially one that sits outside Europe.

The fourth is robotics, where the Chinese companies are the major driver of innovation. There are a few in Europe, and maybe we compete on at least some components, and maybe on the infrastructure side.

So when we look at the major drivers of AI capability that are coming, the places Europe can play a role are the agentic orchestration layer and the coordination and infrastructure layers, with a little on robotics. The other dimensions we have to accept. We take what is there. And strategically, we should focus hard on model access, so that we continue to have access to these models until we genuinely have competing ones. Right now the general intelligence gap between the large providers here and there is roughly one year. Or we focus on niches, where the models we have in Europe can compete. But those are very specific niches.

## **If Europe cannot compete on model capability, can it compete on industrial adoption instead?** 

Closing the adoption gap as far as possible is a legitimate European strategy. Even if you cannot provide the state-of-the-art technology, you can build the support system that keeps general industry as close as possible to what is technologically possible.

The gap itself is the thing to understand. The technology advancement curve is still exponential. The adoption curve of general industry using that technology looks more linear. There is not only a gap between the two. The gap widens, because the technology accelerates while adoption does not. That is the status of global adoption right now.

The layers where we can genuinely invest are concrete. Transform businesses, rethink processes, train people to use it. We have very well-trained people here.

But this is not a nice, cosy field where we can work one step after the other. Look at the speed at which China adopts this technology. There is hard competition here too. You really need to get things going if you want to be as fast as China. And I am not even talking about being faster.

There is the classic technology advancement curve, which is still exponential. Then there is the adoption curve of general industry using that technology, which looks more linear. There is not only a gap between the two. The gap widens, because the technology accelerates while adoption does not.

That is the status of global adoption right now, and the question is how we minimise this gap. Can we, in Europe, on a broad scale, enable organisations to sit as close as possible to the technology that is available? Transform businesses, rethink processes, train people to use it. We have very well-trained people here. There are a few layers where we can genuinely invest.

Closing the adoption gap as far as possible is a legitimate European strategy. Even if you cannot provide the state-of-the-art technology, you can build the support system that keeps general industry as close as possible to what is technologically possible. That is something we could do as Europeans, and something we need to work towards.

To be clear, though: if you look at the speed at which China adopts this technology, this is not a nice, cosy field where we can work one step after the other. There is hard competition here too. You really need to get things going if you want to be as fast as China. And I am not even talking about being faster.

## **China is one country. Europe is 27, all with different priorities. How does Europe align around a common vision and then execute on it at that kind of speed?**

I like sports analogies, and they fit quite well here. In sport, as in AI, we need to talk about fitness levels, or maturity levels. If you take my general fitness and my ability to run a marathon without ever having trained for one, it would take half a year or a year before I could do it. If I were generally very fit, it would be much faster, because I have trained for other things.

What we need to do is train the general economy here to be more mature in applying AI. If that maturity is there, then when new technologies arrive we adapt quickly. If we are not fit, it takes several steps just to get to the level where we can begin to adopt.

So the question is how you train for the Olympics. You can do it the Chinese way, with a state-driven approach. Or you say, well, we have 27 different countries, we have different strengths in different fields, and we can manage this because we combine those strengths intelligently. That is what we have to learn in AI. What the strengths of the different regions are, how to combine them, where we build our own technologies and providers and support systems.

And building world champions also means not focusing on the slowest ones in order to keep everyone together. It means selecting those with the highest potential and giving them the support to get there. You can do that with 27 countries. It does not have to be one.

## **On a practical level, what actually grows AI skills and adoption in emerging markets like those in Central and Eastern Europe?** 

A general observation first, and this does not apply to every company. If you look at Chinese companies, they are hungry. They know this will benefit them, that it lets them compete globally. If you look at established companies here in Germany, many of them come from a leading position, and they now struggle with implementing AI because they are in the defender position and not in the attacker position.

It is what we always said coming from the entrepreneurship side: startups can only win, established companies can only lose. The incumbent has a brand, customers, employees. The founder has no brand, no customers, no product. They only work to win. It is a completely different risk profile.

You can apply that across a whole range of companies, and the useful move is to select the ones who say, okay, we can only win. In every country there will be some with that mindset. Find them, and then think about how to build these types of winners, because they are much more risk-loving. They try things out. They want to capture markets. Played intelligently, that is a real strength, and in those countries there are many younger companies that want to win, enter markets, drive things forward. The question is how to catalyse that energy and accelerate them onto the winning track.

In Germany, we are having discussions with the workers' unions where there is deep scepticism towards all types of change and transitions. So it is genuinely hard and slow to drive the transition that is coming, because they come from a very high standard and they fear losing it. When you are at the top, every change is potentially a change for the worse rather than a change for the better.

## **Everyone in the startup sector is already using AI heavily. But the broader economy, manufacturing, and the traditional industries are still very far behind.**

Exactly, and that is why I said it is a general observation rather than something true of all companies. Now you have that situation. There are the traditional companies, and there are the younger ones.

What works for the established ones, to close that adoption gap, is matching with the startup environment. That can mean buying startups. It can mean hiring the talent. If a startup failed, get those people in. But generally the approach has to be: with this technology, we can actually win.

I do not know the national strategies of the various countries in detail, but that has to be the target picture at country level. We use this technology to attack, to win, and let's build that. China makes a very good narrative on it. Singapore has a good one too. I have not seen too many convincing narratives here in Europe.

Again, in the sports analogy: it is a national training programme. We want to train the winners of the next Olympics. We do not just build gyms and see what happens. That is not the winning approach. The winning approach is to take the companies where they are, identify their strengths, define the target, and systematically support them over a period of time in getting from here to there. It is a different thing entirely from building a bit of infrastructure and hoping. That very strategic, systematic build-up of company competence is, from my perspective, where Europe could actually win this race.

## **From your work with companies, what has genuinely changed for an organisation deploying AI in Europe?**

We started in 2017, and in 2017 it was all about machine learning. The nice thing about machine learning was the clear value case behind everything. If I have a computer vision startup for quality control, I can talk to the people in the plants, discuss defect rates with them, and say that my solution reduces that rate, that it gives you this much value, so let's train the models. Training was the hard part, but then you deploy and you create value. A lot of products and startups were built around concrete value cases and concrete applications, and we were very good at that in Europe. Very particular solutions on the machine learning side.

Then GenAI came, and we had a hard time answering it, because it was a general technology for everyone. You call an API from Microsoft or Google or OpenAI, and everyone is using the same thing.

For companies, what was left was mostly organisational. How do you educate thousands of people to prompt correctly? How do you stop them from putting confidential data into private accounts? How do you deal with hallucinations? A lot of training, and very simple on the application side.

For startups, it was much harder, because there was nothing to differentiate on. You could do consulting services, or some technology on top, but the major platform providers made you outdated very quickly.

Now, with agents, we are entering a different era again, because we are rethinking processes. Process knowledge comes from domain knowledge. We are rethinking value creation in a way that cannot be done by the tech providers, because it is domain-specific and context-specific. So there is a reason again for startups, for the ecosystem, for the experts to build applications that differentiate from the general tech providers. Suddenly there is something we can build again, after three or four years in which it was very hard to do anything that properly differentiated a company.

What is new with agentic AI is the speed. Every two or three months a new technology comes out and we have to deal with it. So the question becomes: who is fastest at applying and translating new technology into my field? That translation capability is what we need to train people for, and we have to accept that things are constantly changing. That is where I see potential strengths, differentiators, and an ecosystem being created.

## **What is next for the appliedAI Institute over the next one to two years?**

There are a couple of things where we can play a role. The first is using exactly what we just discussed. With agents, we could build marketing workflows that every startup with a marketing function could use. Or the same for software engineering, for HR, for finance. With fewer headcount, you can create a much larger company, which means you do not need as much growth capital. And growth capital is Europe's major disadvantage compared to the US, where there is plenty of money and you can grow extremely fast. What agents let us do is grow without that money. That could really change the overall game.

So appliedAI is now concentrating on building that agentic pipeline, starting with software development. If we provide that to the ecosystem, together with the training, because people need to get used to that way of working, we change something for Europe. That is one place where I think we can make a massive difference.

The second is that I honestly believe what is coming with AI will dramatically affect our societies. The education system, the tax system, the labour market, digital trust, cybersecurity. My feeling is that Europe is not prepared for what is about to come. We need to educate people. We need to tell politicians and others how society works with the capabilities this technology will have in the next one or two years. If we decide, if we shape, it can go in a very positive direction. If we do not, it can go in a very negative one. So let's do everything we can to move it in the most positive direction possible.

## **Anything you would want to leave our readers with regarding the European AI strategy?**

In Europe, let's try to build on each other's strengths. The first time I talked with people at the European Commission, I asked them: What is the strategic plan for Europe? Do we want everyone to follow, in which case we are at the speed of the slowest? Or do we select those who really want to lead and drive things forward, and create that pull effect, in which case we are at the speed of the fastest?

With this speed of technology development, we should be focused on how to be fast. Help everyone else to follow, but do not wait for the ones who do not want to move, and do not settle at that very slow speed.

Every country, every ecosystem, every economy needs to decide the speed it wants to be at. And I really want to emphasise that everyone can define this for themselves. The field where they want to lead, where they want to be fast. Then focus the strengths there and be fast, because it is about the speed of application. That is the most relevant thing that counts. We talk about sovereignty across all these different topics, but the first question is: how can we be as fast as possible?
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Space, AI and New CEE Investments
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-4/
Last updated: 2026-08-14T13:53:53.000Z
## CEE Deals 

**Polish AI startup Pathway** has raised[ additional funding at a $500 million valuation](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/pathway-lands-30-m?ref=therecursive.com), bringing its total seed financing to $30 million, as it develops a new generation of AI models designed to move beyond the traditional Transformer architecture. Founded by Zuzanna Stamirowska and Adrian Kosowski, Pathway is focused on improving reasoning, memory and adaptation while reducing the computing costs of AI. The company will use the new funding to expand its compute capacity, including NVIDIA GB300 systems, and further develop its BDH models. Adam Kurzrok, former Group Product Manager for Gemini at Google DeepMind, has also joined the company as Chief Product Officer.

**Serbian AI video startup Preview** has raised [$12 million to date, with Sequoia Capital leading its seed round](https://sequoiacap.com/article/partnering-with-preview-lights-inference-action?ref=therecursive.com). Founded by former Veed and Vizcom team members Stefan Fejes and Veljko Tornjanski, Preview is building an AI-native workspace for professional video production, combining generation, ideation, review and production tracking in a single platform. More than 100 studios are already using the product, including agencies working with Fortune 500 brands and Hollywood filmmakers. Sequoia sees the company as a potential core infrastructure layer for the next generation of AI-powered video production, as increasingly more creative work shifts from traditional production pipelines to AI-generated content.

**Hungarian fleet-management startup Volteum** has raised [€3.25 million in a round led by Polish VC firm Movens Capital](https://mycompanypolska.pl/artykul/polskie-fundusze-inwestuja-w-branze-automotive-volteum-pozyskalo-ponad-3-mln-euro/21054?ref=therecursive.com), with participation from Montis VC, WakeUp Capital and Aidiom, alongside existing investors including Techstars and Day One Capital. The company develops software for mixed fleets of electric and combustion-engine vehicles, bringing charging, mileage, maintenance and other operational data into a single platform. The new funding will support expansion across the UK, Benelux, DACH and CEE, including Poland, where the company plans to launch operations.

**Bulgarian AI startup Builderly** has raised a [pre-seed investment from Vitosha Ventures after reaching €300,000 in organic revenue](https://dbr.bg/sbarkahme-i-prenapisahme-vsichko-balgarski-ai-startap-stigna-300-hil-evro-prihod-i-privleche-investitor~24320.html?ref=therecursive.com). Founded in 2022, the company initially relied on a bank loan and customer revenue rather than external funding. After its first product failed, the team rebuilt the business and developed an AI-powered platform designed to act as a “technical co-founder” for service businesses. Builderly had already reached break-even before securing the investment, which was one of the factors that attracted Vitosha Ventures. The new funding will support the further development of its AI technology and the acquisition of new customers.

Eldridge, the holding company led by Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly, has[ acquired a significant ownership stake](https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/08/chelsea-co-owner-todd-boehlys-eldridge-acquires-ownership-stake-in-slovak-ai-firm-sudolabs/?ref=therecursive.com) in **Slovak AI firm Sudolabs**, in a strategic partnership aimed at accelerating its US expansion. Sudolabs develops custom agentic AI systems and consulting services for enterprise clients, and will continue operating from its Slovakian headquarters. Financial terms were not disclosed. With around 70% of its client base already in the US, the deal is set to strengthen Sudolabs' American footprint, while giving Eldridge access to its AI expertise across its broader portfolio.

## Across the world

**Databricks** has raised [$5 billion in a new funding round at a $190 billion valuation](https://www.forbes.ro/databricks-evaluata-la-190-de-miliarde-de-dolari-dupa-o-finantare-de-5-miliarde-de-dolari-516475?ref=therecursive.com), up from around $134 billion just six months ago. The round was led by existing investors including Coatue, Blackstone, MGX and funds advised by T. Rowe Price, with Sixth Street Growth joining as a new investor. The company plans to use the capital to develop AI-focused products including its Lakebase database, Genie AI assistant and Unity AI Gateway. Databricks says its annualized revenue has surpassed $7 billion, with revenue growing more than 80% year-on-year in Q2, further strengthening its position among the world's most valuable private technology companies.

**Accel** has raised [$800 million for its ninth early-stage fund focused on Europe and Israel](https://sifted.eu/articles/accel-fundraise-800m-ninth-early-stage-europe-fund?ref=therecursive.com), in addition to another $2.7 billion for three other funds, just two years after its previous $650 million fund. The US-based VC has been actively backing European startups in areas including AI and defence. Accel has backed nearly 250 European companies over more than 25 years, including UiPath, Monzo and Doctolib, and has recently invested in companies such as Lovable, n8n, Cambridge Aerospace and Legora.

## New space and defense R&D hub in Bulgaria

**EnduroSat is expanding into a new scale of space infrastructure.** The Bulgarian space company is developing a major space and defense R&D center in Dobroslavtsi, where it will assemble, test and qualify a new generation of satellites weighing between 1 and 3 metric tons, with deployed solar panels reaching roughly the length of a Boeing 737\. The company says customers are already lined up for these platforms. In comments shared with The Recursive, EnduroSat said the new center will also serve as the foundation for a broader development and education campus, while its larger satellite platforms will allow the company to address a growing market for more capable spacecraft.

The project will also include a development and education campus for students in the Space Engineering and Technology Master’s program. Its first phase is planned over three years and will focus on restoring the former airport’s runway capabilities, creating a large green zone and developing the first section of the industrial park. The site will initially serve as EnduroSat’s base before gradually opening to other companies working across space and defense — an ambition the company describes as a European counterpart to Starbase, without the rocket launches.
### Two Banks, One AI Model, Two Entirely Different Regulatory Headaches?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/two-banks-one-ai-model-two-entirely-different-regulatory-headaches/
Last updated: 2026-08-14T10:34:46.000Z
Artificial intelligence is becoming embedded in the operating models of European banks, supporting activities ranging from fraud detection and anti-money laundering to credit underwriting, customer service, and operational resilience. While AI moves into critical banking functions, the European Union has established a comprehensive legal framework through the AI Act, DORA, GDPR and existing prudential legislation. ***The next challenge is supervision.***

While regulation defines legal obligations, supervision determines whether those obligations are implemented consistently, safely and effectively across the financial system. As AI systems become more dynamic, interconnected and increasingly dependent on external providers, **supervisory authorities face a growing challenge**: *assessing how multiple regulatory frameworks interact in practice during a single supervisory review.*

## The supervisory integration challenge

As banks embed AI into core business processes, supervisory authorities increasingly face **questions that extend beyond the scope of any single regulation**.

Consider a bank deploying a generative AI model to strengthen anti-money laundering monitoring. The institution may comply with the **AI Act**'s requirements for high-risk systems, satisfy **DORA**'s operational resilience obligations and continue to meet prudential expectations regarding governance and model risk. 

Yet an important supervisory question remains unanswered: how should supervisors assess the interaction between these frameworks during a single supervisory review?

> Today, **responsibility is distributed across multiple regulatory domains**. AI governance, ICT resilience, outsourcing, model risk and data governance are assessed through different supervisory lenses. Each framework is justified individually. 

Together, however, they create an increasingly complex supervisory environment in which the quality of oversight depends not only on regulatory compliance but also on supervisors' **ability to evaluate how these obligations interact in practice.**

## Why is AI different

The discussion is important because AI systems differ from many technologies traditionally assessed within prudential supervision.

Foundation models may evolve through updates **outside the direct control of financial institutions**. Third-party AI providers increasingly become critical infrastructure. Models may change more frequently than traditional statistical systems and interact dynamically with other operational processes. 

Existing supervisory approaches already address governance, model validation and operational resilience, but provide only limited public guidance on how supervisors should assess continuously evolving AI systems built upon external foundation models.

## Building on what already exists

European institutions have already addressed many of the individual risks associated with AI, but not yet the **supervisory integration challenge**. 

The European Central Bank has highlighted concentration risk, operational resilience and increasing dependence on a limited number of technology providers. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has identified AI as an emerging prudential issue, while the European Banking Authority has expanded its work on AI, innovation and model governance.

Taken together, these initiatives significantly strengthen the supervisory framework. However, they still stop short of providing supervisors with a common methodology for assessing AI across regulatory domains.

## Toward a common supervisory methodology

Rather than creating another layer of regulation, **European policymakers should focus on developing a common supervisory methodology** for AI-enabled banking activities. Such a methodology would build upon the work already underway within the EBA, the ECB and national competent authorities. Its purpose would not be to introduce additional legal obligations, but to create **greater consistency** in how supervisors evaluate governance, accountability, model validation, human oversight, third-party dependencies and continuously evolving AI systems across the *Single Supervisory Mechanism*.

For example, **consider a hypothetical supervisory review** involving two significant banks within the Banking Union that use the same foundation model to support anti-money-laundering monitoring. Both institutions comply with the AI Act, [DORA](https://www.therecursive.com/dora-is-no-longer-a-deadline-what-are-the-penalties/) and existing prudential requirements. However, one supervisory team places greater emphasis on third-party concentration risk, while another focuses primarily on model validation and human oversight. Both assessments may be justified, yet they could produce different supervisory expectations for comparable AI deployments. 

A common supervisory methodology would not alter the underlying legal obligations or remove supervisory judgment. Rather, it would provide **a shared assessment framework**, ensuring that AI systems are evaluated through a consistent supervisory lens across the Single Supervisory Mechanism.

Such a methodology could include a practical assessment matrix covering areas such as **governance, model validation, third-party dependencies, operational resilience and human oversight**, enabling supervisors to evaluate AI systems in a structured and comparable manner.

> The objective is therefore not uniform supervisory outcomes, but a uniform supervisory methodology. Consistency should exist in how supervisors assess AI risks, not necessarily in the conclusions they ultimately reach.

This distinction is more important than it may first appear. The success of the AI Act will ultimately depend not only on the quality of its legal provisions but also on the **consistency with which supervisory authorities interpret and apply them in practice**. 

Two institutions using comparable AI systems should be able to expect broadly comparable supervisory expectations irrespective of where they are supervised within the Banking Union. Achieving that level of supervisory convergence may become one of [Europe's most important competitive advantages](https://www.therecursive.com/you-cant-regulate-your-way-to-ai-sovereignty/) in financial regulation.

## Supervisory capability is just as important as the regulation

Internationally, regulatory approaches are already diverging. While the European Union has adopted a comprehensive legislative framework, the **United Kingdom has largely relied on existing regulators to apply cross-sector principles**. Europe should not attempt to compete by producing additional regulation. Its comparative advantage should instead lie in demonstrating that complex AI systems can be supervised consistently across a highly integrated financial market.

The next phase of European AI policy should therefore focus less on developing additional rules and more on **building a common supervisory methodology for AI-enabled banking activities**. 

Strengthening supervisory capability and convergence across the Single Supervisory Mechanism may prove just as important as the legal framework itself. Europe has already demonstrated global leadership in AI regulation. Its next opportunity is to demonstrate that complex AI systems can also be supervised consistently across an integrated financial market.
### Know Your Investor Before You Pitch
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/know-your-investor-before-you-pitch/
Last updated: 2026-08-13T09:21:27.000Z
Founders spend weeks perfecting their pitch deck, yet often only minutes researching the people reading it. That imbalance can cost more than a weak presentation.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### $5.3 Billion in Tech Exports: Türkiye’s Leap from Transit Route to Tech Powerhouse
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/5-3-billion-in-tech-exports-turkiyes-leap-from-transit-route-to-tech-powerhouse/
Last updated: 2026-08-14T09:06:12.000Z
For centuries, sitting at the intersection of Europe, Asia, and Africa meant **Türkiye’s role was almost pre-written**: *serve as the physical bridge between continents*. But in an era defined by shifting supply chains, rapid automation, and green logistics, simply letting goods pass through is no longer enough. 

Major transit routes, like the Middle Corridor, the Zangezur Corridor, and the Development Road, still anchor the country's physical connections. But behind the scenes, infrastructure investments and economic reforms are pushing a deeper transformation.

Since 2003, **Türkiye has doubled its share of global trade, but the focus now goes beyond volume.** 

**The long-term goal is pragmatic**: build resilient, sustainable supply chains and increase the country's share of global economic value through higher-value production, stronger physical and digital connections, and technology-driven growth. 

## A growing regional tech scene 

Against this broader economic backdrop, Türkiye’s startup ecosystem has grown into one of the most prolific in the region. Over the past decade, it’s startup ecosystem has shifted from a local market into an internationally connected tech hub. As global investors look beyond traditional tech centers, Türkiye offered a **solid talent pool, a growing venture capital market, and established tech hubs**.

A few key metrics highlighted this shift:

- Information and communications technology exports have passed **$5.3 billion**.
- Local and international investors have put roughly **$2.6 billion** into Turkish startups in recent years.
- Startup Genome ranks Istanbul among the top global emerging ecosystems, with a market value estimated at **$13 billion**.

This growth does not happen in a vacuum. Neighboring economies across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East are accelerating their own digital transformations. Through platforms like *Take Off Istanbul*, regional innovation summits, and joint cross-border programs, founders, investors, and policymakers are increasingly **collaborating across borders** rather than competing in isolation. 

## Ripple effect of the success stories

Over the last ten years, Türkiye has also produced several globally competitive scaleups and unicorns: including names like **Trendyol, Getir, Peak Games, Dream Games, Insider, Hepsiburada, and Loom Games**. These companies proved that founders could build scalable, world-class software and digital platforms out of Türkiye.

The true value of these scaleups, however, lies in their long-term **ripple effect**. 

Early employees, operators, and founders from these success stories are now becoming angel investors, mentors, and repeat founders. This recycling of capital, technical knowledge, and operational experience builds a stronger, more resilient foundation capable of supporting successive generations of new startups.

## Building regional partnerships

Institutional infrastructure provides the backbone for this ecosystem. Türkiye is home to more than **100 technology development zones supporting thousands of tech companies** working on R&D, product development, and commercialization.

Major tech hubs — including **Bilişim Vadisi,** the **FinTech Zone** at the Istanbul Financial Center**, Bilkent Cyberpark, İTÜ ARI Teknokent, ODTÜ Teknokent, and Yıldız Technopark** — actively partner with regional counterparts across Eurasia. Strategic ties connect Turkish hubs with organizations like **Astana Hub** in Kazakhstan, **IT Park** in Uzbekistan, and the **High Technology Park** of the Kyrgyz Republic.

Physical footprint matters, too. Bilişim Vadisi’s campus in Baku, Azerbaijan, alongside regional events such as *TEKNOFEST Azerbaijan* and *Take Off Baku*, creates practical channels for cross-border collaboration.

**At the center of this setup is Istanbul**. With direct flight access, deep financial markets, and strong digital infrastructure, the city provides a practical, single location for companies looking to manage operations across Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa simultaneously.

## Policy focus: Quality over volume 

Public policy is also adapting to these changing dynamics. **Recent regulatory and economic efforts focus heavily on high-tech sectors**, digital infrastructure, and advanced industries under broader economic reform efforts.

The focus is deliberately shifting away from simply chasing sheer investment volume. Instead, the priority is [attracting strategic investment](https://www.invest.gov.tr/en/pages/home-page.aspx?ref=therecursive.com) into high-impact fields: Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Manufacturing, Green Technologies and Clean Energy, Digital Infrastructure and Financial Technology.

To support this shift, regional financial structures are becoming more formal. The Istanbul-based [**Turkic Investment Fund**](https://www.turkicfund.org/?ref=therecursive.com) was established specifically to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), fund joint ventures, and drive economic integration across Turkic states.

## From national ecosystems to regional innovation networks

The broader shift in modern innovation is simple: competitive advantage is no longer about isolated domestic markets. It is about **how effectively an ecosystem connects with others**. Talent mobility, capital flow, and shared infrastructure are the hallmarks of modern tech regions. 

We see this reflected in capital markets, where venture capital firms such as **Idacapital** and **Boğaziçi Ventures** actively deploy capital across Türkiye, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, helping build an integrated investment landscape. 

As the ecosystem matures, Türkiye’s role is increasingly defined by its ability to connect talent, capital, technology and entrepreneurship across neighbouring markets and wider regional networks. In this context, Türkiye is well positioned to be more than just *a bridge for transfer of goods* but a catalyst for more **integrated cross-border innovation**.
### CEE AI Summit 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-ai-summit-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-12T11:41:40.000Z
****The CEE AI Summit** is the premier regional initiative shaping the future of digital policy, innovation, and cooperation. Through high-level dialogue, data-driven insights, and real-world case studies, the Summit bridges the gap between policy and practice.  
  
📅 **Date:** September 3rd, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Prague, Czechia  
🏢 ****Venue:** Martinic Palace

[Check the agenda ](https://ceeaisummit.eu/agenda/?ref=therecursive.com) 

As the global race for technological leadership accelerates, Central and Eastern Europe has a unique opportunity to move beyond being a consumer of innovation and become a key driver of Europe’s digital economy. The **CEE AI Summit** is designed to support exactly this transition – by **connecting policy, business, and technology leaders** who are shaping the region’s future.

The event will bring together a diverse group of stakeholders, including **government representatives, EU policymakers, industry leaders, investors, and innovators**. Through a combination of high-level discussions, data-driven insights, and real-world case studies, participants will explore how to turn ambition into tangible economic impact.  
  
What to expect:   
💠 High-level dialogues with CEE Digital Ministers and EU representatives   
💠 Data-driven insights from industry leaders.   
💠 Real-world case studies on AI impact.   
💠 Unrivaled networking with the architects of our digital economy.

CEE AI Summit is more than just a conference, it is a **platform for dialogue and action**, aimed at unlocking the region’s full potential and positioning CEE as a competitive force in the global AI landscape. 

At the heart of this vision are three priorities: building the infrastructure and talent base for an AI-powered economy, creating agile regulation that unlocks innovation and growth, and deepening cross-border collaboration to turn regional strengths into global competitive advantages.

Participants will also have the opportunity to engage directly with decision-makers, explore partnership opportunities, and gain early insights into emerging trends shaping the future of AI.

**Join the region’s leading voices to explore how CEE can become Europe’s next hub for AI innovation.**

*Together with the* [*Czech National AI Platform (CNAIP)*](https://www.linkedin.com/company/cnaip/?ref=therecursive.com)*, the event is organized by* [*AI Chamber*](https://aichamber.eu/?ref=therecursive.com)*, a leading platform supporting the responsible development of artificial intelligence in Central and Eastern Europe.*

****This is an invitation-only event.**  
  
If you have not received an invitation but wish to attend, please request  
an invitation by completing the form below.  
  
Please note that capacity is ****limited**. While we appreciate all interest, seats  
will be allocated based on business relevance and program alignment.

[Learn more ](https://89e17924.sibforms.com/serve/MUIFACHNyf31o%5FBIioerqke8dPd4aAZ90Y2aoAy5GzndIcbTJVMIpIkrFn-5izVJpupLo7sQtrIpF5kyFcj763Sa%5FhCN67cTwJ-9mwqD-awvZlE4DXapJIwCClzrhxfSkrAHB6sLI%5FXSYwOPJ7QfNXWSQyZq0IuBwjQDb39G2ZDCXYuSBIEJouwWXh5FBYFM6kaiNMuoakcSVb3zeQ==?ref=therecursive.com)
### Your Startup Can Fail Without Making You a Failed Founder
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/your-startup-can-fail-without-making-you-a-failed-founder/
Last updated: 2026-08-12T13:01:35.000Z
Founders spend a lot of time thinking about the external factors that determine whether their companies succeed: finding the right investors, hiring the right people, reaching product-market fit, entering the right market. And, inevitably, being in the right place at the right time.

**But how much of success is *really luck*?** And how much of that luck can we create ourselves?

We met with behavioral design expert and bestselling author **Nir Eyal** on an August morning in Prague, where he is spending part of his summer holiday before taking the stage at [**The Mindset Advantage**](https://www.therecursive.com/the-mindset-advantage-with-nir-eyal-in-prague/)by[**Impact Nights**](https://luma.com/uppersky?ref=therecursive.com) in the city this Thursday. We sit down to discuss his new book, [*Beyond Belief*](https://www.nirandfar.com/beyond-belief/?ref=therecursive.com), and an idea that quickly brings the conversation back to entrepreneurship, what Eyal calls **“provoked luck.”**

**Founders cannot control everything that happens to them.** What they can influence, Eyal argues, are the beliefs that determine whether they keep putting themselves in situations where something might happen in the first place.

For founders, those beliefs can be remarkably practical. *I can figure this out. I can learn what I don't know. I can try again if this doesn't work.* Or, on the other side: *I don't have the right connections. I didn't go to the right university. Startups from my market don't get funded.*

This is at the heart of *Beyond Belief*, the idea that **we often treat our assumptions about ourselves and the world as facts**, without realizing how much they shape what we notice and how we act.

*"The number one determining trait of whether an entrepreneur will succeed or fail is not intelligence. It's not skill. Skill can be learned. It's persistence,"* Eyal says. "*Persistence doesn't guarantee success. But quitting guarantees failure."*

## Beliefs are not facts

*"Are we born as founders? No. It's a skill like any other,"* Eyal tells me. And this distinction becomes particularly important for entrepreneurs. As he argues, founders can easily take something that is true today: *I'm not good at fundraising, I don't have the right network, I've never built a company before*; and turn it into a conclusion about what they are capable of becoming.

That creates room for a subtle shift in language. Telling yourself *I'm the best entrepreneur who ever lived* is **difficult to reconcile with evidence**. But *I'm learning to become a better entrepreneur* leaves space for both the reality of where you are today and the possibility of improvement tomorrow.

It also gets at a broader point Eyal makes throughout our conversation: **useful beliefs aren't the same as wishful thinking**. 

> The goal isn't to convince yourself that your startup will succeed regardless of the evidence. It's to recognize which conclusions are facts and which are stories about what might happen next.

For Eyal, useful beliefs therefore don't have to predict the future perfectly. They need to remain **grounded in evidence** while helping people take productive action.

## How founders can collect evidence

Eyal elaborates that beliefs change when people encounter new evidence, and that evidence can come from deliberately **paying attention to information they previously ignored**.

*"I worked with a woman who believed she was terrible at public speaking, and she would go to pitch in front of investors. ‘It’s not for me. I’m very bad at public speaking. I get very nervous.’ Well, is that a fact or is that a belief?"*

The result was a feedback loop: she remembered the failures, those memories reinforced her belief that she was a poor speaker, and that belief reduced her motivation to practice. Eyal suggested that she record her presentations and keep what he calls a “**reality log**,” documenting not only her mistakes but also the moments when she performed well.

> "If I believe I'm no good at public speaking, how likely am I to practice and try? Not very. Replace that with the belief that *I'm improving my public speaking through practice*, and the incentive to keep practicing changes."

This is also **where co-founders, mentors and investors can play a role**. Rather than simply offering encouragement, Eyal suggests they can point to concrete evidence of improvement: *what worked, what changed, and what should be repeated.*

## The goal isn't to eliminate ambitious beliefs

Startup culture is hardly suffering from a shortage of ambitious claims. Founders are expected to explain how their companies could become billion-dollar businesses and dominate markets.For Eyal, however, **even seemingly unrealistic beliefs can be useful, as long as they don’t contradict the facts and encourage action.**

He recalls meeting a woman in her early twenties who told him she dreamed of winning the Nobel Peace Prize but was embarrassed by how unrealistic the ambition sounded.

> "‘Is it against the laws of physics that you can't win the Nobel Peace Prize? Is it absolutely impossible?’ I asked her. *Even if there were only a 1% chance, maybe a 0.1% chance, the possibility still existed."*

More importantly, Eyal challenged her to consider what acting according to that belief might lead her to do. "*Let's say you don't win the Nobel Peace Prize, but you still act as if you are going to win the Nobel Peace Prize. What's the worst-case scenario? You helped millions of people and you didn't get the medal."*

The same logic can apply to founders. "*You have to work on something that, even if it fails financially, was still worth doing,"* Eyal says. That might mean building a product the founder personally needs or solving a problem they understand deeply. Financial success remains uncertain, but it is no longer the only measure determining whether the years spent building the company were worthwhile.

## What founders can learn from Silicon Valley's relationship with failure

Certainly, when we talk about failure in entrepreneurship, we cannot ignore the cultural differences between Silicon Valley and much of the rest of the world: **the way entrepreneurial failure is interpreted.**

In Silicon Valley, Eyal argues, a founder can raise millions, fail to build a successful company, explain what they learned, and potentially raise funding again.

> *"If someone gives you millions of dollars and you tried your best and you lost their money — good for you*. *Literally, they would say, ‘You know what? You did what you were supposed to do. You worked your hardest. You tried.’"*

Failure, in this interpretation, doesn't necessarily say anything definitive about whether the founder is capable of building a successful company. "*You can then go and say, ‘Hey, I raised X amount of money for my last venture. It didn't work. Here's what I learned. And here's this new idea I have from what I learned.’ People will happily give you money again,"* Eyal says.

> "In the rest of the world, that's not the case. In the rest of the world: ‘Oh, you lost millions of dollars. You're a failure.’ That's a belief. It's just a belief."

For Eyal, **the problem is what happens when a failed outcome becomes a judgment** about the person behind it. *The company failed* can gradually become *I am a failed founder*. And once failure is interpreted as evidence of a fixed ability rather than information from an experiment, founders have less reason to try again.

He connects this with psychologist Carol Dweck's distinction between **fixed and growth mindsets**. *"In Europe (I think this is a broad generalization) there's more of what's called a fixed mindset,"* Eyal says. *"People think you're either talented or you're not."*

Entrepreneurship, in his view, shouldn't be treated this way. 

> "*What's much healthier is a growth mindset. Talent isn't born. Talent is learned when it comes to these types of things*. *Entrepreneurship is a skill you learn like any other."*

### Failure isn't final verdict

Failure can therefore still produce something valuable: **new evidence**.

*"And here's what you learned that made your original hypothesis wrong,"* Eyal continues. 

That last condition is important. Eyal isn't arguing that every failed startup should automatically be celebrated, or that founders should ignore poor decisions. Rather, the distinction is between **failure that produces learning and failure that is treated as a final verdict on someone's ability**.
### Human-to-Human: How AI Fashion Startup Irisphera Unlocked the Gulf Market
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/human-to-human-how-ai-fashion-startup-irisphera-unlocked-the-gulf-market/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T08:14:58.000Z
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has become a global centre for technological adoption, with its retail and fashion sectors hungry for innovation. For European startups, it represents a vast, fast-moving market, but one with its own unique rules of engagement. 

One European startup that has recently navigated this landscape is [Irisphera](https://irisphera.com/?ref=therecursive.com), founded by Romanian entrepreneur [Antonia Dumitriu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/antoniadumitriu/?ref=therecursive.com), who turned a pandemic-era idea into a global AI company by understanding a simple, often overlooked principle: business is personal.

After launching last year, today the AI fashion startup is active in 12 markets, with one client brand achieving a 28% conversion rate, several times the usual number for the industry.

## From a high school project to global expansion

Antonia Dumitriu’s story starts not in a boardroom, but in the world of high fashion. A stylist from the age of sixteen with editorials for Vogue Italy and experience with luxury designers like Jil Sander, she knew the industry's pain points intimately. The idea for Irisphera, an AI-powered personalisation platform, was born "*during the pandemic, while I was still in high school and getting bored*," she explains in an interview with The Recursive. 

"*As a stylist, I saw the same challenges over and over. The process of finding a client’s body shape, understanding their style, and then assisting with shopping was incredibly manual and time-consuming. I wanted to automate that painstaking process and make that level of personalised service accessible to everyone, not just high-fashion clients. Around 70% of online shoppers abandon a purchase because they are unsure about fit, size, or appearance.*" After winning a contest for young entrepreneurs, she brought investors on board, built a team, and, after four years of development, launched in September 2025\. 

By August 2026, the company is already active across twelve markets. The Irisphera platform has processed more than 100,000 fashion products, completed over 50,000 virtual try-on sessions and generated more than 45,000 styling recommendations for shoppers.

One of its most impressive metrics is a recent 28% conversion rate achieved with an Asian partner. "*When you look at e-commerce, the average conversion rate globally is somewhere between 0.7 to 5%, so achieving 28% with one of our partners is a significant milestone for us*,"Dumitriu notes. "*It’s not just a number; we are setting a new standard for what personalisation can achieve. It's the proof of how AI innovation, when applied correctly, can actually bring a tangible impact to businesses and customers around the whole world*." The company's early traction has also led to a key partnership with Oracle, integrating its solution into their fashion enterprise ecosystem.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-03-at-21.16.11--1-.png)

## If they trust you, they are ready to move very quickly

While Irisphera's expansion has been global, its early and rapid success in the Middle East was almost accidental. The journey began when a colleague attended a conference in the region. "*Our entry into the Middle East happened almost by chance. A colleague attended a conference in the region, and I went along with him. We discovered a very interesting market, and the response was immediate*," Dumitriu recalls. "*I received feedback from potential partners saying, ‘Look here, we have a huge demand for this kind of technology, especially for our in-store experiences.*’ *It was an immediate excitement because the need was so clear and pronounced*."

Unlike the often lengthy sales processes in Europe, the GCC moved at a different pace. "*The sales cycles were also very short compared to Europe, as an example," she says. "In Europe, you might go through months of discussions and pilots. In the GCC, we found that if they see the value and trust you, they are ready to move very quickly. There’s a real appetite to be a first-mover and adopt innovative solutions.*" This initial success, driven by a chance visit, quickly established the Gulf as a core market for Irisphera, which then served as a springboard to other regions.

## Making customers feel like the centre of the world

So what makes the Gulf different? According to Dumitriu, it comes down to a culture that values relationships and a relentless focus on the customer. "*In general, the GCC region is all about customer experience," she states. "Retailers there are focused on delivering a premium, almost bespoke service. Everything is related to making customers feel like the centre of the world, and that aligns perfectly with our mission to provide deep personalisation. They understood the value proposition immediately*." This customer-centricity is paired with a population that is highly tech-savvy and innovation-oriented, with businesses eager to be the first to adopt new technologies.

However, cutting-edge technology alone isn't enough. The real lesson Dumitriu learned was the profound importance of a personal connection. "*It's about relationships and in-person meetings. At first, I wondered why we needed to fly out for a meeting that could be a video call, but I quickly learned the culture. They really value you being there, shaking hands, and building a connection,*" she emphasizes. "*It's really important for them to make sure that the human they're doing business with is an honest one they can trust. It’s B2B on paper, but in practice, it’s human to human, right? Once that foundation of trust is built, the possibilities are endless.*"

## Localising for privacy is non-negotiable

Adapting to the GCC market required more than just building relationships; it meant fundamentally tailoring the product. A key concern, especially in countries like Saudi Arabia, is privacy. "*We had to adapt the product, especially around privacy. In some markets, particularly Saudi Arabia, people are not very comfortable with sharing their photos online for this kind of analysis*," Dumitriu explains. "*We understood that this was a non-negotiable cultural and personal boundary we had to respec*t." In response, Irisphera introduced crucial privacy options, such as blurring users' faces.

Crucially, the company's core technology was built with this in mind. "*What's very important from a technical standpoint is that our AI processes the image for analysis but we don't save or train our models on shoppers' images. The data is ephemeral*," she highlights. "*This is something unique to our platform and something that our partners in the Gulf really value. It showed we weren’t just paying lip service to privacy; it was built into the core of our technology.*" 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-03-at-15.29.09.png)

## The future of fashion is data-driven, personal, and sustainable

Looking ahead, Dumitriu sees AI not just as a tool for sales, but as an "intelligence layer" to solve fashion's biggest challenges. This includes increasing conversions and reducing returns, but also tackling the industry’s significant environmental footprint. "*The future of fashion is driven by data*," she says. "*It's not just about selling more; it's about making smarter decisions at every level. For the consumer, it's very personal, ensuring they only buy what they truly love and will wear. For the industry, this data-driven approach helps reduce returns and overproduction, which also means it thinks about the planet, because the fashion industry is one of the most polluting ones.*" Return rates in fashion e-commerce commonly run between 25% and 40%. Irisphera reports more than 20,000 purchases through the platform with zero returns. 

Her ultimate vision is a unified customer experience, where a shopper's profile and preferences move seamlessly across every channel, from online stores to physical malls, delivering a consistently premium and personal journey.

As Irisphera continues its global expansion from Europe to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, its early success in the Gulf offers a key insight. In a world increasingly dominated by algorithms and automation, Antonia Dumitriu’s journey suggests that one of the most valuable commodities is still human trust.
### The Mindset Advantage with Nir Eyal in Prague
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-mindset-advantage-with-nir-eyal-in-prague/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T08:14:05.000Z
📅 **Date:** August 13, 2026 / 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM (CET)  
📍 **Location:** Prague, Czech Republic  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Etnetera](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Etnetera/@50.1074278,14.4540328,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x470b94df32a65d2f:0x1b10bae315d7e3b4!8m2!3d50.1074278!4d14.4540328!16s%2Fg%2F1tfb58vm?entry=ttu&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI2MDgwNS4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://luma.com/nir-eyal-prague?ref=therecursive.com) 

Behavioral design expert and bestselling author [**Nir Eyal**](https://www.nirandfar.com/?ref=therecursive.com) is coming to Prague for an evening exploring how beliefs shape our decisions, behavior, and performance.

Eyal is the author of the [New York Times bestseller *Beyond Belief*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=057mnWzLBcA&ref=therecursive.com), as well as the international bestsellers *Indistractable* and *Hooked*. His work sits at the intersection of behavioral science, technology, product design, and personal performance.

In *Hooked*, Eyal examined how products create habits, while *Indistractable* focused on managing attention and avoiding distraction. His latest book, *Beyond Belief*, explores how underlying assumptions influence what people notice, the choices they make, and what they believe is possible.

## What to expect from the evening

The evening will feature a **keynote by Nir Eyal**, followed by a moderated conversation, an audience Q&A, and networking with members of Prague’s startup, business, technology, and creative communities.

The event is aimed at founders, entrepreneurs, business leaders, product and technology professionals, creators, and anyone interested in behavioral science, habits, attention, and performance.

**The Recursive is joining the event as Media Partner**, alongside Etnetera as Venue Partner, Bliss as Hospitality Partner, and Uppersky, which is leading the production.
### DORA Is No Longer a Deadline
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/dora-is-no-longer-a-deadline-what-are-the-penalties/
Last updated: 2026-08-10T12:08:38.000Z
January 17, 2025 came and went. Most firms exhaled.

They shouldn't have.

On June 3, 2026, **the European Supervisory Authorities published their first DORA incident overview**. An oversight document based on actual incident data from regulated entities across the EU. That's the moment the enforcement era became real.

National competent authorities are now cross-checking Register of Information data automatically and issuing the first compulsion payments. The **informal tolerance that characterised 2025 supervision is finished**.

Here's what makes this uncomfortable: according to Deloitte research, only 50% of institutions expected to reach full compliance by end of 2025\. A further 38% pushed their target into 2026\. That means somewhere between a third and half of all regulated entities are entering active enforcement with **documented gaps**. And 60 to 70% of EU financial institutions described their Register of Information as a 'work in progress' at the January 2025 deadline.

Work in progress doesn't cut it when supervisors are cross-checking your submissions automatically.

## What the penalties actually look like?

The penalty framework varies by member state, which is itself part of the problem. Belgium allows fines up to 5 million euros or 10% of annual turnover. Italy up to 20 million euros or 10%. Ireland up to 10 million euros. Germany and the Netherlands up to 5 million euros. **The Czech Republic** sits at the lower end with a 2 million euro ceiling. **Croatia** has taken a different approach, capping penalties at 3% of total annual income.

And then there are the laggards. In March 2025, the European Commission opened infringement procedures against **Poland and Bulgaria**, alongside 11 other member states, for failing to fully transpose DORA into national law. Both countries are still completing their legislative alignment. 

The irony is pointed: **DORA's enforcement era has begun**, but some of the regulators responsible for enforcing it are themselves still catching up.  
Individual executives face personal fines of up to 1 million euros in most jurisdictions, and in Germany and Italy up to 5 million euros.

For critical ICT third-party providers, all of which were formally designated under DORA oversight in November 2025, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, the **daily penalty structure is the most aggressive**: up to 1% of average daily worldwide turnover for each day of continued non-compliance, for up to six months. For a firm the size of Amazon or Microsoft, that is not a rounding error.

**Beyond the fines**: regulators can suspend or prohibit specific ICT services, require the appointment of a special manager, temporarily ban senior managers from exercising management functions, and issue public notices of violation. 

**Reputational damage** from a public enforcement notice typically exceeds the direct financial penalty. Rating agencies and institutional investors treat it as a governance signal.

## Where most firms are still exposed?

The Register of Information problem is the most widespread and least solved. DORA requires firms to **map, monitor, and contractually govern every ICT third-party relationship**. Most fintechs built their technology stacks on layers of dependencies, cloud providers, payment processors, fraud detection tools, data vendors, without the governance infrastructure DORA now demands.

**The incident reporting timeline is another gap**. Major ICT incidents require initial notification within 4 hours, an intermediate report within 72 hours, and a final report within one month. Most firms either don't have tested incident response procedures at all, or have procedures that exist on paper but have never been stress-tested against real timelines.

And then there's the board question. DORA explicitly places responsibility for ICT risk management on **the management body**. If your board cannot speak to the firm's DORA compliance posture when a supervisor asks, and they are asking, that is a governance failure before it is a technical one.

## What comes next?

The enforcement posture in 2026 is risk-based. **Supervisors are prioritising institutions with the largest third-party exposures** and the most significant gaps first. That means smaller fintechs and payment institutions may have a short window to close their gaps before supervisory attention reaches them.

That window is not indefinite. The firms cross-checking your Register of Information data automatically are not waiting for your remediation plan. They are building their enforcement queue.

The firms that treat this as an operational upgrade, not a compliance exercise, will come through this cycle stronger. **Better vendor relationships, cleaner governance, more credible posture** with banks and institutional partners. The firms that don't will learn the difference between a deadline and enforcement the hard way.
### Who Is the Most Innovative in the CEE?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/europes-innovation-landscape-in-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-10T12:07:52.000Z
The [European Innovation Scoreboard 2026](https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/statistics/performance-indicators/european-innovation-scoreboard%5Fen?ref=therecursive.com) measures and compares the research and innovation performance of EU Member States and selected global competitors. It provides a **snapshot of each country's strengths, weaknesses, and progress**, helping policymakers identify where innovation ecosystems are thriving and where further investment is needed. 

This article takes a closer look at **how Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries performed in the 2026 European Innovation Scoreboard**. To make comparisons easier, the countries are presented from the highest to the lowest innovation score, highlighting both the region's strongest innovation ecosystems and the areas where further progress is still needed. 

## CEE innovation snapshot 

🏆 **Innovation leader:** Estonia remains the region's top performer, ranking 11th in the EU with a Summary Innovation Index of 108.6.

📈 **Fastest annual improver:** Latvia recorded the strongest year-on-year increase in the region (+2.8%), followed by Lithuania (+1.9%) and Estonia (+1.9%).

🚀 **What CEE does best:** Advanced manufacturing, high-tech exports, research collaboration and a growing pool of digital talent continue to define the region's innovation strengths.

⚠️ **Biggest challenge:** Across most CEE countries, venture capital availability, business R&D investment, and the comercialisation of research remain the biggest barriers to faster innovation growth.

📊 **Innovation landscape:** 1 Strong Innovator, 4 Moderate Innovators, and 6 Emerging Innovators make up this year's CEE ranking. 

**📈 Long-term growth:** Since 2019, every CEE country has improved its innovation performance, led by Estonia (+19.8) and Lithuania (+19.7). 

## Estonia

[Estonia](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/estonia-2/) remains the highest-performing innovation ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe, ranking 11th among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 108.6\. Classified as a Strong Innovator, the country **improved its performance by 1.9% compared to 2025**, remaining comfortably above the EU average.

Estonia's biggest advantage continues to be its startup ecosystem. The country ranks among Europe's leaders in venture capital investment, SME innovation and intellectual assets, reflecting its ability to turn ideas into scalable businesses. **Strong public-private collaboration** further reinforces this position. At the same time, government support for business R&D and resource productivity remain areas where additional progress could strengthen long-term competitiveness.

## Slovenia

[Slovenia](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/slovenia/) continues to rank among the strongest innovation performers in Central and Eastern Europe, placing 17th among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 87.2\. Classified as a Moderate Innovator, the country's innovation performance **remained essentially unchanged compared to 2025**. 

Unlike Estonia, whose innovation model is built around startups and venture capital, **Slovenia's strength lies in its ability to connect research with industry**. The country is among the EU leaders in public-private co-publications, lifelong learning, and international scientific collaboration, reflecting a well-established knowledge ecosystem. At the same time, the report points to limited venture capital availability, low non-R&D innovation expenditure, and weak knowledge-intensive services exports as key obstacles to turning scientific excellence into faster business growth.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/AI-Index-General-Assets-3-1.png) 

## ****CEE AI Index 2026**

AI Chamber, in partnership with The Recursive Media and collaboration of Europe Cloud, has launched the CEE AI Index 2026, the first index focused on assessing the ability of Central and Eastern European countries to develop, operate, and host AI efficiently, safely, and in a governed way.

[Check the rankings!](https://www.ceeindex.ai/?ref=therecursive.com) 

## Czechia

[Czechia](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/czech-republic/) remains one of Central and Eastern Europe's industrial innovation leaders, ranking 19th among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 79.1\. Classified as a Moderate Innovator, the country recorded a **2.5% decline compared to 2025**, performing below the average for its innovation group.

Rather than relying on a booming startup ecosystem, **Czechia's innovation model is built on a strong manufacturing base.** The country ranks 4th in the EU for exports of medium- and high-tech products and performs well in non-R&D innovation investment, digital skills and collaboration between innovative SMEs. However, one challenge stands out: venture capital investment remains among the lowest in the EU, making it harder for innovative companies to scale despite the country's solid industrial and research foundations.

## Hungary

[Hungary](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/hungary/) ranks 21st among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 72.1, remaining a Moderate Innovator. While the country has improved significantly since 2019, its innovation performance remained broadly stable in 2026, **recording a slight 0.3% decline** compared to the previous year.

Hungary's innovation strengths are closely tied to its **industrial economy**. The country ranks 5th in the EU for exports of medium- and high-tech products and **performs strongly in digital skills**, public-private research collaboration, and government support for business R&D. However, the report also points to persistent structural weaknesses, including low public R&D expenditure, limited design applications, and low employment in innovative enterprises, suggesting that stronger commercialisation and broader participation in innovation will be key to sustaining future growth.

## Croatia 

[Croatia](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/croatia/) ranks 22nd among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 69.2, placing it in the Emerging Innovators group. Compared to 2025, the country's innovation performance **declined slightly by 0.6%**. 

Croatia's strongest performance comes from public-private co-publications, high-tech imports from outside the EU, and innovation expenditures per person employed, highlighting the country's ability to foster research collaboration and support firm-level innovation investment. The country also recorded **significant progress in digitalisation**, with notable improvements in high-speed internet access and digital skills over the past year. However, venture capital availability, government support for business R&D, and knowledge-intensive services exports remain among Croatia's weakest areas, limiting the country's ability to scale innovative businesses and commercialise research. Overall, Croatia continues to strengthen parts of its innovation ecosystem, with attracting private investment and boosting business innovation remain key priorities.

## Poland

[Poland](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/poland/) ranks 23rd among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 65.2, remaining an Emerging Innovator. While the country has improved significantly since 2019, its innovation performance declined by **1.5% compared to 2025**, although it continues to perform above the average for the Emerging Innovators group.

As the region's largest economy, Poland combines steady digital progress with growing business innovation. The country **stands out for its design applications, cloud computing adoption, and government support for business R&D**, demonstrating continued investment in innovation capacity. However, venture capital investment, SMEs introducing product innovations, and the country's ability to attract foreign doctoral students remain among its weakest indicators, highlighting that stronger commercialisation and a more dynamic startup ecosystem will be crucial to unlocking its full innovation potential.

## Slovakia

[Slovakia](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/slovakia/) ranks 24th among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 62.3, remaining an Emerging Innovator. The country **improved its innovation performance by 1.0%** compared to 2025 and continues to perform above the average for the Emerging Innovators group.

Slovakia's innovation ecosystem is closely linked to its export-oriented economy. The country ranks 2nd in the EU for exports of medium- and high-tech products and 7th for sales of new-to-market and new-to-firm innovations, showing a **strong ability to bring innovative products to international markets**. At the same time, low venture capital investment, limited mobility of highly skilled professionals and weaker research excellence continue to hold back the development of a more dynamic innovation ecosystem, suggesting that stronger support for startups and research commercialisation could complement Slovakia's industrial strengths

## Latvia 

[Latvia](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/latvia/) ranks 25th among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 61.0, remaining an Emerging Innovator. The country **improved its innovation performance by 2.8% compared to 2025**, placing it above the average for the Emerging Innovators group.

Rather than excelling in a single area, Latvia's innovation ecosystem is built on steady progress across several dimensions. The country performs particularly well in trademark applications, where it ranks 6th in the EU, while also recording **strong results in knowledge-intensive services exports** and public-private research collaboration. However, low business R&D investment, limited government support for business R&D, and relatively low innovation spending per employee continue to constrain the country's innovation capacity, highlighting the need to encourage greater private-sector investment alongside its improving research and business linkages.

## Lithuania 

[Lithuania](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/lithuania/) ranks 18th among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 86.6, remaining a Moderate Innovator. The country **improved its innovation performance by 1.9%** compared to 2025, placing it slightly above the average for its innovation group.

Lithuania's innovation ecosystem is **powered by its talent base**. The country ranks 3rd in the EU for tertiary education attainment and 1st for job-to-job mobility of highly skilled professionals, while also **performing strongly in ICT employment**, cloud computing and business innovation. These strengths are helping Lithuania build a dynamic, knowledge-driven economy. At the same time, business R&D investment and knowledge-intensive services exports remain among the country's biggest challenges, highlighting the need to translate its strong human capital into greater commercial impact.

## Bulgaria 

[Bulgaria](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/bulgaria/) ranks 26th among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 48.9, remaining an Emerging Innovator. The country's innovation performance **declined by 1.1% compared to 2025**, remaining below the average for its innovation group.

Despite its overall ranking, Bulgaria's innovation ecosystem shows promising signs of momentum. The country performs strongly in trademark applications (7th in the EU), high-speed internet access (9th) and high-tech imports from outside the EU (9th), while the report also highlights **Bulgaria as an emerging entrepreneurial hub in Southeast Europe**, with more than €1 billion invested in startups between 2020 and 2025 and the highest number of funded startups per capita in the region. At the same time, fragmented research institutions, low labour productivity, and limited government support for business R&D continue to hold back the country's ability to translate entrepreneurial activity into broader innovation performance.

## Romania

[Romania](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/romania/) ranks 27th among EU Member States with a Summary Innovation Index of 41.8, remaining an Emerging Innovator. Despite holding the lowest position in the EU ranking, the country's innovation performance **improved by 1.4% compared to 2025**, reflecting gradual progress across several key indicators.

Romania's innovation profile is marked by strong digital infrastructure rather than research performance. The country ranks 4th in the EU for high-speed internet access and 3rd for high-tech imports from outside the EU, providing a **solid foundation for future innovation-driven growth**. However, persistent weaknesses in tertiary education, business innovation, and private R&D investment continue to limit its overall performance. Bridging these structural gaps will be essential if Romania is to translate its digital potential into a stronger and more competitive innovation ecosystem.

*All data in this article is drawn from the European Innovation Scoreboard 2026 and its individual country profiles, published by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (manuscript completed July 2026). Figures are indexed to the EU average in 2026, and all rankings refer to the 27 EU Member States.*
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: New Space and Defense R&D Hub
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-3/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:49:39.000Z
## CEE and beyond

Polish co-founded SAR satellite company ICEYE has secured the [first investment from the European Commission's ](https://www.iceye.com/newsroom/press-releases/iceye-secures-the-first-investment-from-european-commissions-scaleup-europe-fund?ref=therecursive.com)[Scaleup Europe Fund](https://www.iceye.com/newsroom/press-releases/iceye-secures-the-first-investment-from-european-commissions-scaleup-europe-fund?ref=therecursive.com). Managed by EQT, the fund co-led ICEYE's €1 billion Series F round, which included €450 million of primary investment at a valuation exceeding €10 billion. The company will use the capital to expand its SAR satellite constellation and defense and intelligence capabilities across Europe and beyond.

Cyprus-based enterprise AI company **Omilia** [has secured a €58.1M Series B](https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/08/cyprus-based-enterprise-agentic-cx-company-omilia-secures-e58-1-million-in-series-b-funding/?ref=therecursive.com) round led by Expedition Growth Capital. Since its Series A, the company has grown its annual recurring revenue more than tenfold to **over €52 million**, with customers including Capital One, Taco Bell, and Discover. The new funding will support Omilia's expansion in North America, including the launch of its first US office, while accelerating the global rollout of its enterprise AI platform.

**MammoCheck**, a Cyprus-based medical technology company and Frederick University spin-out, has been awarded a **€500K grant** under the SEED programme of the Research and Innovation Foundation (RIF). The project is co-funded by the European Union and the Republic of Cyprus under the Cohesion Policy Programme THALIA 2021-2027, with the Frederick Research Center participating as partner organisation. MammoCheck is developing an AI-powered adjunctive screening platform for breast cancer. 

Bulgarian startup **Estel Technologies** [has secured €270K in pre-seed funding](https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-startup-estel-technologies-raises-a-pre-seed-to-modernize-tech-staffing-sales-with-ai/) to expand its AI-native sales platform for the global tech staffing industry. The round was led by [**Vitosha Ventures**](https://www.therecursive.com/vitosha-ventures-announces-first-10-investments-from-eur34m-fund-ii-adds-rob-kniaz-as-general-partner/), with participation from Austrian angel investor **Kerem Basak**, founder and CEO of FB Consulting. The platform is already live across the **UK, DACH region, Poland, and** [**Bulgaria**](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/bulgaria/). Estel currently serves three enterprise customers and has reached **€24K in annual recurring revenue (ARR)**.

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## New space and defense R&D hub in Bulgaria

**Bulgarian satellite technology and services company EnduroSat** is planning to [develop one of Europe’s largest space and defense R&D centers](https://www.economic.bg/en/a/view/endurosat-will-build-a-huge-space-and-defense-center-in-dobroslavtsi?ref=therecursive.com) at the site of the former Dobroslavtsi airport. The plans were announced by the company’s founder, Raicho Raichev, during a visit to the site alongside Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev.

The visit also marked the official launch of the Dobroslavtsi high-tech industrial park and space and defense R&D center. Earlier this week, the Council of Ministers approved a draft Memorandum of Understanding between the Bulgarian government and Starbase Europe EOOD, the company that will carry out the priority investment project. Starbase Europe is also owned by Raichev. *Stay tuned to The Recursive for more updates next week!*
### How Did the CEE Get Its First Insurtech Unicorn?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-did-the-cee-get-its-first-insurtech-unicorn/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:49:31.000Z
Insurance maybe isn’t sexy, but it’s a billion-dollar business. We sat down with Dusan Komar, the CEO of the first CEE insurance unicorn Ominimo, to exclusively discuss their exponential growth, market entry and expansion in Europe.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### What the Balkans Taught Me About Its Next Growth Story
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/what-the-balkans-taught-me-about-its-next-growth-story/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:49:58.000Z
A year can be enough to challenge some of the assumptions you arrive with.

When Calash opened its Sofia office a year ago, our internal expectations were modest. We are an international strategy and M&A advisory firm with more than two decades of work in energy, industrials and infrastructure, a profile that doesn’t always map neatly onto a market still associated, from the outside, with software outsourcing and a relatively young venture capital scene. We thought local appetite for our work would build slowly.

It hasn’t. Demand has been considerably stronger than we projected.

More importantly, the past twelve months have changed some of my assumptions about where the most interesting opportunities in the Balkans are likely to emerge.

Over that period, we’ve supported leading innovators in telecom, the Internet of Things and the employee benefits space — companies building real product moats and going up against well-funded incumbents. At the same time, we’ve had meaningful exposure to our traditional sectors here: infrastructure, industrial and energy businesses that are actively looking for strategy, solutions and technology to expand margins, sharpen operations and unlock new revenue streams.

That second category, in my view, is where the more interesting Balkan story is being written, and isn’t being told nearly enough.

## The talent dividend is real

One of the first things that became clearer from being on the ground was just how much the region’s talent base has evolved.

Anyone who has spent time in Sofia, Athens or Bucharest in the last two years will recognise what I’m describing. The diaspora is coming back into the orbit. Senior operators with a decade or more at international scaleups, banks and corporates are showing up as advisors, founders and operating partners. The local capital base — VCs, growth equity funds and family offices — has matured in parallel.

A founder building in Sofia today has access to a support network that simply didn’t exist five years ago.

Bulgaria now has more than 10 active VC funds, alongside accelerators, founder networks and a growing base of experienced operators recycling their knowledge and capital [back into the ecosystem](https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-startup-ecosystem-entrepreneurs-journey-ebrd-documentary). Locally established VC funds were managing around €500 million by 2024, while Sofia itself accounted for 86% of the country’s startups.

This is the foundation of the optimism I keep hearing in meetings, and it’s earned. After a year of those conversations, however, I’ve also become increasingly convinced that optimism alone isn’t enough.

It isn’t, by itself, a strategy.

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## The over-rotation toward SaaS and AI

Most of the headline activity, most of the pitch decks and most of the media oxygen in the region is concentrated in SaaS and, increasingly, generative AI plays. That’s a global phenomenon, not a Balkan one.

The complication is that these are precisely the business models with the highest risk and no clear commercialisation path. Even among mature 2017-vintage venture funds tracked by Carta, only a portion have begun returning meaningful capital to their LPs, and most pre-2021 funds are running close to empty on dry powder.

International capital is rewarding cash-flow positivity and capital efficiency in a way it hasn’t for a decade, and that shift is not a passing mood.

The longer we have worked in the region, the more relevant a different question has become: where are the cash-flow-positive opportunities the Balkans are actually well-positioned to win?

## What the region is good at, and isn’t selling hard enough

*Industrials. Infrastructure. Energy. Marine. Defense. MEP. Manufacturing.*

These are sectors with deep, multi-generational roots in Bulgaria, Greece and Romania, with skilled labour, established supply chains and a real cost-to-quality advantage compared with Western Europe.

Over the past year, we have seen this not as an abstract investment thesis, but in the businesses themselves. Local industrial companies are adopting — as well as spinning out — their own automation, predictive maintenance, IoT-enabled monitoring and energy-management software, not as headline “digital transformation” projects, but as practical margin levers.

The output is companies with growing EBITDA, defensible market positions and the kind of asset-backed, repeatable cash flows that international infrastructure and growth equity investors are actively hunting for in 2026.

This, in my view, is where the next wave of internationally relevant Balkan transactions will come from.

It is also the segment where Calash has spent most of its time globally, across more than 700 projects and $35 billion of cumulative enterprise value advised, so the bias is admitted up front. But a year of working locally has strengthened rather than weakened that conviction: some of the region’s greatest advantages sit precisely in the sectors receiving less attention from the broader technology and venture conversation.

## A more uncomfortable observation

A year on the ground also means seeing some of the ecosystem’s structural weaknesses more clearly.

It’s worth being candid about one feature of the local capital scene. Bulgaria’s venture ecosystem was kick-started by the European Investment Fund’s JEREMIE programme in 2012, and successive EIF-backed vehicles have provided a steady supply of capital ever since.

The benefit has been enormous, as Sofia wouldn’t be the regional hub it is today without it. But abundant capital paired with relatively light LP discipline has, at times, allowed commercially marginal businesses to be funded on optimism rather than unit economics.

The scoreboard reflects it: over 13 years, more than €1.5 billion was raised and deployed across 30+ fund vehicles in Bulgaria’s VC ecosystem, doing an estimated c.1,000+ investments, with approximately 80–100 recorded exits. Of these, fewer than 20 have a confirmed or estimated valuation at or above €50 million.

I don’t make this point to be ungenerous. If anything, seeing how far the ecosystem has developed makes the question of what comes next more important.

The market has changed, and the funds and founders who internalise that earliest will be the ones who attract the next round of international capital.

## What good looks like from here

So what has a year in the region ultimately changed?

Not my conviction that the Balkans have significant potential, but my view of where that potential is most likely to translate into durable businesses and internationally relevant transactions.

For founders, that means being honest about unit economics from day one and resisting the temptation to dress a traditional business in AI clothing because it’s the easier raise this year.

For local investors, it means leaning harder on commercial and operational diligence, particularly in sectors where the asset base, customer concentration and regulatory exposure can’t be assessed from a deck. And for international LPs looking at the region, it means widening the lens beyond software.

The Balkans have an enormous untapped market in the sectors that are, frankly, less fashionable but more durable. After a year on the ground, I’m more convinced than when we opened the office that the opportunity here is real. But I’m also more convinced that the region’s next internationally relevant growth story may look different from the one outsiders expect.

It may be built as much in factories, energy infrastructure, industrial supply chains and established businesses adopting new technologies as in the next generation of software startups.

That is perhaps the biggest shift in perspective from our first year in Sofia: **the Balkans do not need to replicate someone else’s technology ecosystem to produce globally relevant companies**. Some of their strongest opportunities are already rooted in what the region has been doing well for decades.
### Why Employees Still Choose Salary Over Ownership
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/why-employees-still-choose-salary-over-ownership/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T08:15:27.000Z
Employee ownership can already work with today's legal tools, says startup lawyer Stefan Surina. The real challenge is convincing founders and employees that equity is worth it.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why You'll Wish You Invested in CEE Healthtech
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/why-youll-wish-you-invested-in-cee-healthtech/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:50:21.000Z
Healthcare is emerging as one of Europe's most strategic industries. Elizabeth Jennings shares why trust, long-term investment, and Central and Eastern Europe's scientific strengths could redefine the region's role in the global biotech landscape.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Bulgarian Startup Estel Technologies raises a Pre-Seed to Modernize Tech Staffing Sales with AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-startup-estel-technologies-raises-a-pre-seed-to-modernize-tech-staffing-sales-with-ai/
Last updated: 2026-08-04T09:25:37.000Z
Bulgarian startup **Estel Technologies** has secured **€270K in pre-seed funding** to expand its AI-native sales platform for the global tech staffing industry. The round was led by [**Vitosha Ventures**](https://www.therecursive.com/vitosha-ventures-announces-first-10-investments-from-eur34m-fund-ii-adds-rob-kniaz-as-general-partner/), with participation from Austrian angel investor **Kerem Basak**, founder and CEO of FB Consulting.

The company is building an AI-powered platform designed to help tech staffing firms identify genuine hiring demand, prioritize high-potential sales opportunities, and reduce time spent on outdated or duplicate job listings. According to [Estel](https://www.estel.tech/?ref=therecursive.com), recruiters and staffing sales teams often rely on multiple disconnected tools, while a significant share of job openings become obsolete before outreach begins, creating billions in lost productivity across the industry.

## Rethinking sales for the tech talent industry

Founded by **Bogdan Stavrev**, **Ivo Michorov**, and **Yusuf Berki**, Estel combines founders' experience in staffing, workforce management, and AI. Stavrev previously served as VP of Digital Products at one of the world's largest staffing organizations, while Michorov led Google's global extended workforce program and Berki has spent 15 years developing AI and machine learning systems across HR tech, healthcare, and finance.

At the core of the platform is Estel's proprietary **Demand Confidence Score (DCS)**, which analyzes daily market signals to verify active hiring demand, rank opportunities, and match them with prospective buyers. The company says the platform is designed to replace the fragmented sales workflow with a single workspace covering demand verification, lead prioritization, and outreach.

> "Tech staffing hasn't had its Salesforce moment yet, everyone's still stitching together tools and guessing which leads are real and worth their time. We built Estel because sales teams should spend their time selling and not wasting half their days in research," said **Bogdan Stavrev**, CEO and co-founder of Estel Technologies.

The platform is already live across the **UK, DACH region, Poland, and** [**Bulgaria**](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/bulgaria/). Estel currently serves **three enterprise customers** and has reached **€24K in annual recurring revenue (ARR)**. The startup plans to increase ARR twentyfold by mid-2027 while preparing for a seed funding round and expansion into the US market.

Among the investors is **Kerem Basak**, whose company **FB Consulting** was already using Estel before participating in the financing round.

> "I used Estel before I invested in it. As someone who's spent a decade in tech talent, I don't say that lightly—most tools in this space overpromise. This one actually changed how my team works," Basak said.

The newly raised capital will be used to further develop Estel's demand verification, scoring, and matching algorithms, while accelerating customer acquisition across key European markets. According to **Max Gurvits**, partner at Vitosha Ventures, the investment reflects the founders' deep understanding of the staffing industry and the market opportunity for AI-driven sales infrastructure.
### How Startups Can Sell AI to Enterprises Before They Have a Big Brand
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-startups-can-sell-ai-to-enterprises-before-they-have-a-big-brand/
Last updated: 2026-08-03T11:09:16.000Z
Enterprises mostly buy from names that carry decades of enterprise IT credibility, a long list of high-level executives, and solid references. A pre-seed startup building a multi-agent AI platform has none of the things listed above. 

And yet we closed enterprise deals. We entered a government pilot with Ukraine's Ministry of Justice and are now **preparing for European expansion**. Here, I want to share the lessons I learned about selling [AI to enterprises](https://www.therecursive.com/ai-vs-saas-future-of-enterprise-software/) before anyone had heard of you, and what I think investors should look for when evaluating early-stage AI companies doing the same.

## The brand problem is real, so you'd better stop pretending it isn't

One of the common mistakes you, as an AI founder, can make is trying to outrun the trust deficit with the product. You think the demo wows them and they'll overlook the 10-person team, the zero case studies, and the website that went live three months ago. They won’t. 

Regulated enterprise sectors like legal, finance, or government don't just buy software. First of all, **they buy risk mitigation**.

Every vendor they onboard is a potential liability: a data breach, a failed integration, a compliance gap, or downtime due to low reliability. You have to keep in mind that when you have no brand, you're a high-risk vendor by default. The thing is that at this point, your job isn't to prove your product works but to lower their risk perception to the point that they're willing to find out.

## Tactic 1: Sell the pilot instead ot the product

Our first paying client was Silpo, one of Ukraine's largest retailers. We didn't walk in cold but went through Fozzy Venture Studio, an internal accelerator run by Silpo's parent company. The accelerator ran for about five months, then came another three to four months of testing and configuration before the agent went live.

What made that process work? Right sequencing. **We launched in co-pilot mode first**, which means every AI-generated response had to be approved by a contact center manager before it reached the customer. That one decision built the initial trust: the team could see the responses, correct them, and understand the logic. 

And almost immediately after that, we switched to fully automatic mode for a defined set of topics. That list of topics has been expanding ever since, and with it, the share of customer inquiries resolved by AI has grown.

The reason Silpo cared wasn't automation for its own sake. They are extremely focused on customer experience. Their main concern was whether the AI would handle customers the way a good human operator would, or it would generate the kind of friction people associate with chatbots. That framing shaped everything about how we built and configured the agents.

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## Tactic 2: Your reference isn't a customer. It's a use case

When you're early, you don't have a Gartner Magic Quadrant ranking or 200 enterprise logos on your website. What you do have is a specific, credible use case that an **enterprise buyer can immediately map onto their own pain**.

For us, the Ministry of Justice pilot was strategically important not just as a contract, but as a proof point. We got into that project through **GovTech** Lab, a program designed to connect government institutions with startups. That deployment taught us a lot and it comes is sales conversations for a reason. A system handling citizen legal consultations has real stakes: wrong answers have real consequences. That meant government-certified infrastructure, local models, and proper response verification built in from the start.

When you can describe that to an enterprise buyer, the indirect message is clear: “*If our system could meet those standards, it can meet yours*.” Programs like GovTech Lab are an amazing entry point for startups into complex projects. They let you **test your capabilities against the real requirements of high-stakes institutions**. 

The lesson I'd like to give you here: *pick your first deployments not for the revenue they bring, but for the story they let you tell to the next buyer. One strong reference use case in a regulated, high-stakes sector is worth ten pilots in low-stakes environments.*  
  
**Four things I would do again:**  
• enter through accelerators, venture studios, or public-sector innovation programs rather than traditional procurement channels  
• secure the right to publish the case study before signing the contract  
• establish and document baseline metrics before launch so results can be measured credibly  
• and build a reusable security and compliance package covering data handling, model deployment, verification, and risk management.  
  
Together, these steps turn an early deployment into more than a customer relationship - they create a reference case that makes every future enterprise sale easier.

## Tactic 3: Use the language of the person who signs the contract

[AI founders](https://www.therecursive.com/ai-boom-vs-dot-com-bubble/) love talking to engineers and product teams, and I get it – those conversations are exciting. But **engineers don't sign enterprise contracts**. CFOs, COOs, and General Counsels do, and they don't care about your model architecture.

Right now, about 25% of Silpo's incoming requests are fully automated. Their leadership sees that number not in percentage points but in headcount and capacity. Their contact center operators spend their time on complex requests instead of answering "*How do I buy a croissant with a discount*?". 

When senior decision-makers understand the behind-the-scene of the AI and humans interaction, the question of cost disappears. It becomes a question of efficiency and company development. The lesson I’d like to give you here: *Help them understand it.*

That shift in **framing from "what does the product do?" to "where did your team save time?" is the entire game**. Lots of AI founders pitch enterprises like they're presenting at a developer conference. The vocabulary and framing are wrong, and the buyer checks out before the second slide.

## Tactic 4: Name the institutions, not just the logos

When you have no brand, you borrow credibility from institutions that already have it.

Being selected for Ukraine's GovTech Lab wasn't just a pilot opportunity, it was a **signal we could use in our next sales conversations**. An independent institution evaluated our technology against real government requirements and decided it was worth running. 

For AI founders operating in Europe right now, there are real opportunities to accumulate these signals:accelerator programs, public sector pilots, regulatory sandbox participation, and research partnerships with universities. 

The lesson I’d like to give you here: **don't hand off the agent and go dark*. Stay involved: requirements, data mapping, integration, everything after launch. I believe that is actually what makes a difference for enterprise buyers. They see you’re solving the problem, not just selling software.* 

Most AI startups build their products based on their own vision and hypotheses, not on client requirements. They **build blind**. In our case, through accelerators and startup programs, we chose not to focus on short-term revenue, but on deeply understanding the problem and the client's actual requirements. That strategy helped us more than anything else. And it's the advice I give to every early-stage AI founder I talk to.

For investors evaluating early-stage AI startups targeting enterprise, this is one of the clearest signals to look for: not just "*do they have customers*?" but "*what institutional validation have they accumulated, and how deliberately*?"
### B2B eCommerce is not B2C with a discount
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/b2b-ecommerce-is-not-b2c-with-a-discount/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T08:16:05.000Z
Somewhere in your company there is a **spreadsheet that moves more revenue than your website does**.

It belongs to Edward, a sales rep who stopped trusting the site months ago. A key account asked for their contracted price, the site showed list price, so the deal moved to email. Payment delay got agreed on a phone call. The quote for 400 units went out as a **PDF, version seven, saved as final-FINAL.xlsx**. The site still takes orders, but everything that actually closes a deal, the pricing and the trust behind it, lives in **WhatsApp threads and Eddie's laptop**.

That store is a [Potemkin village.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin%5Fvillage?ref=therecursive.com) A clean facade, with the real business happening out of sight.

It is the most common failure we see in **B2B eCommerce**, and it usually gets misdiagnosed. Merchants assume they bought the wrong plugin or the wrong platform, and that a different one will fix it. 

It won't, because the problem was never the storefront. B2B buying only looks like retail from the outside; underneath it works differently, and running it as a B2C store with a few plugins bolted on doesn't close that gap. The work just moves into spreadsheets and chat apps, where it quietly eats your margin.

## Your customer is not a person

In B2C eCommerce, you design the user flow for one ‘persona’ on a thin, well-lit path. They land, they buy, and the craft is removing friction between wanting something and paying for it.

**A B2B customer is a committee with a logo**. Behind one login sits a procurement officer who builds the cart, a department head who needs the goods, a CFO who signs off on the spend, and a warehouse manager fitting the delivery into next week. Each shows up with different permissions and a different reason for being there.

**The purchase doesn't happen in one sitting either**. A consumer buys a kettle in ninety seconds; a distributor placing a recurring five-figure order moves through evaluation, internal sign-off, and a budget cycle that can run for weeks. So the system isn't hosting a checkout, it's holding a relationship that has to stay consistent across many people and many days.

Therefore we keep telling clients that **B2B commerce is a design problem before it is technical**. Not ‘design’ as in colours and buttons, but mapping how a company actually buys: who sees what, who approves what, in what order, and what each role needs on screen to do its part. If that mapping is wrong, no platform or plugin will rescue it.

**The real difference between platforms is how far they let you change them**. Shopify and Squarespace let you restyle the storefront but not rework the logic underneath. Others, like WooCommerce and BigCommerce, are built to be extended, so a competent team can take the native checkout apart and rebuild it around real ERP data instead of bending the business to the platform's defaults. That flexibility is what B2B actually needs, and it only pays off when the documentation and code quality are good enough to keep the work maintainable.

## Four questions that tell you the system is shallow

If you want to know whether your store is doing the B2B job or only impersonating one, **run these four checks**. Each tests the same thing: whether the storefront reflects what the ERP actually knows.

1\. **The price**. When a tier-2 distributor logs in, do they see their exact contracted, volume-adjusted price, or the same list price everyone else gets next to a "call for pricing" banner? That banner admits the site can't do the one thing this buyer came for, and it sends them back to the salesperson.

2\. **The terms**. Can that buyer check out on a purchase order with Net 60 credit, the way their finance department actually works, or does the system insist on a company credit card for a €20,000 order?

3\. **The workflow**. Can a junior procurement officer assemble a cart and route it to their CFO for approval inside the store, or does approval drop into a forwarded email and a chase three days later? Real organisations buy through approval chains, and a store that can't represent the chain isn't really part of the purchase.

4\. **The inventory**. When the store says "in stock", does that mean the goods are allocated to this customer in the ERP, or only that they haven't sold out on the B2C side? This one fails after the sale, when the buyer schedules a delivery against stock that was never really theirs.

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## The part nobody copies from a tutorial

This part doesn't come with any template, because it's a judgement call about your own catalogue: **how much should someone see before they have an account?** 

Miscalculate it in either direction and it costs you. Hide everything behind a login and you're invisible to search engines and to the buyers doing prior research, which today is most of them. Open everything up and a competitor can read your full spec sheet. Neither extreme is right.

Take a [build we did for Plastribution](https://www.neuralab.net/projects/plastribution/?ref=therecursive.com), the UK's leading distributor of plastics raw materials, with a catalogue of over 5,000 grades running off NetSuite. The public site carries the product range and the marketing information, so it does its job for search and for a buyer comparing grades at 11pm. The documents that actually close a technical sale sit behind a login: datasheets, material safety data sheets, [REACH ](https://echa.europa.eu/regulations/reach/understanding-reach?ref=therecursive.com)statements, certificates of analysis. **A browsing stranger sees enough to get interested. A registered customer sees plenty to specify and commit.**

The moment you gate content, you have designed a workflow, whether or not you meant to. How does a buyer request access, who reviews the request and on what criteria, how long does it take, and how much of the back office's day does it cost? Get that wrong and you have built a bottleneck your own team routes around, which puts you right back in the shadow operation.

This reframes **content management in B2B**. The job is governing who has the right to see which commercial and technical assets, and proving you can show your capability to the market without handing your intellectual property to the competition. That is a real merchant fear, and a **well-designed access model** is the answer to it.

Now lay all of this onto the systems that actually run businesses in this region, and the difficulty turns specific. Western commerce writing quietly assumes a clean, modern, well-documented API into NetSuite or SAP. **Across Central and Eastern Europe, the back office is more often** a heavily customised local ERP like Pantheon or Wand, a localised Microsoft Dynamics NAV or an in-house database that predates the current IT team. Many were never built to be connected to a website, and the modern REST API you were counting on may simply not exist.

This is why the **out of the box plugin approach breaks here**, and why a Western playbook does not transfer. Customer-specific pricing and a gated content workflow are hard enough against a modern API. Against a legacy ERP with no clean way in, they become an architecture problem you have to solve deliberately. Doing that takes a team that has already done it against these exact systems, and that experience is the part a competitor cannot copy quickly.

## What it costs to leave it shallow

None of this is an IT footnote. It shows up in the numbers that decide what the company is worth. Sales rep Edward spends more time fixing orders than closing them, and the cost is measurable. Manual quoting runs an error rate around [8 to 12%](https://www.infor.com/events/why-your-quotes-are-wrong?ref=therecursive.com). On €50M of annual quotes, that is up to €5M priced wrong every year. [Manual data entry costs roughly $28,500 per employee.](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/survey-manual-data-entry-costs-american-companies-more-than-28-000-per-employee-each-year-302516867.html?ref=therecursive.com)

Each of those is margin leaking quietly out of the business, and margin is what an acquirer multiplies at exit. A company scaling on a B2C store and a stack of spreadsheets carries a ceiling it has not hit yet, and the first serious investor to run diligence will find it before the founder does.

We have watched capable teams keep buying plugins to patch a problem that a few days of honest design work would have framed properly. Reaching for the next add-on is understandable, and sometimes a shortcut is the right call; plenty of businesses run fine on a lightly customised store. 

B2B eCommerce just isn't one of those cases. **The store is the easy 10%. The other 90% is pricing logic, approval chains, payment terms, and ERP integration.** Get that right and the spreadsheet quietly running your business disappears, because the website is finally doing its job. Get it wrong and you keep paying for it, one workaround at a time.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Serbia Celebrates Its First Unicorn
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-2/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T14:19:00.000Z
**Serbian Ominimo** has secured first part of funding for the ongoing **Series B round,** backed by the investment arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The deal assigns the Novi Sad-headquartered startup a valuation of €1.48 billion ($1.60 billion), officially making it **Serbia’s** [**first tech unicorn**](https://www.therecursive.com/1st-serbian-unicorn-ominimo-1-6b-valuation-ebrd-series-b/). Over roughly 15 months, Ominimo expanded its business from a valuation of €212.75 million ($230.00 million) during its Series A round (May 2025) lead by Zurich Insurance Group, to $1.6 billion valuation and unicorn status. *Ominimo is not disclosing the Series B amount at the moment as some investors will still join subsequently.* 

**Polish energy startup Pstryk** has secured **€7M** [in funding to scale its mobile-first platform](https://www.therecursive.com/polands-pstryk-lands-eur7m-to-reshape-how-households-buy-and-manage-electricity/), which helps households manage electricity consumption through dynamic pricing. The round was backed by Future Energy Ventures, Axpo, Montis, and existing investors.Pstryk combines dynamic electricity tariffs with digital energy management. Alongside the funding round, the company also expanded its leadership team to support its next phase of growth.

**Slovenian GenePlanet**, a genomics and laboratory company providing genetic testing and next-generation sequencing (NGS) services, has received **a strategic investment** from healthtech-focused investor Lauxera Capital Partners. As part of the transaction, BlackPeak Capital, which first invested in GenePlanet in 2023, has partially exited its stake while remaining a shareholder in the company.

**Bulgarian startup Nanogram** has secured **$2.2M (€1.91M)** in fresh funding. The capital comes from three investment funds: Ohio-based **Drive Capital**, which invested **$500,000**, Bulgarian **LAUNCHub Ventures**, which contributed **$900,000**, and Polish **Inovo**, which invested **$700,000**. The round also included angel investors, bringing the company's **post-money valuation to approximately $11 million**.

**Czech healthtech startup** **Carebot** has raised more than **€1.5M** in its largest funding round to date, alongside the launch of a new AI-powered mammography solution. The round was led by Garage Angels and Electron Capital Partners, with JIC Ventures joining as a new investor alongside existing backers Gain Ventures and Eva Janečková. The fresh capital will fund the development of new AI-driven diagnostic tools. As it scales across Europe and beyond, Carebot is also preparing a larger investment round of up to €10 million to support its next phase of global growth.

**Croatian space tech startup** **Genesis Space Flight Laboratories** secured **€1.2M** from GapMinder and Fil Rouge Capital. Founded in 2025 by microbiology researcher Bence Mátyás, Genesis is developing a reusable infrastructure platform for microgravity research based on autonomous space capsules. The investment will support the development of state-of-the-art technology for reusable space capsules, the launch of the first commercial missions, and the expansion of the company’s operations, with the goal of making microgravity research more accessible globally.

**Lithuanian startup** **Sigvi** has raised **€1.2M in a pre-seed funding round** led by Superhero Capital, with participation from angel investors including LitBAN Chairman Vladas Lašas. Founded in 2023, the company is developing an AI-powered operating system for independent car rental operators, helping automate fleet management, pricing, and rental operations. The funding will support product development and the company's expansion across Europe.

**Croatian AYMO Ventures**, [that debuted last summer with €52M fund](https://www.therecursive.com/aymo-ventures-aymo-growth-fund-closing-accelerator-investment-strategy/), invested in Croatian legal tech startup Yure, an AI platform made for legal professionals and grounded in the law they work with, so research and drafting takes considerably less time. Founded by Matija Peric, Luka Pavlović and Marko Bosnjak, Yure.ai is already in daily use at leading domestic law firms like Porobija & Špoljarić and Croatian companies like INA, Sofascore and PPD.

**Lithuanian Ordero**, a startup developing a meal-ordering platform for schools, kindergartens, and businesses, has secured a **€150,000 investment** from venture capital funds FIRSTPICK and Lost Astronaut. The fresh funding will support continued product development, with the company aiming to expand to more than 100 partners across Poland over the next 12 months.

## Partnerships across the region

**Ukrainian drone company** [EDRONE has partnered](https://thedefender.media/en/2026/07/edrone-oves-jv-launch/?ref=therecursive.com) with **Romanian technology firm** OVES Enterprise to establish drone production in Romania. The joint initiative will manufacture Ukrainian-designed drones using Romanian industrial capabilities, combining combat-proven UAV technology with local production expertise. The project aims to support European defense demand and strengthen regional defense manufacturing capacity.

The companies will manufacture drones at a facility in Cluj-Napoca, with production set to begin in autumn 2026\. In its initial phase, the facility is expected to produce around 1,000 drones per month, including FPV drones, interceptor drones, and reconnaissance UAVs, while employing approximately 30 people.
### You Can’t Regulate Your Way to AI Sovereignty
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/you-cant-regulate-your-way-to-ai-sovereignty/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:50:56.000Z
For years, critics of Europe’s AI strategy have made the same argument: while America builds artificial intelligence, **Europe writes laws for it**. The EU AI Act became the clearest expression of that divide — a landmark attempt to govern AI that many saw as further proof that Europe was prioritizing rules over innovation.

Recent events suggest **the debate may be changing**.

In June, U.S. restrictions temporarily blocked access to Anthropic’s advanced Fable 5 model, disrupting businesses and governments across Europe before the ban was lifted just weeks later. Around the same time, **OpenAI** came under growing pressure to limit access to some of its most advanced capabilities, while **Anthropic** itself reportedly faced political scrutiny over restrictions it placed on the use of its models for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Earlier this year, the Trump administration also reportedly threatened to reconsider government contracts with Anthropic after the company refused to allow its models to be used for certain military and surveillance applications.

Whether temporary or permanent, these episodes reveal a broader shift: frontier AI is no longer being treated merely as commercial software. It is becoming a **strategic infrastructure**.

That helps explain why Austria reportedly urged the European Union to explore attracting Anthropic to establish a stronger European presence. The proposal turned one of Europe’s greatest criticisms on its head. For years, the continent’s regulatory framework was portrayed as a reason frontier AI companies would avoid Europe. Now legal predictability, regulatory stability and the rule of law were being presented as **competitive advantages**.

The irony is difficult to ignore. The same AI Act which was critiqued that it might drive innovation away may become increasingly valuable in attracting AI companies.

But there is a **deeper question hiding beneath the headlines**.

## Frontier AI doesn't grow on regulation tree

Even if Europe succeeds in becoming a safe harbor for frontier AI companies, how safe can that harbor really be?

A company relocating to Europe leaves behind the ecosystem on which frontier AI depends to operate and evolve. It still requires advanced semiconductors, hyperscale cloud providers, enormous computing capacity and vast amounts of affordable electricity. These are not peripheral inputs. They are the **essential infrastructure of modern AI**, and they remain overwhelmingly concentrated in the United States or under the control of American firms.

That dependence matters because it exposes the limits of what Europe can actually offer. A company may move its offices, employees and legal headquarters, yet it remains deeply dependent on an ecosystem of American **cloud providers**, **semiconductor supply chains**, **compute infrastructure** and, increasingly, the **energy systems** that power them.

More importantly, relocating a company does not eliminate **political leverage**. 

Governments do not need to control every part of the AI value chain to influence its direction — they only need to control one critical link. Restrict access to advanced chips, cloud infrastructure, compute capacity or another essential dependency, and the entire strategy begins to unravel. In other words, **moving a company does not necessarily move its dependencies**.

This exposes a broader weakness in Europe’s AI strategy.

## We need “Infrastructure Effect”

For more than two decades, Europe has exercised influence through what legal scholar Anu Bradford famously described as the “Brussels Effect”: **the ability to shape global markets by setting the rules companies must follow**. It worked remarkably well for privacy, consumer protection and competition policy because access to Europe’s market was itself a powerful incentive.

Artificial intelligence breaks this otherwise complex equation.

> Unlike previous waves of digital innovation, frontier AI is constrained by height-end and difficult to replicate physical infrastructure. 

Compute capacity, advanced semiconductors, hyperscale data centres, abundant electricity and deep pools of capital are no longer supporting assets — they are **the new factors of production**. They cannot be legislated into existence through regulation alone.

The numbers illustrate the scale of the challenge. Today, **the United States controls roughly three-quarters of the world’s frontier AI compute**, while Europe accounts for only a small fraction. American hyperscalers also power around 70% of Europe’s cloud market, and private AI investment in the United States is nearly ten times greater than in the European Union. At the same time, the U.S. accounts for almost half of global data-centre electricity consumption and continues to expand AI infrastructure at a pace Europe has yet to match. AI leadership is increasingly determined not only by who writes the rules, but by **who owns the infrastructure.**

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## Rules cannot replace compute

This is not the first time economic power has shifted because control over the factors of production changed. During the Industrial Revolution, governments could regulate commerce, but **economic leadership ultimately belonged to those who controlled coal, steel, railways and factories**. The AI revolution is creating a similar shift. Today’s strategic assets are GPUs instead of steam engines, hyperscale data centres instead of railways, and gigawatts of electricity instead of coal.

None of this diminishes the value of the AI Act. If anything, **recent events suggest that Europe’s emphasis on legal certainty may prove to be one of its genuine competitive advantages**. In a world of growing geopolitical uncertainty, predictable institutions matter.

But predictability is only one part of this much more complex equation.

> The real risk for Europe is not that it chose to regulate AI. It is that **regulation becomes a substitute for building the capabilities that ultimately determine who leads in AI**. 

Rules cannot replace compute. They cannot manufacture semiconductors, generate electricity, build hyperscale infrastructure or create industrial scale.

Europe may well become the preferred destination for companies seeking regulatory certainty. That would be a meaningful achievement.

But unless Europe can build the broader ecosystem to support the development of the frontier AI, it will have solved only part of the equation. **Rules may attract frontier AI companies, but they cannot replace the capabilities those companies ultimately depend on.**

Europe may be able to offer regulatory shelter.

But not yet strategic autonomy.
### How to Raise New Generation of Business Angels?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/raising-new-generation-of-business-angels-in-europe-esil/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T06:02:22.000Z
Europe is investing not only in startups, but in better investors.

Years have been spent building stronger startup ecosystems, supporting founders, creating new funds, and encouraging innovation. But another key part of that community are the **business angels**. As angel investing becomes more sophisticated, educating investors is emerging as an equally important part of strengthening Europe's innovation economy.

Business angels can play a [really important role in a startup's early growth](https://www.therecursive.com/considering-an-angel-investor-for-your-startup-here-are-the-pros-and-cons/). Beyond providing capital, they often offer **mentorship, strategic guidance, industry expertise, and valuable networks**. Their involvement can also help startups build credibility with future investors. 

## Ongoing education is more important than ever

One example of this growing focus on investor education is the newly launched [**ESIL Angel Academy**](https://www.europeanesil.eu/angel-academy/?ref=therecursive.com).

The Early Stage Investing Launchpad (ESIL) launched the ESIL Angel Academy to help both aspiring and experienced business angels strengthen their investment and mentoring skills while gaining practical tools to support startups more effectively. The course is **free of charge and available online**.

Learning is becoming an essential part of angel investing. The rapid pace at which artificial intelligence is transforming deep tech, biotech, and other innovation-driven sectors **requires investors to continuously develop new skills**. At the same time, evolving regulations and increasingly complex technologies make ongoing education more important than ever.

[“Investors need to educate themselves”As investors become increasingly selective, the Czech Republic’s next growth wave may come from deep tech. Jan Lukačevič argues that while the country has no shortage of scientific talent, turning research into globally competitive startups requires stronger commercial skills.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/icon/PNG_recrop_resize_logo_only-bc4962db-cb9f-4154-93f5-ac9861fa5465.png)The RecursiveTeodora Atanasova![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/thumbnail/PERSON-no-background--3--1-541c12dc-2a5f-4549-ace0-562df61e09c6.png)](https://www.therecursive.com/deep-tech-could-be-the-czech-republics-next-big-bet-if-founders-learn-to-sell/)

Supported by the European Union through the European Innovation Council (**EIC**) and **EISMEA**, the initiative brings together the expertise of **META Group, BAE, and Bpifrance** to strengthen Europe's angel investment ecosystem.

> "Education and capacity building programs are absolutely fundamental to how you build and grow angel communities. We have to bear in mind that it's not necessarily easy to know how to angel invest. What are the skills you need? What's the process? What's the kind of knowledge I need to effectively find good deals, evaluate those deals, do the due diligence and make the right decisions? And that's really a process you learn over many years."

— said **Jenny Tooth OBE,** VP of Diversity at Business Angels Europe (BAE) and Executive Chair of UKBAA.

## The importance of angel investing in (Central and Eastern) Europe

For Central and Eastern Europe, improving investor education could have an even greater impact, as developing ecosystems continue to attract more founders, investors, and international capital.

At the regional, national, and even European level, there are several networks of business angels, the Enterprise Europe Network, several innovation agencies, and regional hubs. However, **Jana Drzkova,** Head of Business Development at EuroQuity, Bpifrance, commented that she still sees challenges. "*What I see as a bit difficult is cooperating across these networks to really support innovations —from research and universities to the market — and to accelerate their growth. I see *high potential, especially in cross-border cooperation and cross-border investments*, because some countries focus more on specific verticals*."

What is important as well is knowledge transfer, she points. 

> "*For example, business angels in Western Europe who are already used to investing in specific verticals can transfer their knowledge to the widening countries. We can empower business angels to invest across borders and even transfer the flow of money from Western Europe to the widening countries. I think this is a very positive signal for business angels; they are very valuable to the Commission, which is really looking to work with them to support their deal flow and build a stronger Europe together*."

Europe's startup success won't depend only on producing more founders. It will also depend on building a **stronger community of knowledgeable investors** capable of backing innovation over the long term. As investor education gains momentum, initiatives like the ESIL Angel Academy demonstrate how developing better-prepared business angels can ultimately help create stronger startup ecosystems across Europe.

## What do angel investors learn at the ESIL Academy?

Participants gain practical guidance on every stage of the investment journey, including identifying promising startups, negotiating deals, mentoring founders, and navigating investments in deep-tech companies, while also exploring the role of diversity in building stronger investment ecosystems.

The course is free of charge and fully online, **offering over 20 hours of content led by more than 30 industry experts** who have collectively deployed over €400 million in risk capital and supported 2,449 founders across Europe and the US. 

It's **delivered by leading angels, funds, and angel groups from across Europe**, alongside representatives of the European Commission's European Innovation Council, bringing a combined 300+ years of early-stage investing experience. Participants also get access to downloadable templates and tools they can apply directly to their own deals.
### Poland's Pstryk Lands €7M to Reshape How Households Buy and Manage Electricity
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/polands-pstryk-lands-eur7m-to-reshape-how-households-buy-and-manage-electricity/
Last updated: 2026-07-30T13:31:09.000Z
With backing from Future Energy Ventures, Axpo, Montis, and existing investors, Pstryk is scaling its mobile-first platform that gives households greater control over electricity consumption through dynamic pricing.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Greece (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-greece-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-03T11:42:08.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Greece and key details about the startups.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Building a Startup During War Without VC. And Without Replacing People With AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/building-a-startup-during-war-without-vc-and-without-replacing-people-with-ai/
Last updated: 2026-07-29T12:45:15.000Z
Bootstrapped from day one, Kiss My Apps has grown into one of Ukraine's largest consumer app companies, reaching more than 160 million downloads.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why CEE Businesses Need Multilingual AI Built for Their Languages
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/why-cee-businesses-need-multilingual-ai-built-for-their-languages/
Last updated: 2026-07-29T14:31:50.000Z
A Croatian marketing agency I worked with last year had a problem they couldn't quite name. Their **output had tripled** since adopting a popular writing assistant. And within two months, **their engagement metrics had quietly collapsed**. 

When we audited their articles together, the issue was obvious: every piece read like a well-meaning translation. Grammatically correct. Culturally hollow. Their audience felt it, even if the analytics took a few months to confirm it.

That gap between efficiency and resonance is **the real story of AI-generated writing in Central and Eastern Europe right now**. For most local businesses, it is quietly eroding the promised gains.

## Why generic writing tools fail regional languages

The major writing assistants on the market were built primarily on English-language datasets. That just reflects what was available at scale when training happened. But the practical consequence for businesses operating in Macedonian, Bulgarian, Croatian, or Serbian is significant: **these languages are underrepresented not just in volume but in cultural register**, idiom, and the kind of nuance that makes native readers trust a text.

The output technically works, but it doesn't resonate. Native speakers can quickly recognize it. And increasingly, **so do ranking algorithms**.

Google has moved well beyond matching keywords. Its systems reward genuine engagement time on page, return visits, and organic backlinks. Register-mismatched output simply underperforms, regardless of production speed. Across SMEs in the Balkans, the pattern is consistent: **the productivity gains from generic writing assistants erode within three to six months** as quality drags down organic visibility.

[How Machines Absorb Cultural Heritage (And What Gets Lost in Translation)An AI confidently declares that Nikola Tesla was Serbian. Prompt the same model in Croatian, and Tesla becomes Croatian. Both answers arrive with perfect![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/icon/PNG_recrop_resize_logo_only-63e1ce0c-da18-4d98-bfe6-a671fbbbae56.png)The RecursiveKároly Boczka![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/thumbnail/ai-model-cultural-training-647477a2-0bbc-4e5f-a46e-36c8583b8a9d.png)](https://www.therecursive.com/how-machines-absorb-cultural-heritage-and-what-gets-lost-in-translation/)

## From SEO to GEO: The shift most regional businesses haven't caught up with

Fundamentally, I hear this constantly from founders across the region: “*We’re doing SEO*.” What they're usually not doing is preparing for what comes next. **Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, and Google's AI Overviews** are now genuine discovery channels. 

This approach is what practitioners call GEO, ***Generative Engine Optimization***, and it changes the strategic equation fundamentally.

That Croatian agency’s well-meaning translation output is exactly the kind of writing that would fail to get cited under GEO. Traditional SEO is about ranking in an algorithm. GEO is about being cited by an AI system when someone asks a relevant question. These systems pull exclusively from authoritative, well-structured, factually grounded sources. Thin or culturally flat writing gets filtered out entirely — it doesn’t rank, and it doesn’t get cited.

For businesses in the Western Balkans and broader region, this situation creates **specific urgency**. Companies that invest in high-quality, locally authentic writing are now building a structural advantage that will compound over the next three to five years. The early-mover window is still open, but not for long.

## The architecture problem that nobody names

Across regional operations, the problem is rarely effort or intent. It’s mainstream writing assistants applied poorly, the mentioned agency’s writing assistant was a textbook example of that single-model culprit.

The mainstream writing assistants are built around a single underlying model, usually one of the major US-developed LLMs. That model may be excellent at English, adequate at German, and genuinely weak at Macedonian or Bulgarian. When you’re locked into that system, you inherit its limitations across every language it handles.

**A more effective approach routes each task to the model best suited for it:** whether GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, or a specialized open-weight model with stronger regional coverage. The output becomes more consistent, more locally authentic, and more defensible from both an SEO and GEO standpoint. A few newer platforms are already building on this multi-model architecture. In tool evaluations across the region, this architectural choice consistently surfaces as the variable that actually moves the needle more than pricing, features, or interface design.

There's also a deeper automation gap. A meaningful difference exists between a **writing assistant that speeds up drafting and a platform that automates entire workflows**, handling multilingual variants at scale, connecting to your CMS, and integrating across your stack. For most CEE SMEs, the ceiling they're hitting isn't drafting speed, but workflow fragmentation.

## Four questions worth asking before committing to any platform

These are the questions the agency should have asked before adopting their writing assistant, the ones that reveal real differences across regional platforms:

**How was the underlying model trained for your specific language?** Claims of "30+ language support" are nearly universal. They're also nearly meaningless without specifics. Ask for native-language samples on idiomatic, context-dependent writing not straightforward product descriptions.

**Do you have control over which model runs your tasks?** Vendor lock-in is a genuine strategic risk as the LLM landscape shifts rapidly. Flexibility here is worth prioritizing over marginal feature advantages.

**What does actual editing time look like?** If your team spends 40+ minutes revising every generated draft, the productivity math collapses. The real benchmark: Does the output need light polishing or full reconstruction?

**Does the system connect to your existing stack?** Efficiency gains come from automation, not just generation speed. A writing assistant that sits isolated from your CMS, your translation pipeline, and your publishing workflow captures perhaps a third of the available upside.

## The window is open, for now

I'll be direct: the businesses that will own local search and generative discovery in the Western Balkans five years from now are the ones making deliberate investments today, not those optimizing for the cheapest output per word.

**The regional market has real structural advantages**: lower competition for high-quality native writing, audiences underserved by English-first tools, and time before larger Western European players turn serious attention this way.

For founders and marketing leads asking **where to start**, several platforms are now building around this multi-model, multilingual approach. Writer offers enterprise-grade workflow automation with model flexibility. Textie.ai is built specifically for the CEE and Balkan region, and Writesonic supports multilingual generation across a broader set of LLMs.

And last but not least, ask yourself: **are we focusing on developing content infrastructure, or are we primarily producing content?**
### AdScout Enters the US Market With a Bigger Ambition: Agentic Commerce
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/adscout-enters-the-us-market-with-a-bigger-ambition-agentic-commerce/
Last updated: 2026-07-29T07:25:24.000Z
AdScout has signed its first customers in the United States at a moment when the Bulgarian startup is outgrowing the category where it began. The company entered the market through creator commerce. Today, it is building around a broader ambition: agentic commerce.

Every major shift in commerce has rewritten the mechanics of trust. Search engines organized the web, social media humanized recommendations, and AI is now reorganizing the information that sits between a product and the decision to buy it.

That is where [AdScout](https://adscout.io/?ref=therecursive.com) finds itself today. The Bulgarian company is now preparing for broader international expansion at a moment when several developments are reinforcing one another. 

Over the past few months, AdScout has brought former Google Ads team lead Lachezar Atanasov as AI Head of Product. The company also just signed a new customer - **Ozone.bg**, **expanding its portfolio** with one of Bulgaria's largest online retailers. 

Another recent milestone is securing **a new angel investment** that will accelerate the development of its agentic commerce roadmap. The funding will support the platform as the company prepares to **expand into additional international markets**, building the infrastructure it believes will underpin a new generation of AI-driven commerce. This investment is taking AdScout further toward closing a new investment round, to accelerate scaling. 

AdScout entered the market through creator commerce, helping brands integrate creator-generated product reviews and video content directly into e-commerce experiences while allowing creators to monetize through affiliate partnerships. The proposition for the brands was about bringing themselves **closer to trust** at a time **when the buying decision is being made**. For creators, it meant a clearer route **from influence to revenue**, without having to manage the commercial and administrative burden that often comes with affiliate partnerships.

What Miroslav Stoyanov and his team kept encountering, however, was that brands needed something content alone could not provide: the infrastructure that made creator commerce workable at scale. 

Every recommendation comes with a surprising amount of work behind it: finding creators, managing campaigns, tracking affiliate links, handling payments, contracts, and reporting. For most brands, none of it happens in the same place.

## Connecting the missing infrastructure of creator commerce

That realization reshaped the company's ambition. AdScout began looking beyond creator campaigns to the infrastructure surrounding them, where every interaction generated another piece of the purchasing journey. As the number of campaigns grew, so did the value of the information they produced.

*"Commerce has always rewarded the companies that reduce friction. Search reduced the friction of finding products. Social media reduced the friction of discovering them through people you trust. We think AI reduces a different kind of friction: understanding which information is worth trusting before you make a decision." says *Miroslav Stoyanov*, CEO of AdScout.* 

That is the logic behind AdScout's move toward **agentic commerce**. At a time when almost every company claims to be AI-powered, AdScout is focused on a more practical question: what does AI make better for the people using it? 

The answer they came up with is helping people navigate the growing volume of information surrounding products, connecting reviews, recommendations, creator experiences, and purchasing data into something useful at the moment a decision needs to be made.

It seems we have reached **the end of the product specifications era**. For years, commerce treated information as something that sits next to the product, but somewhere along the way it became a natural part of the product itself. Reviews, customer feedback and behavioral cues now all shape how products are understood, compared, and trusted before a transaction takes place. A specification sheet can tell you what a product does, but you’re still more likely to buy it once you understand **why another person chose it**.

## Solving the “Trust Tax” at scale

It is perhaps no coincidence that AdScout's first US customer arrives now. As AI becomes an active participant in the buying journey, retailers are discovering that the [“Trust Tax”](https://www.therecursive.com/google-veteran-joins-bulgarian-adscout-to-tackle-trust-tax/) has deepened. **Trust now emerges from the relationship** between reviews, creator experiences, customer feedback, and every interaction surrounding a product, making it considerably harder to understand, measure, and operationalize than when purchasing decisions were shaped by a handful of touchpoints.

AdScout's ambition is to bring that complexity one step closer to a working model. The transition the company is building around is already underway, as purchasing decisions become shaped by an expanding network of **people**, **platforms**, and **AI systems**.
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Slovakia (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-slovakia-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-28T14:06:12.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Slovakia and key details about the startups.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Bulgarian Tiger Technology Raises €8.8M Series A
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-tiger-technology-raises-eur8-8m-series-a/
Last updated: 2026-07-28T07:13:17.000Z
Bulgarian enterprise infrastructure startup [Tiger Technology](https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-volleyball-star-matey-kaziyski-investment-in-tiger-technology/) has secured a **€8.8 million** ($10 million) **Series A** funding round to accelerate its international expansion and further develop its hybrid cloud data management platform for enterprise customers.

The round was led by **TCEE Fund IV**, advised by **3TS Capital Partners**, with participation from **TDJ**, **Endeavor Catalyst**, **Impetus**, and existing investors including **MFG Invest** and **Dimitar Ratchev**.

The fresh capital will support the company's expansion across the **US, Europe, and the Middle East**, while funding further product development and the growth of its sales and partner ecosystem.

> "This investment is an important validation of the technology, customer trust and international business our team has built," said **Iravan Hira, CEO of Tiger Technology**. "It gives us the resources to accelerate our global expansion, amplify our partnerships with leading cloud and technology platforms, and bring Tiger Technology's always-on, AI-ready data infrastructure to many more companies operating in mission-critical environments."

## Building hybrid infrastructure for AI

Founded in Bulgaria, Tiger Technology develops software that helps enterprises manage data across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments without disrupting existing operations. Its flagship platform, **Tiger Bridge**, enables organizations to seamlessly access and move data between storage environments while preserving existing infrastructure.

The company says its technology addresses a growing challenge for enterprises adopting AI. According to Tiger Technology, more than **40% of enterprise data remains stored on-premises**, around **80% is unstructured**, and more than half is considered "dark data" that is never analyzed or used. As organizations increasingly deploy AI systems that rely on accessible, high-quality data, hybrid data infrastructure has become a strategic priority.

The startup estimates the global hybrid storage market will reach **$29.3 billion by 2030**, driven by enterprise AI adoption, growing volumes of unstructured data, and increasing requirements around security and data sovereignty.

### Strategic partnerships and global expansion

As part of its growth strategy, Tiger Technology plans to deepen partnerships with major hyperscale cloud providers. Earlier this year, **Amazon Web Services (AWS)** named the company a **Rising Star Partner of 2025**, recognizing its work in helping enterprises migrate and manage large-scale file infrastructures in hybrid cloud environments.

> "Many years ago, we made a bet that felt contrarian at the time," said **Alexander Lefterov, Founder and CTO of Tiger Technology**. "The industry was drawing a hard line between cloud and on-premises, but we believed enterprises would need a transparent bridge between the two. Adoption of AI, always-on data access and an increasing threat landscape are significant drivers for our solutions and our growth."

Today, the company says it manages **more than 100 petabytes of enterprise data** across sectors including transportation, media, construction, and government. Recent customer deployments have delivered up to a **10x improvement in file restore speeds** during multi-petabyte cloud migrations, reduced on-premises storage requirements by up to **90%**, and enabled organizations to unlock years of historical data for AI analysis.

## Investors back enterprise AI infrastructure opportunity

For investors, the company's positioning at the intersection of hybrid cloud infrastructure and enterprise AI was a key factor behind the investment.

> "Tiger Technology stood out through a combination of unique technical breakthroughs in petabyte-level hybrid storage, mission-critical customer deployments, and a clear market opportunity driven by AI adoption, data security and sovereignty," said **Sever Totia, Partner at 3TS Capital Partners**.

**Momchil Vassilev, Managing Director of Endeavor Bulgaria**, added that the company represents the type of globally ambitious deep tech business the organization aims to support, combining Bulgarian engineering talent with international growth ambitions.
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Slovenia (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-slovenia-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-28T10:40:34.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Slovenia and key details about the startups.

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### Pedro Santos Vieira on Risk, Capital, and the Next Generation of Startups
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/pedro-santos-vieira-on-risk-capital-and-the-next-generation-of-startups/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T08:13:53.000Z
"Are there enough people willing to pay a meaningful amount of money to have a problem solved?" Pedro Santos Vieira, Partner at 500 Global, reflects on Doers Summit, VC, founder-market fit, and the structural factors that determine which startup ecosystems produce global companies.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Poland (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-poland-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-27T13:34:20.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Poland and key details about the startups.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### 1st Serbian unicorn! Ominimo Hits $1.6B Valuation after EBRD supported Series B
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/1st-serbian-unicorn-ominimo-1-6b-valuation-ebrd-series-b/
Last updated: 2026-08-06T13:43:53.000Z
Ominimo has secured first part of funding for the ongoing **Series B round,** backed by the investment arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The deal assigns the Novi Sad-headquartered startup a valuation of €1.48 billion ($1.60 billion), officially making it **Serbia’s first tech unicorn**.

It all started not even two years ago, when a team of former McKinsey consultants decided to rewrite the insurance playbook. 

**Dušan Komar** (CEO), **Laslo Horvath** (CTO), and **Dennis Weinbender**, wanted to tackle mandatory auto insurance, a commoditized, heavily regulated product dominated by centuries-old corporations. With exceptional data science team they have built an underwriting engine in Serbia that turned motor insurance into a profitable €1.48 billion enterprise.

For Central and Eastern Europe, **the milestone carries symbolic weight**, as Komar stated following the unicorn status announcement: 

> "*This is a big moment, first of all for Ominimo, but I believe also for the entire Serbian startup ecosystem. When a country gets its first unicorn, international investment funds start to look at that country differently, and the chances of new big startups emerging from it become greater*."

## From $230 million to $1.6 billion valuation

Over roughly 15 months, Ominimo expanded its business from a valuation of €200 million ($230.00 million) during its Series A round (May 2025) led by Zurich Insurance Group, to $1.6 billion valuation and unicorn status. *Ominimo is not disclosing the Series B amount at the moment as some investors will still join subsequently.* 

A central question for investors during the company's early expansion was whether a **model calibrated in Hungary** (where Ominimo captured a 7.00% market share and sold over 300,000 policies in its first 12 months) could scale across borders.

Recent sales data indicates that the expansion model is working. Just recently in June 2026, they set a company record by selling over **$1 million worth of insurance policies in 24 hours**, with the majority of new volume coming from its expansion markets in the **Netherlands and Poland**. Based on that week’s performance, Komar shared their annualized Gross Written Premium (GWP) exceeded $300 million. 

Crucially, this growth is being underwritten at a combined ratio between 92.00% and 100.00%, even after accounting for ultimate claim liabilities, including Reported But Not Settled (RBNS) claims and Incurred But Not Reported (IBNR) provisions. In an industry where growing competitors routinely operate at combined ratios above 150.00%, maintaining a ratio at or below 100.00% confirms that the business generates an underwriting profit on the policies it writes.

With fresh backing from the EBRD, **Ominimo plans to expand its footprint into six additional European Union markets and enter the United States** within the next 12 months, testing whether its algorithm-driven underwriting model can challenge incumbent insurers on a global scale.

> "*Ominimo is one of *the most impressive insurtech companies* we have evaluated so far, thanks to the combination of exceptional growth and strong business foundations. We are glad to be able to support the company in the next phase of its development and look forward to a long-term partnership on its further growth path.*" 

\-- said **Bruno Lusic** from the EBRD.

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## Disrupting traditional insurance

The technical flaw in traditional motor insurance stems from how incumbents segment risk. On a hypothetical market of 10 million drivers, legacy insurers typically group customers into 10,000 to 100,000 broad buckets based on static demographic data. Because **safe and unsafe drivers end up in the same risk pool**, low-risk policyholders overpay to subsidize high-risk drivers.

This gap turned out to be a rock in the shoe for a couple of McKinsey consultants who spent over a decade advising European insurers (now the Omnimo's executive team). They observed that incumbents were consistently held back by three structural bottlenecks: outdated IT architecture, slow corporate decision-making, and an acute shortage of data science talent. *"We had already built similar businesses multiple times, just not for ourselves,"* commented Komar for Serbian [NIN](https://www.nin.rs/english/news/80739/dusan-komar-for-nin-diplomacy-as-a-consultant-you-advise-as-an-entrepreneur-you-decide?ref=therecursive.com#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWe%20had%20already%20built%20similar%20businesses%20multiple,what%20it%20is%20%2D%20a%20boring%2C%20commoditized%2C) when they landed Series A.

So, instead of relying on broad risk pools, Ominimo built a pricing infrastructure capable of **calculating individualized rates for millions of unique driver profiles** using extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithms.

> "Our proprietary pricing technology allows us to identify lower-risk drivers more accurately than traditional insurers and offer them some of the most competitive premiums in the market, while maintaining strong underwriting profitability."

\--explained Komar for The Recursive.

## Data Science behind it all

But how did they manage to **calculate individualized rates for millions of unique driver profiles?** Insurtechs historically struggled because they functioned as software wrappers on top of legacy infrastructure or spent heavily on acquiring customers directly. To avoid those traps Omnimo focused heavily on the engineering aspect.

**Ominimo’s technical operations are anchored in Belgrade and Novi Sad**, where the company recruits local mathematical talent. The average age across its engineering and data science teams is 25, and the group includes eight medalists from international mathematics and physics Olympiads.

"*Our desire is to continue attracting young talents from Serbia to join us in solving the most complex problems in the field of artificial intelligence in the world of insurance*," shared Komar in the announcement.

This infrastructure gives the firm significant operational leverage. While software engineers, data scientists, and business analysts make up under 5.00% of staff at traditional insurance companies, they account for **over two-thirds of Ominimo’s 100-person workforce**, pointed Komar.

For [NetokracijaRS](https://www.netokracija.rs/ominimo-insurance-srbija-223166?ref=therecursive.com), Laslo Horvath also shared then **their entire infrastructure is engineered internally on a cloud-native microservices architecture**. What this means? Because the core platform is cloud-based and vendor-independent, expanding into a new geographic market requires only deploying localized configuration parameters rather than rebuilding software infrastructure. This architectural design enables linear infrastructure cost increases alongside exponential user acquisition.

Most importantly, by maintaining complete ownership over both code and actuarial models, the engineering team introduces new system features in single days rather than the six-month iteration cycles typical among legacy insurance carriers.

## Majority are not direct sales

Last but not least differentiator for Ominimo is their business model.

*"...our strategy is to meet customers where they already are, rather than spending significant marketing budgets trying to drive traffic exclusively to our own website*," shared Komar for The Recursive. 

Approximately **one in five policies Ominimo currently sells is purchased directly through their own website**. Instead, it integrates directly into aggregator platforms, price comparison engines, and broker networks where drivers already search for coverage. This keeps customer acquisition costs minimal.

The share of purchases through their own website continues to increase as their brand awareness grows, added Komar pointing that, however, **their objective is not to maximise direct sales at the expense of other channels**. 

> *"Our philosophy is to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy our products through the channel they naturally prefer. This is why, in every market where we operate, we partner with price comparison websites, brokers and other distribution partners alongside our own direct channel. We view these channels as complementary rather than competing, and believe this omnichannel approach is one of the key drivers of our growth."*

Their recent expansion to Netherlands and Poland proved this model works, but more about their exponential growth and future plans find out this week in the upcoming deep-dive interview with Dušan Komar.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: New Ukrainian Fund Launches; will.i.am Backs a Hungarian Startup
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly/
Last updated: 2026-07-25T13:19:23.000Z
## CEE Deals

**Raintree** has acquired **Vilnius-based Spike Technologies**, bringing agentic AI voice technology into its electronic health record (EHR) platform for rehabilitation and physical therapy providers. The integration aims to automate labor-intensive revenue cycle management tasks such as payer calls, claims follow-ups, prior authorizations, eligibility checks, and patient outreach. By embedding AI directly into its platform, Raintree is expanding its push toward more autonomous healthcare operations and reducing administrative workload for providers.

**Hungarian co-founded edtech startup imagi** has raised a $4.5 million seed round to expand its AI learning platform for students and teachers in the US and beyond. The round was led by Brighteye Ventures and [Day One Capital](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/day-one-capital-fund/), with participation from FemInvest and We Are Human, with [**will.i.am**](http://will.i.am/?ref=therecursive.com) among the investors. Operating across more than 100 US school districts, imagi provides K-12 students with supervised access to AI tools through a curriculum focused on AI literacy. The company has also partnered with OpenAI and Lovable to integrate AI tools into classrooms with safety guardrails for students and support for educators.

Romanian [**GapMinder**](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/gapminder/) has led a **seed funding round in Croatian healthtech startup Lasken AI**, alongside [Fil Rouge Capital](https://www.therecursive.com/croatian-vc-fil-rouge-capital-marks-one-year-and-4-new-investments-in-romania/). The company, founded by Patric Jarchow and Leonard Unger, is building a healthcare data intelligence platform that transforms fragmented public healthcare information into continuously updated datasets for pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organizations. The funding will accelerate Lasken AI's commercial expansion, starting with Germany before scaling across Europe's largest pharmaceutical markets, while supporting further development of its AI-powered healthcare intelligence platform.

**Prague-based fintech startup Plexo** has secured backing from [**DEPO Ventures**](https://www.therecursive.com/czech-startup-investor-pullback/) to build infrastructure connecting financial institutions using stablecoins for cross-border payments. As stablecoins gain traction in international trade, the market remains fragmented, with banks, exchanges, payment providers, and OTC traders relying on different technologies, contracts, and compliance processes. Plexo aims to simplify these connections, which can currently take months to establish. The startup has also attracted the attention of the Central Bank of Kenya, which invited Plexo to consult on regulations for corporate stablecoin payments.

Swiss travel platform **Travelnode**, majority-owned by private equity funds, Slovakian **Sandberg Capital** and Czech **ARX Equity Partners**, has [acquired **Rentlio**](https://www.netokracija.com/travelnode-akvizirao-rentlio-245734?ref=therecursive.com)**, Croatia’s second-largest provider of tourism software solutions**. In a move to consolidate the European hospitality-tech market, this is their second significant acquisition in recent weeks; they recently acquired Italian software company Podcamp, which develops software specialized in campsite management. Travelnode previously also bought Dubrovnik-based platform Phobs, so the synergy of Phobs and Rentlio will make it the market leader in software solutions for hotels, campsites and apartments in Croatia and Slovenia. Rentlio and Phobs together have almost a hundred employees and generate more than ten million euros in revenue.

## Newly Launched Fund

Ukrainian defense tech investment platform **Resist.UA** [has launched](https://www.therecursive.com/new-eur50m-fund-bets-on-ukraines-defense-tech-founders/) **Resist 2.0**, a new European investment fund targeting **up to €50 million** in commitments to connect international investors with Ukraine's growing defense and dual-use technology sector.

Established in Estonia, the fund is designed to support Ukrainian and European companies with Ukrainian roots developing technologies shaped by frontline requirements and validated in combat. According to Resist.UA, the fund will work with qualified international investors while helping scale battlefield-proven technologies for global markets.

## Outside Tech, Inside the Ecosystem

[Serbian specialty coffee chain Kafeterija](https://www.therecursive.com/blackpeak-capital-invests-kafeterija-expansion/) has acquired Bulgarian coffee and food brand Eddy's, expanding its presence in Southeast Europe. The deal marks another step in [Kafeterija's regional expansion](https://www.therecursive.com/blackpeak-capital-invests-kafeterija-expansion/), following backing from growth equity investor [**BlackPeak Capital**](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/blackpeak-capital/). As part of the acquisition, Eddy's locations will introduce a broader beverage selection, including Kafeterija's signature coffee, while continuing to operate under the established local brand.
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Lithuania (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-lithuania-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-24T13:17:56.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Lithuania and key details about the startups.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### What Happens When You Start a Company with Nothing but Conviction
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/gleb-babiy-bootstrapping-aspect-health/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T14:36:20.000Z
Most startups collapse when crisis hits. Aspect Health founder Gleb Babiy built his in it. From zero-dollar recruiting to balancing clinical precision with founder speed, here is a story on how the raw grit wins.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Estonia (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-estonia-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T14:35:53.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Estonia and key details about the startups.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### A Billion-Dollar Question: What Should Companies Actually Do with AI?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/what-should-companies-actually-do-with-ai/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T10:17:02.000Z
Artificial intelligence has accumulated enough mythology to become its own **management problem**.

Somewhere between the declarations of one-person billion-dollar companies and the endless stream of AI-generated thought leadership, a practical question has become surprisingly difficult to answer: 

> What should companies actually do with AI?

For **Igor Bogicevic**, CEO and co-founder of Deyta.ai, the answer starts with human judgment. For **Ioana Alexandra Frincu**, CTO at Eazy Asigurări, it starts with an overloaded inbox.

Together, they offered something more useful than another AI prediction: start small, solve real problems, and don’t confuse automation with autonomy.

## Automation is not the goal? Liberation is.

Bogicevic opened with a reminder that felt almost unfashionable in today’s AI climate: automation is not the goal. Liberation is.

The point is not to prove that software can imitate people. The point is to remove repetitive work so people spend more time where decisions actually matter.

**“How can we actually liberate ourselves to do more strategic work,* more work that actually has a high value?”* Bogicevic asked.

> *“That’s always been the name of the game since the industrial revolution. Your value is not in writing more emails. It might be closing more customers, it might be handling the board… how to free yourself to have more time to really do the high-value work?”*

That framing quietly changes **how AI projects get selected.**

Instead of starting with the technology (Which model? Which agent? Which platform?) **start with friction**.

## 50 times cheaper: How a CTO automates insurance

At the AI workshop at Hellen’s Rock Retreat, Ioana Alexandra Frincu, demonstrated how her team built an AI-powered email triage system for about €1,000 a year, ditching enterprise tools that cost 50 times more and saving employees hours of manual work every day.

The company receives roughly 5,000 incoming emails per month through a shared inbox. Those messages include sales inquiries, but also insurance claims — and claims come with legal deadlines.

*“We have a legal requirement to respond to claim notifications in a certain number of days. If we don't do that, we can get legal repercussions,”* Frincu explained.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/DAY2_16-1.JPG)

****Ioana Alexandra Frincu**, CTO at Eazy Asigurări | Photo: Helen's Rock Founder Retreat

Initially, a person manually reviewed and redirected incoming emails. It worked until it didn’t. As volume increased, **messages started getting delayed or missed**. The issue wasn’t productivity anymore, it became risk. Instead of buying a large enterprise automation stack, Frincu’s team built a lightweight workflow using open-source tooling.

The system monitors Outlook, checks incoming emails, interprets content through AI models, and routes messages to the right team. The first version wasn’t particularly sophisticated. No memory. No autonomous agents. No complex orchestration. Just classification and routing.

***“It's not very smart, but smart enough to do the job,”*** Frincu said.

And that turned out to be enough. According to her, comparable enterprise solutions can cost upwards of $50,000 annually.

> *“This is what enterprise providers sell you for $50,000 a year and upwards. And if you build it on your own in n8n, it costs about a thousand a year. So it's 50 times cheaper.”*

The second version of the workflow introduced something more difficult. 

Insurance claims are not one-off events. Once a claim is opened, every future interaction needs to reach the same handler. Now the system had to remember the state. By connecting email routing to a regularly refreshed internal dataset, the workflow started assigning follow-up communication automatically. The reported result: **hours recovered every day**. The automation saved the team three hours a day and the implementation time was two days, including the testing. 

## The one thing we have as humans? Taste and judgment

While advocating for automation, Bogicevic delivers a strong dose of realism, warning against the **sensationalist narratives often found on social media**. He stresses that as more tasks become automated, our core value shifts to oversight, critical thinking, and discernment. The ability to evaluate the output of an AI, to question its conclusions, and to apply context-specific wisdom is a skill that cannot be outsourced to a machine.

Bogicevic pointed to a broader concern raised across the industry: that **blindly outsourcing decision-making can make teams faster, but also more average**. AI can help generate possibilities; judgment still determines which ones matter.

> *“You should keep your mind open. And you should use your judgment as a human. That’s the best thing that we have: taste and judgment… because so many other things can be automated right now.”*

## Just have fun… this whole thing is a big experiment

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/DAY2_13.JPG)

****Igor Bogicevic**, CEO and co-founder of Deyta.ai | Photo: Helen's Rock Founder Retreat

The AI landscape is moving at a breakneck pace, but Bogicevic shares that **we are still at the very beginning** of this new technological chapter. This uncertainty, he suggests, should be seen not as a risk, but as an invitation to participate.

*“Just have fun. I mean, this is a whole big experiment in some sense,”* he advises. 

> *“It feels like it’s been 20 years since this all started, everything is moving so fast. But if you just look, the frontier is still open. It’s so many things are undefined.”*

His final piece of advice is a practical call to action: rather than waiting for the perfect, all-encompassing AI solution, **the time to start is now, with the real-world problems we face every day.**

> *“Pick something that’s your real problem. Try to automate it. And, you know, let’s see how it goes.”*
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Romania (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-romania-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-10T07:15:18.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Romania and key details about the startups.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### 150 CEE Startups and Counting: Inside 28DIGITAL’s Push to Scale Regional Tech
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startups-28digital-push-to-scale-regional-tech/
Last updated: 2026-07-22T13:57:31.000Z
In recent years, data from the European Innovation Scoreboard has highlighted a persistent dynamic across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE): while the physical infrastructure and technical talent required for a digital economy are firmly in place, the region often struggles with the connective layer required to convert local innovations into internationally scaled ventures.

To understand how European innovation networks are addressing this divide, we spoke with **Federico Menna**, CEO of **28DIGITAL (formerly EIT Digital)**. The organization’s activity across the CEE region points to a multi-tiered approach designed to connect talent, early-stage research, and established enterprises with broader European markets.

## Early-stage validation

For early-stage founders in CEE, navigating the path from a working prototype to an investment-ready company remains one of the primary hurdles. 

28DIGITAL addresses this through its **Venture Incubation Program (VIP)**, a 12-week initiative providing customer validation, mentoring, and up to €25,000 in equity-supported prize funding. The program intentionally targets Regional Innovation Scheme (RIS) countries to help bridge the innovation output gap between Eastern and Western Europe.

To date, **28DIGITAL reports supporting over 150 startups across CEE**, including 14 in its most recent cycle. Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria continue to lead in venture volume, while Hungary has seen steady momentum with 11 teams participating over recent editions.

Several notable regional ventures illustrate the program’s focus on market validation:

- **Restimo (Poland):** Used early program support to refine its MVP and business model, allowing the startup to pivot during market disruptions and secure subsequent investment rounds.
- **finQbit (Poland):** Founded in 2023, the startup develops quantum-ready financial risk infrastructure for banks. After joining the Venture Incubation Program in 2024, finQbit raised over $1 million in total funding, secured a €500,000 European Innovation Council (EIC) grant, and joined international trade delegations to markets like Dubai.
- **Omnio (Bulgaria):** Founded by former financial compliance practitioner Stoyan Lozanov, the startup built an AI-driven platform automating anti-money-laundering and customer screening processes.

As 28DIGITAL expands its operational footprint across Central and Eastern Europe, ****several of its core programs are currently accepting applications for upcoming cohorts**. Please check all active calls directly on the [28DIGITAL Calls & Opportunities Portal](https://28digital.eu/all-startup-opportunities/?ref=therecursive.com)!

## Moving scaleups to market

As ventures grow, the challenge shifts from validation to market entry and cross-border scaling. 28DIGITAL addresses this through the **Co-Creation Accelerator** (the evolution of its Open Innovation Factory), which pairs early-stage deep-tech startups with established corporate partners over four months to solve concrete operational challenges.

Selected startups receive up to €250,000 in project support (with no co-investment required) along with direct access to a network of more than 270 European corporate and research partners. For regional ventures like Bulgarian healthtech startup **Checkpoint Care**, 28DIGITAL has supported fundraising efforts by connecting the team with investors and refining their proposition for broader European expansion.

## Corporate partnerships and flagship initiatives

Beyond individual startup support, 28DIGITAL engages with institutional and corporate anchors across the region to drive structural digital transformation:

### Hungary: EDIH leadership & industrial collaboration

The organization maintains a strongly embedded institutional presence in Hungary through the **DigitalTech European Digital Innovation Hub (EDIH)**, which 28DIGITAL leads. Backed by €5.4 million from the Digital Europe Programme, DigitalTech EDIH serves as a reference hub for startups, SMEs, and public institutions, focusing on cybersecurity, blockchain, fintech, and edtech. The consortium includes major academic partners such as Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) and Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), and is integrated into the European Corridor of Cybersecurity EDIHs (ECCE).

On the corporate side, **Bosch Hungary** has served as a key partner, hosting the 2024 EIT Digital Master School graduation ceremony and participating in 28DIGITAL's **Corporate Innovation Club,** an initiative aimed at generating direct inter-firm collaboration across the region.

### Romania: Industrial digitization & healthtech networks

28DIGITAL is expanding its ecosystem footprint in Romania, aiming to build on its academic partnership with UBB in Cluj to increase startup adoption and accelerate digitization across local industries. Corporate entities seeking access to digital talent pipelines and startup co-creation are invited to engage.

Concurrently, Romania participates in major flagship initiatives like the **UNITE Project**, a €20 million pan-European digital health initiative led by 28DIGITAL spanning seven regions. Through UNITE, interregional consortia can access open calls offering nearly €1 million each to validate digital health solutions across borders.

### Slovakia & Bulgaria: Regional expansion

- **Slovakia:** Engagement centers on the Horizon Europe **RIVCircular** project, where 28DIGITAL manages digital solutions for the circular economy across eight EU regions, including Košice.
- **Bulgaria:** 28DIGITAL is actively working toward establishing a physical office footprint in Bulgaria and is currently seeking local strategic and corporate partners. The objective is to provide Bulgarian entrepreneurs with direct access to funding, mentorship, and European networks, building on early success stories like Omnio and Checkpoint Care.

## Retaining STEM talent

Parallel to early venture building is the **long-term task of talent development**. A primary objective for regional growth is ensuring that technical talent remains in CEE while developing the skills needed to build proprietary products rather than relying solely on outsourced services.

Guerrini explains how through its pan-European education initiatives, **28DIGITAL works with local academic institutions** to integrate business creation into technical curricula. 

A key milestone occurred when **Babeș-Bolyai University (UBB) in Cluj-Napoca**, Romania, joined the EIT Digital Master School network, introducing its cybersecurity expertise to a dual-degree curriculum that combines deep-tech training with entrepreneurship. As UBB Professor **Simona Motogna** observed regarding the local ecosystem, there is a growing recognition that relying primarily on outsourcing is not sustainable over the long term, making local investment in product development and venture creation essential.

Similar trajectories are visible in doctoral research. In Hungary, PhD candidate **Csaba Györgyi** completed his studies through the EIT Digital Doctoral School in collaboration with Ericsson, co-inventing five patents and developing the open-source networking tool **P4RROT**, demonstrating how applied academic research can transition into commercial technology.

## Last, but not least, the tech transfer

Bridging the gap between university research labs and commercial markets represents a critical pillar. Through 28Digital's **SPIN programme** (including the SPIN: Rise track), researchers receive training in IP valorization and business development.

In recent editions, participation across the CEE and DACH regions remained strong. The Eastern regional cluster (encompassing Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Czechia, Austria, and Germany) **contributed 22 research participants** in 2024 and 25 in 2025 across key domains including Health Tech, Smart Manufacturing, Cybersecurity, and dual-use technologies, supported by local partners such as Warsaw-based **Applejack Lab**.

As 28DIGITAL expands its operational footprint across Central and Eastern Europe, **several of its core programs are currently accepting applications for upcoming cohorts**. Please check all active calls directly on the [28DIGITAL Calls & Opportunities Portal](https://28digital.eu/all-startup-opportunities/?ref=therecursive.com)!
### "Investors need to educate themselves"
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/deep-tech-could-be-the-czech-republics-next-big-bet-if-founders-learn-to-sell/
Last updated: 2026-07-22T14:10:47.000Z
As investors become increasingly selective, the Czech Republic's next growth wave may come from deep tech. Jan Lukačevič argues that while the country has no shortage of scientific talent, turning research into globally competitive startups requires stronger commercial skills.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### New €50M Fund Bets on Ukraine's Defense Tech Founders
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/new-eur50m-fund-bets-on-ukraines-defense-tech-founders/
Last updated: 2026-07-21T14:24:24.000Z
Ukrainian [defense tech](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/defense-tech/) investment platform **Resist.UA** has launched **Resist 2.0**, a new European investment fund targeting **up to €50 million** in commitments to connect international investors with Ukraine's growing defense and dual-use technology sector.

Established in Estonia, the fund is designed to support Ukrainian and European companies with Ukrainian roots developing technologies shaped by frontline requirements and validated in combat. According to Resist.UA, the fund will work with qualified international investors while helping scale battlefield-proven technologies for global markets.

### Why founders matter more than products

Unlike many traditional defense investment vehicles that prioritize products, Resist.UA says its investment strategy focuses first on **founders and teams** capable of building globally competitive technology companies under the most demanding conditions.

> "Over the past two years, Ukrainian defense tech companies have attracted more than **$500 million** in private investment, reflecting growing international interest in the sector and its long-term potential," said **Roman Sulzhyk**, Founding Partner of Resist.UA.

Sulzhyk also added that they see Ukrainian defense tech not only as a wartime necessity, but as an emerging industry being built in real time. *"Ukraine has exceptional human capital — engineers, entrepreneurs, and teams capable of creating world-class products. Our goal is to help these companies scale and to make Ukraine attractive for international* [*investment*](https://www.therecursive.com/europe-defense-tech-investment-regulation-vc/)*."*

### Building on the first fund

Founded in **2023**, Resist.UA operates at the intersection of venture capital, military expertise, and battlefield-tested innovation.

Its first investment vehicle, backed by Ukrainian capital, focused on pre-seed and seed-stage miltech startups, combining financing with operational support to help early teams transform prototypes into scalable businesses.

According to the company, the first fund:

- built a portfolio valued at **more than $10 million**;
- evaluated **over 600** defense tech projects;
- engaged with **100+ Ukrainian defense startups**;
- invested in companies including **Farsight Vision** and [**M-FLY**](https://www.therecursive.com/ukrainian-defense-tech-startup-m-fly-raises-e1-19m-uav-laser-guidance/), while much of its portfolio remains undisclosed due to security considerations.

Resist.UA says it follows a hybrid venture capital and private equity model, placing particular emphasis on long-term company growth, manufacturing capabilities, and a **reinvestment-first strategy**, where returns are directed back into scaling portfolio companies and strengthening Ukraine's defense innovation ecosystem.

### Betting on founders

For the investment team, founders remain the central investment criterion.

> "For us, the key factor is people. Technologies can evolve, products can pivot, but strong teams are what ultimately build scalable companies," said **Oleksii Komlichenko**, Partner at Resist.UA.

The fund's leadership combines expertise across international finance, legal structuring, venture investing, and talent management. Among its founders is Roman Sulzhyk, who previously spent more than two decades in international capital markets, including roles at **J.P. Morgan** and **Deutsche Bank** in New York and London.

> "We are not building a short-term story," Sulzhyk said. "Our goal is to help shape a new industry that can become one of the key drivers of Ukraine's post-war economy and integrate Ukrainian technologies into the global security and defense market."
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Albania & Kosovo (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-albania-kosovo-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T10:11:18.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Albania & Kosovo, and key details about the startups.

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### Biggest Funding Rounds: Czech Republic H1 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-czech-republic-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T14:22:47.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for the Czech Republic and key details about the startups.

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### Biggest Funding Rounds in Latvia (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-latvia-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T14:15:16.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Latvia and key details about the startups.

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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Pension Capital Reaching Eleven Labs, Revolut, Databricks...
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-pension-capital-reaching-high-growth-companies/
Last updated: 2026-07-18T09:44:13.000Z
## CEE Deals

The Ukrainian-founded AI vehicle inspection startup, **Self Inspection**, has [successfully closed a $10 million financing round](https://www.selfinspection.com/press-releases/self-inspection-raises-10-million-vehicle-condition-intelligence?ref=therecursive.com) led by **Sheryl Sandberg**'s Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. Spearheaded by Ukrainian founder and CEO **Constantine Yaremtso**, the company is developing a smartphone-based platform to create a trusted, standardized system of record for vehicle condition data. Notably, Bulgarian venture capital firm **BrightCap Ventures** joined the round as the sole European fund to back the technology. The financing also secured vital strategic checks from prominent automotive and financial entities, including Westlake Financial and U.S. AutoForce. Self Inspection will use the capital to advance its AI capabilities and expand across North America and Europe.

Prague-based HTG Medical has [raised €450,000](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/htg-medical-raises-450k?ref=therecursive.com) and secured EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR) certification for its HTG Urogram, an automated urine monitoring device designed for intensive care units. The funding brings the Czech medtech startup's total capital raised to more than €1 million and supports its commercial rollout across Europe. By replacing manual urine output tracking with automated, real-time monitoring integrated into hospital systems, HTG Medical aims to reduce nursing workloads, improve measurement accuracy, and accelerate expansion into international markets.

Fil Rouge Capital has invested in **PropsMadness**, a Croatian sports analytics platform that centralizes player stats, matchup context, and injury updates into a single hub. Founded by Trpimir Zovak and Vedran Aračić, the startup has rapidly expanded its coverage from the NBA to the NFL, MLB, WNBA, and World Cup. Backed by a high-caliber team of nine with a track record of building massive-scale products, PropsMadness has already captured over 4,000 users, and this funding round will be used to accelerate its growing momentum. The amount was not disclosed.

## Funds, M&A, and other updates

**Aspire11** has [deployed the first €100 million](https://www.therecursive.com/aspire11-deploys-first-eur100m-backing-revolut-elevenlabs-and-databricks/) from its €515 million fund, marking the initial investment phase of the platform. The first portfolio includes companies such as **Revolut, ElevenLabs, Databricks, Vinted, VAST Data and Baseten.** The deployment marks another step in Europe's broader effort to bring more long-term institutional capital into innovation.

Bulgarian VC firm **Vitosha Ventures** has [announced the first 10 investments from its €34 million Fund II](https://www.therecursive.com/vitosha-ventures-announces-first-10-investments-from-eur34m-fund-ii-adds-rob-kniaz-as-general-partner/), which plans to back close to **80 Bulgarian startups** by 2030\. The firm has also appointed Hoxton Ventures co-founder Rob Kniaz as a new General Partner. Vitosha Ventures Fund II closed in May 2026 and plans to invest in close to 80 Bulgarian startups through 2030, with individual investments ranging from €100,000 to €1 million.

**Provectus Capital Partners** agreed to buy a majority stake in a private healthcare group in Bulgaria, together with INVENIO Partners. The group includes the Haelan network of outpatient centers, a children’s clinic, and two hospitals, and it has about 650 staff and over €20 million in yearly revenue. The deal includes new funding to help the group grow, and some existing shareholders will also sell part of their shares. INVENIO will stay on as a significant minority owner, and both investors will support expansion through new clinics and selected acquisitions. The transaction still needs normal regulatory approvals.

**YEP Accelerator** has announced the [cohort of Ukrainian startups](https://techukraine.org/2026/07/07/bridging-ecosystems-yep-accelerator-unveils-first-ukrainian-startup-cohort-headed-to-silicon-valley/?ref=therecursive.com)selected for its first international accelerator program, featuring a five-week in-person program in San Francisco. This fall, the teams will travel to the US to work on scaling their businesses, entering the American market, and raising investment. To date, organizers have already secured soft commitments of $3 million in potential investment from partner funds and continue to build out their investor pool.

## Other relevant news from the region and abroad

The European [defense lab NestAI](https://thenextweb.com/news/nestai-finland-estonia-sovereign-defence-ai?ref=therecursive.com) has launched a **sovereign training capability for battlefield autonomy and command orchestration**. Powered by its NestOS platform, the initiative integrates real operational data with synthetic simulations to build models that continuously adapt to evolving, contested threats. Partnering with the Finnish and Estonian Defence Forces, AMD, and the LUMI AI Factory, NestAI wants to secure Europe's technological autonomy at the edge.

**The European Union** is launching a new fast-track [financing tool for defense tech startups](https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/commission-welcomes-political-agreement-programme-agile-and-rapid-defence-innovation-agile-2026-07-16%5Fen?ref=therecursive.com), with the AGILE (Agile and Rapid Defence Innovation) programme of €115 million. The programme is set to accelerate the development, testing and market uptake of disruptive defence innovative products, focusing on supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), including start-ups and scale-ups.

Poland is [launching one of the largest investment programmes](https://mycompanypolska.pl/artykul/7-mld-zl-na-polskie-innowacje-rusza-wielki-plan-budowy-gospodarki-bezpieczenstwa/20951?ref=therecursive.com) from the National Recovery Plan. **The Security and Defence Fund** (FBiO), with an amount of nearly 23 billion PLN (€5 billion). The construction of the Fund is based on two pillars. The loan part accounts for 70 percent of the funds and is supported by Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego. In turn, the capital part is 30 percent of the fund, for which the specially established company Chrobry S.A. is responsible.

In addition to that, the Polish Minister of Finance and Economy, Andrzej Domański, announced recently the creation of a special fund worth 0.5 billion PLN (\~€115 million), which is to **support Polish companies from the space sector**.

Applied Computing, a London-based AI company building foundation AI for energy operators, recently [announced a €17.4 million ($20 million) funding round](https://tech.eu/2026/07/16/applied-computing-lands-20m-to-expand-foundation-ai-for-energy/?ref=therecursive.com), as well as its expansion into the United States. The round was led by KBR, with **Databricks Ventures** also joining the round as a new investor in the company.

Munich-based [QuantumDiamonds](https://the-recursive.ghost.io/ghost/?ref=therecursive.com#/editor/post/69b91ad1e98907000188de36) has raised €91 million in equity and non-dilutive funding to scale its **innovative quantum sensing technology**. The firm uses synthetic diamond sensors to detect hidden defects in complex semiconductor chips, supporting major global manufacturers in improving production quality.
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Serbia (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-serbia-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T14:48:42.000Z
A look at seven Serbian companies that raised capital in H1 2026, from a Subotica battery gigafactory to a Belgrade AI workspace tool.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### How AI Is Reshaping the Brokerage Infrastructure
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-ai-is-reshaping-the-brokerage-infrastructure/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:51:56.000Z
Even before going through the massive boom over these past couple of years, artificial intelligence has been presented as the technology that would transform everything, including financial markets. But when we look at the results, most of the time, the adoption of AI only led to minor improvements: things like faster customer support or better analytics. Useful, certainly, but not quite “revolutionary” enough to match the promise.

**2026, however, feels like a new stage in that regard**. If before that the market had only seen what were essentially upgrades to previously-existing methods, then now we have cases like Coinbase’s AI-powered [investment advisors](https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/coinbase-is-launching-ai-tools-that-give-investment-advice-and-make-trades-on-your-behalf-190000088.html?ref=therecursive.com) capable of executing trades autonomously and Kalshi’s [‘Harrison’ agent](https://cryptobriefing.com/kalshi-ai-agent-harrison-prediction-markets/?ref=therecursive.com) that helps design and stress-test the prediction market contracts.

Taken together, these developments point to a broader shift, where **AI is finally becoming part of the trading infrastructure itself**. It is no longer being treated simply as an add-on, meant to provide surface-level enhancements while ultimately staying separate. 

As this change gradually takes place, it brings with it a very timely question: *what does it actually mean for a brokerage to become truly “AI-native?”*

## AI as the new operating layer

Financial markets have always generated **more information than any individual human trader could realistically process**. 

Price movements are influenced by countless factors: macroeconomic data, company announcements, geopolitical events, social sentiment, blockchain activity, etc. — all of which need tracking if you want to stay up-to-date. 

Even experienced professionals spend as much, if not *more*, time filtering information as they do making decisions.

Earlier generations of AI weren't particularly good at solving this problem. They could automate individual tasks, but connecting different types of information into something genuinely useful was beyond them.

That said, like it inevitably happens with any technology, AI models moved forward and became more sophisticated over time. With better data pipelines and autonomous agents in play today, **these systems are genuinely capable of not only compiling enormous amounts of information in real time, but also acting on it**. 

Artificial intelligence no longer simply presents more data to the trader. It can help organize that data, explain relationships between disjointed market events, pull out insights that would otherwise remain buried, and even make deals happen on behalf of the trader.

Of course, that doesn't make these models infallible, but it certainly does add a whole new level of practicality and usefulness, compared to many of the AI tools that financial institutions experimented with even just a year ago.

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## AI-Native means changing workflows, not adding features

I’ve seen quite a few firms that described themselves as AI-powered because they've added a chatbot or an automated assistant somewhere in their product, but, in my eyes, at least, that’s not quite enough to truly call oneself “AI-native.” Why? Because such additions don't fundamentally do anything to change how traders work.

A real AI-native brokerage approaches the problem differently: by **embedding intelligence directly into the trading environment itself**, so as to actively help its users interpret the market as they make decisions.

This matters a lot more than some might think, seeing as trading today has become less about accessing information and **more about understanding it**. 

> Market data is widely available, but the real challenge lies in identifying which signals deserve attention and which can (and should) be ignored.

## Trust is the biggest challenge

I’ll admit, this is where discussions around AI can often be overly optimistic.

Financial services operate in a very strict environment, where mistakes can be more than a little costly. Recommendations generated by an AI model influence trader choices involving substantial amounts of capital, which is why they should be approached cautiously and responsibly.

Unfortunately, even now, despite all the advancements, LLMs remain susceptible to hallucinations and false outputs. Market conditions change all the time, and because of that, **models trained on historical data can struggle during periods of serious volatility**, when everything keeps shifting very quickly.

As such, reliability and governance come to the forefront of considerations. Who validates the outputs? How are recommendations tested? How can firms explain why their AI made *that* particular suggestion?

These questions are increasingly important both to regular users and to regulators, whose attention towards AI grows sharper every day. Frameworks like the [EU AI Act](https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/?ref=therecursive.com) are pushing financial institutions to think about the explainability of models, risk management, and human oversight. Introducing AI into investment workflows cannot come at the expense of accountability, that much has become abundantly clear by now.

In terms of becoming AI-native, this means that **the task that lies before brokerages is not just technological in nature, but also organizational**. Engineering teams, compliance officers, risk managers, and business leaders all need to take part in figuring out how AI systems can be integrated into their workflows in a manner that’s auditable and trustworthy.

That process inevitably takes a longer time to work out, but it also stands to create far more sustainable products and long-lasting trust with the rest of the market. And so it’s worth the effort.

## Combining intelligence with responsibility is the future

Personally, I don't believe that AI will ever fully replace traders — just as electronic trading never eliminated the need for human expertise. What will happen instead, I think, is that we'll see a shift in what human expertise is meant to look like.

As basic information gathering becomes increasingly automated through AI, human professionals can spend more time actually evaluating scenarios and exercising their own judgment. **The competitive advantage will, in turn, come from asking better questions and making better decisions** with the information that’s equally available to everyone.

This is ultimately why I believe AI-native brokerages will become the industry standard. Financial markets have reached a level of complexity where **simply providing access to markets is no longer enough.** Helping users **understand what they're seeing** is the name of the game now. 

Creating systems where artificial intelligence enhances human decision-making without taking away the responsibility that comes with it — that’s the future of brokerage. Firms that can do that, while also remaining transparent and acknowledging the limitations of what AI can and cannot do, stand a good chance of leading in this next stage.
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Croatia (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-croatia-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T14:37:40.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Croatia and key details about the startups.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### What Comes After AGI? Sumon Sadhu on the Post-Biology Era
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/what-comes-after-agi-sumon-sadhu-on-the-post-biology-era/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:55:18.000Z
The tech world is consumed by the race to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but what happens when we get there? In a keynote session at the Hellen's Rock Founder Retreat 2026, serial AI entrepreneur, angel investor, and scientist **Sumon Sadhu** suggests: *we enter the "Post-Biology Era", where we escape the limits of our evolution*. He argues that the next three decades will see humanity shift from chasing biology to rewriting it, a transition accelerated by a single, fundamental concept he calls "the loop".

## It thinks on 20 watts

While we obsess over supercomputers, Sumon points out that the device you are using right now — your brain — is the most powerful computer on Earth. 

> “You're actually running the most powerful computer on Earth, about a billion operations per second on roughly 20W of power, the same amount as the bulb in your fridge.” 

A top supercomputer might match that raw speed, but it requires a staggering 20 megawatts, **a million times more power**. “*On the measure that actually counts, performance per watt, biology beats our best silicon by about a million fold. That gap is the hidden engine of this whole talk,”* he states. This is not mysticism, he notes, but engineering, with a spec sheet that evolution finished billions of years ago, featuring everything from photon-level light detection to molecular turbines running at nearly 100% efficiency.

## It's not the smartest mind, it's the fastest loop

For Sadhu, both life and intelligence are driven by a shared mechanism: a feedback loop of sensing the world, building a model, acting, measuring the outcome, and updating the model. With the AGI revolution, this loop is becoming a cheap, on-demand utility, like electricity from a socket. 

This fundamentally changes the rules of competition in business. The question is no longer who has the single smartest mind, but **who can run the loop fastest**. *“When your loop closes in days and your rivals close in quarters, you don't out-argue them and you don't outspend them, you out-evolve them,”* Sadhu argues. 

For founders and leaders, this means instrumenting their companies as organisms, relentlessly **shortening the cycles of building, selling, and learning**. As machines master the "how," the uniquely human role becomes deciding the "why" — setting the goal, taste, and judgment for the loop.

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## When the loop gets a body

The decade following the AGI transition, Sadhu predicts, will be the era of physical intelligence, as the loop gets a body. 

Robots will move from digital simulations to the physical world, running into what roboticist Hans Moravec noted as a paradox: **tasks easy for humans** (folding a towel, walking) **are brutally hard for machines**, **while tasks we find hard** (chess, calculus, logic) **are easy for them.** 

The reason, Sadhu explains, is evolutionary age. Our sensory-motor skills have been perfected over 500 million years. The challenge is not simply building better muscles — it is building better computation. In his framing, a robot is a body paired with a nervous system, except that this nervous system runs on silicon rather than biology. That nervous system is made of silicon. The entire race, therefore, is to **reverse engineer the brain’s 20-watt efficiency trick into a chip**.

## Hacking the source code of life

If we cannot win by copying biology, perhaps we should stop trying. 

This is the turn that leads to the Post-Biology era. Instead of re-implementing life in steel and silicon, we are beginning to edit the original, using AI and robotics **to design going beyond the defaults of evolution**. 

> *“A genome is editable information, which means biology's givens, whatever laws, they're just parameters,”* Sadhu highlights. 

This opens up once-fictional possibilities. He points to labs **designing enzymes that eat plastic, de-extinction projects aiming to bring back the woolly mammoth** by 2028, and new possibilities in bioelectricity. 

Citing the work of biologist Michael Levin, he also explained how electrical code can tell tissues what to build. A cancer cell is one that has escaped this network; reconnecting it could revert it to its original program, offering a path to treatment without chemotherapy. In this new era, Sadhu notes, *“medicine is no longer a chemical that you swallow. It's a program that you write.”*

This power brings **profound ethical responsibility**. Scientists in the field have already hit the brakes twice, calling for moratoriums on heritable human embryo editing and research into molecules that could evade the immune system. The capability, however, does not disappear. As nature’s constraints become our choices, the stakes are higher than ever. 

*“We spent 3.5 billion years as a result of biology,”* he concludes. 

> *“We're about to spend the next century as its authors. So we better learn how to write well.”*
### Aspire11 deploys first €100M, backing Revolut, ElevenLabs and Databricks
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/aspire11-deploys-first-eur100m-backing-revolut-elevenlabs-and-databricks/
Last updated: 2026-07-17T13:20:13.000Z
Aspire11 has deployed the first **€100 million** from [its **€515 million** **fund**](https://www.therecursive.com/new-e500-million-global-fund-to-back-generational-growth-companies/), marking the initial investment phase of the platform. The first portfolio includes companies such as **Revolut, ElevenLabs, Databricks, Vinted, VAST Data and Baseten.**

The deployment marks another step in Europe's broader effort to bring more long-term institutional capital into innovation. Recent examples include Czech investment firm [Orbit Capital's €107 million Growth Debt Fund II](https://www.therecursive.com/polish-orbit-capital-closes-eur107m-growth-debt-fund-ii-to-expand-venture-debt-for-cee-scaleups/), highlighting a growing appetite for investment vehicles designed to support technology companies beyond traditional venture capital.

## Connecting innovation with the pools of long-term capital

[When it launched in late 2025](https://www.therecursive.com/new-e500-million-global-fund-to-back-generational-growth-companies/), Aspire11 set out to connect pension capital with high-growth companies. Founded by Czech investor **Pavel Mucha**, the platform was created to demonstrate how institutional retirement savings can play a more active role in financing innovation while continuing to generate stable, long-term returns for pension savers. 

> *"Europe has no shortage of innovation, entrepreneurial talent or ambitious founders. The challenge is connecting that innovation with the pools of long-term capital that can help it scale. Aspire11 was created to help bridge that gap and demonstrate how pension capital can play a much greater role in backing the companies shaping the future economy,"* 

— said **Pavel Mucha**, founder of Aspire11.

The platform was launched in September 2025, with €500 million fully committed by Czech pension company Rentea and drew inspiration from Canada's Maple Model — an investment approach that has enabled some of the world's largest pension funds to become major investors in private markets.

## Dual investment strategy

Rather than operating as a traditional venture capital fund, Aspire11 introduced a dual strategy. 

Its **Tribes** platform invests in leading venture capital funds, while **Eternals** provides long-term capital directly to mature private technology companies. The strategy is built on the idea that many of today's most valuable companies remain private for much longer than in previous decades, meaning a significant share of value creation now happens before they ever reach the public markets.

**Tülin Tokatli**, co-founder and Managing Partner of Tribes, says their goal is to identify exceptional companies as early as possible and remain a long-term partner as they scale. *"Tribes gives us exposure to the managers discovering tomorrow’s category leaders, while Eternals allows us to back the most compelling businesses as they mature into global companies*.”

As **Zaya Kadyrova,** co-founder and Managing Partner of Eternals, further explains:

> *"While many of the world's most valuable technology companies now create the majority of their value while still private, much of Europe's pension capital remains significantly underrepresented in venture and growth investing.* 
>  
> *Our goal is to help long-term institutional capital access exceptional businesses while remaining invested through their most important growth phases. Being *geography agnostic*, we focus on backing global leaders regardless of where they are, whether in Europe or the US."*

Aspire11's latest move is part of a much broader shift in how Europe is thinking about pension capital — not just as a source of retirement income, but as a driver of innovation and long-term economic growth. 

## The pension capital opportunity

Europe manages more than **€3 trillion** in pension assets, creating one of the world's largest pools of long-term capital. Unfortunately, only around 0.12% of it is currently allocated to venture and growth investments across the continent. In comparison, US public pension funds allocate 29.7% to alternatives. 

Some European countries, such as the Netherlands (3.9%) and Germany (2.3%), already demonstrate how institutional capital can play a larger role in supporting innovation. According to the [Venture & Growth Capital in Europe – Mapping Pension Funds' Attitudes report](https://www.investorsforpurpose.com/ImpactLens/2025/10/02/Venture-and-growth-capital-in-Europe-mapping-pension-funds%E2%80%99-attitudes/?ref=therecursive.com), **European pension funds are increasingly exploring indirect exposure to venture capital** through fund-of-funds, specialist managers and co-investment structures rather than dismissing the asset class altogether. The findings suggest a growing interest in investment models that combine long-term innovation with prudent portfolio management.

This is where Aspire11's model is a worthy example. Rather than expecting pension funds to build venture expertise internally, the platform gives institutional investors access to experienced venture managers and mature private technology companies. By doing so, it offers a **practical way for long-term institutional capital to participate more actively** in innovation while remaining aligned with pension funds' investment objectives.

Europe already has one of the world's largest pools of long-term capital. As initiatives like Aspire11 emerge, the conversation is shifting towards how that capital can play a greater role in supporting the continent's next generation of technology companies.
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Ukraine (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-ukraine-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-14T14:28:42.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Ukraine and key details about the startups.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Vitosha Ventures Announces First 10 Investments From €34M Fund II
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/vitosha-ventures-announces-first-10-investments-from-eur34m-fund-ii-adds-rob-kniaz-as-general-partner/
Last updated: 2026-08-22T09:44:53.000Z
Bulgarian venture capital firm Vitosha Ventures, formerly Vitosha Venture Partners, has announced the first 10 investments from its €34 million second fund.

Vitosha Ventures Fund II closed in May 2026 and plans to invest in close to **80 Bulgarian startups through 2030, with individual investments ranging from €100,000 to €1 million**.

The fund is anchored by the Fund of Funds in Bulgaria (FMFIB), which has committed [€30 million through the “Entrepreneurship Fund – Early Stage”](https://www.therecursive.com/fund-of-funds-secures-three-partners-to-roll-out-e100m-entrepreneurship-initiative/) financial instrument. The resources are provided under the Programme “Competitiveness and Innovations in Enterprises” 2021–2027, co-financed by the European Union. The fund is also backed by private Limited Partners from Bulgaria and abroad.

Since 2020, Vitosha Ventures has reviewed more than 3,000 projects and invested in 117 startups. Of these, 107 were backed through its first fund.

## The first 10 investments

The first cohort of Fund II spans AI, robotics, maritime technology, logistics, agriculture, consumer technology, recruitment and systems engineering.

**Spicy SE** is developing a platform for systems engineering that allows teams to design complex products, including cars, drones, machinery and critical infrastructure. Its AI agent helps transfer data from legacy systems into a more structured workflow. The company already works with MicroVision and HENSOLDT, while pilots and trials are underway with Novo Nordisk, Luxoft and Vestas.

**SORN.AI** is building a platform that helps companies understand how their brands appear in answers generated by AI systems and how they can improve their visibility. Positioned around the emerging field of AI search optimization, the company is focused on the US market and says it has surpassed €100,000 in monthly revenue in under a year.

- **SeAI** is applying artificial intelligence to crew management for ships and offshore platforms. Its platform brings together documents, certificates, training, schedules and assignments, aiming to reduce delays and errors associated with crew changes.
- **Builderly** allows small and medium-sized businesses to create applications by describing what they need in natural language. The platform is designed to turn an idea into a published digital product without requiring a traditional development team or distribution through app stores.
- **ID Robots** is developing SkyHub, a platform for managing fleets of autonomous drones and robots from different manufacturers. The company says it has 127 connected autonomous machines, seven beta partners and a $35,000 pilot contract. It also works with Bulgaria’s Ministry of Interior and the Municipality of Plovdiv.
- **Truckspedia** is building an AI-supported platform for road freight that connects carriers, trucks and cargo. The system aims to automate processes including finding available trucks, communication, documentation and delivery management.
- **Smart Farm Robotix** is developing an autonomous, solar-powered agricultural robot that uses AI to identify weeds and remove them with precisely directed energy, without the use of herbicides. The company has also been approved for investment by the EIC Accelerator.
- **DreamColor** is building an AI-powered personalized service for at-home hair coloring. Its platform analyzes factors including natural hair color, undertones and hair condition to create an individual formula and kit. The company reports more than 6,000 users and over 4,000 paid orders.
- **Citadel Robotics** develops physical AI agents for maritime security. Its technology is designed to automate dangerous tasks and help detect threats to commercial ships, naval vessels and critical maritime infrastructure, as well as support border protection and monitoring of illegal fishing.
- **ESTEL** is an AI platform for recruitment companies and IT consultancies that identifies demand for specialists and potential clients. The platform analyzes market signals, verifies job postings and helps sales teams identify companies and contacts with stronger purchasing intent.

**The 10 companies bring Vitosha Ventures’ total portfolio to 117 startups across its two funds.**

> “We are grateful to all our partners and investors. With great enthusiasm and responsibility, we will be backing the most promising Bulgarian startups in the years ahead,” [Vitosha Ventures](https://www.therecursive.com/vitosha-vc-invests-e1-5m-in-5-promising-startups-and-plans-expansion-in-see-with-fund-ii/) said.
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Bulgaria (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-in-bulgaria-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T11:53:43.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds for Bulgaria and key details about the startups.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### From Drones to Robotaxis: 8 Major Gulf Investments in CEE Deep Tech
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/from-drones-to-robotaxis-8-major-gulf-investments-in-cee-deep-tech/
Last updated: 2026-07-12T10:47:27.000Z
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.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why Georgia Is Becoming Eurasia's Startup Hub
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/why-georgia-is-becoming-eurasias-startup-hub/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T09:04:28.000Z
Try researching Georgia's startup ecosystem, and you'll quickly notice how little information is available. Who are the country's leading startups? Which investors are backing them? How active is the venture capital ecosystem? Compared with more established tech hubs, Georgia remains largely under the radar.

Yet the numbers suggest a different story. According to StartupBlink, Georgia is home to 131 startups. More strikingly, the ecosystem [grew by 78% over the past year](https://www.startupblink.com/startup-ecosystem/georgia?ref=therecursive.com), making it one of the fastest-growing startup ecosystems in the region.

Georgia has spent the past decade building its startup ecosystem. Since its establishment in 2014, the Georgia Innovation and Technology Agency (GITA) has invested more than [$14 million into around 240 startups](https://startupgenome.com/report/the-global-startup-ecosystem-report-2024/georgia-the-rising-star-of-startup-innovation-at-the-crossroads-of-europe-and-asia?ref=therecursive.com), while creating a nationwide network of ten technology parks that now serve as hubs for founders, researchers and investors. The country's appeal extends beyond grants. Registering a business can take less than thirty minutes, while technology companies exporting services may qualify for Georgia's **Virtual Zone Person** status, which offers significant tax incentives for eligible IT businesses. 

**That ambition is increasingly attracting international organizations to establish a regional presence in Georgia.** Among the most prominent is [500 Eurasia](https://500.co/founders/eurasia/accelerator?ref=therecursive.com), the regional arm of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm 500 Global, which has made Tbilisi a meeting point for founders and investors from across Central Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

## Building a regional startup network

Today, through 500 Eurasia, the firm has broadened its presence in the region, working with startups as well as public institutions to support the development of the local innovation ecosystem.

> *“Eurasian founders inherently build for fragmented markets from day one. Unlike Silicon Valley/US founders who scale domestically first, these entrepreneurs develop cross-cultural product adaptation as a core competency — essential for global expansion,” Pedro Santos Vieira, Partner at 500 Global in* [*an interview for The Recursive*](https://www.therecursive.com/what-sets-eurasian-startup-ecosystem-apart-opportunity-for-investors/)*.* 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/IMCH1328-1.jpg)

The venture capital firm made its first investment in the region more than a decade ago. Today, through 500 Global (Eurasia), it has expanded its focus. Working alongside GITA and Bank of Georgia, the program brings together entrepreneurs from the Baltics, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The accelerator's role extends beyond twelve weeks of mentorship. Through introductions to global investors, participation in events such as Web Summit and SLUSH, and access to one of Silicon Valley's most extensive founder networks, it offers something many entrepreneurs from the region have historically struggled to find: **a direct route into international markets**.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/NEW-Template-Youtube-Thumbnails---3-.png)

****The 500 Global Eurasia team.** **Back row (left to right):* Anna Saltykova (Portfolio Manager), Oksana Vodonos (Investment Associate), Sesily Beridze (Marketing Coordinator). **Front row (left to right):* Mariam Keratishvili (Operations Manager), Elene Gogiashvili (Accelerator Manager), Pedro Santos Vieira (Partner at 500 Global)

## Building beyond domestic markets 

The curtain rose not on a play, but on a startup pitch.

For one afternoon in June, the stage of Tbilisi's historic **Rustaveli National Theatre** belonged to entrepreneurs as **500 Global in Eurasia hosted its Batch 10 Demo Day**. The velvet seats were occupied by startup founders, venture capitalists, operators, and ecosystem builders from nearly 30 countries spanning Central Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. 

As some of the founders put it, "going global" is no longer something companies wait to pursue after raising larger rounds. Instead, it is part of the plan from the very beginning.

The **nine startups presenting at Demo Day** had that approach. Their products ranged from automated penetration testing and vulnerability analysis to AI-powered debt collection, customer intelligence, restaurant workforce management, clinical trial recruitment and financial compliance. On paper, they looked like a familiar cross-section of today's enterprise software landscape, with AI integrated into most of their products. Explore all [Batch 10 startups here](https://events.500.co/500eurasiabatch10demoday/BOG?ref=therecursive.com).

One of the things that stood out was that the startups were not directly asking for money. They were showing traction, expansion plans and acquisitions of other companies.

Some of the **founders had spent years inside the industries they were now trying to reinvent**. They had managed restaurant chains, scaled bootstrapped businesses through war and economic uncertainty, worked alongside doctors, led digital transformation projects or built enterprise software long before generative AI entered the mainstream. Conversations with several founders suggested that technology was rarely the starting point.

One example was **Vadym Bortnyk**, co-founder of [**MaiCall**](https://maicall.ai/?ref=therecursive.com). *"My entrepreneurial journey started long before I was born,"* he tells me with a smile. It sounds like an unusual way to introduce yourself until he explains.

> *"My mom is a mathematician, my dad is an entrepreneur, and they ran a sewing factory and a restaurant. From the age of five, I grew up inside their businesses."*

His own career has been anything but predictable. He started with a single café before growing FreshLine into a restaurant chain of more than 50 locations across Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, selling over 15 million sandwiches. Then he left hospitality altogether.

*"I wanted problems of a different scale."* Those problems first took him into public service, where he led the Directorate of Regional Digitalisation at Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation, coordinating reforms across more than a thousand municipalities. Later came fintech, where he managed online lending operations in Sri Lanka and Mexico, overseeing roughly 30,000 loans every month and a team of 170 debt collectors.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/IMCH4413.jpg)

Vadym Bortnyk, CEO & Co-founder of MaiCall

That was where he noticed something that most people would probably never think to measure. *"Machine learning collects debt better than people do,"* he said.

The observation eventually became MaiCall, an AI-powered collections platform aiming to rethink how debt recovery works altogether. Initially, the company struggled to explain what set it apart. During the accelerator, mentors challenged the team to focus on the outcome customers actually cared about: recovering debt. *"We came in selling software,"* Bortnyk says. *"We walked out delivering money."* 

## Experience before disruption

One cliché refuses to disappear from startup culture: the best companies are born in garages. Some founders in Tbilisi would probably disagree.

None of them described a ‘eureka’ moment. There was no late-night brainstorming session or sudden realization that AI would change everything. If anything, their stories developed over years spent inside industries that had become so accustomed to inefficiency that almost nobody questioned it anymore.

For **Mariam Kharazishvili**, co-founder of [**Clinova**](https://clinova.ai/?ref=therecursive.com), the company began with a project that had nothing to do with healthcare. Her previous venture built augmented reality environments for brands. One of those clients happened to run clinical trials. That assignment exposed a world few people outside pharmaceutical research ever see.

> *"Hospitals spend at least half a year manually reading thousands of handwritten records just to start a trial,"* she recalls. *"And eighty percent never finish recruitment in time."*

The timing was significant. According to McKinsey, their share of trial sites increased from [49% in 2005–2014](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/charting-the-path-to-patients?ref=therecursive.com) to 65% between 2015 and 2024\. Drug developers were increasingly looking beyond traditional markets, attracted by lower costs and more diverse patient populations. The need for more efficient recruitment and data infrastructure became even more pressing.

*"The market exploded,"* Kharazishvili says. *"The infrastructure didn't."*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/IMCH4549.jpg)

Mariam Kharazishvili, Co-founder & COO of Clinova

She pauses before adding the sentence that has since become Clinova's positioning. *"Clinova is the infrastructure."*

Like many founders in the cohort, Kharazishvili entered the accelerator believing she understood her market. Three months earlier, Clinova had been largely focused on CIS countries. By Demo Day, the conversation had changed towards Saudi Arabia and the broader Middle East, where governments have made healthcare digitisation and biotechnology national priorities.

*"The market found us before we found it,"* she says. *“Our focus over the next six months is deploying Clinova across a minimum of five hospitals in Saudi Arabia, alongside expanding market coverage in Georgia. That's the only milestone that matters.”*

The pivot wasn't driven by instinct alone. Mentors repeatedly challenged the team's enterprise sales strategy, questioning whether a founder-led approach could scale in an industry where purchasing decisions often involve multiple stakeholders, lengthy procurement cycles and conservative institutions.

*"The toughest feedback,"* she remembers, *"was that our sales motion wasn't built for enterprise healthcare."* Rather than defending their approach, the team rebuilt it. They came out with a sharper ICP, a structured sales process, and a strategy that cut their sales cycles significantly.

> *"500 kicked exactly where it hurt most. And that's what good mentorship does,"* Kharazishvili adds.

## Rethinking the growth strategy 

If Clinova's story is about discovering a market, **Alina Golubieva**'s is about rediscovering a company. Unlike many first-time founders, she arrived at the accelerator with very little to prove to herself.

*"My journey hasn't been linear,"* she says. Long before launching [**Karpatia Benefits**](https://www.karpatia.tech/eng/home?ref=therecursive.com), Golubieva had already spent more than a decade building businesses. One of them grew from three employees to one hundred and twenty, reaching **$15 million in revenue** without raising external capital. Most of that growth happened during Covid-19 and continued through Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/IMG_0454.jpg)

Alina Golubieva, CEO & Co-founder at Karpatia Benefits

Karpatia Benefits itself emerged from a surprisingly ordinary observation. Companies genuinely wanted to invest in employee wellbeing, she explains. Yet the systems behind those benefits remained trapped in spreadsheets, email threads and manual administration. HR teams spent countless hours coordinating processes that employees often barely noticed.

> *"What I enjoy most,"* Golubieva says, *"is taking something painful and bureaucratic and making it feel simple."*

That philosophy sounds almost understated compared to the hyperbolic language common in venture capital. It was also a common theme among several founders in the cohort, many of whom spoke about solving specific problems rather than reinventing entire industries. 

**They wanted to make systems work.** Yet even for someone with years of entrepreneurial experience, the accelerator introduced an unfamiliar way of thinking. *"Before 500 Global,"* Golubieva says, *"I built businesses on classic bootstrap logic. Grow within your cash flow. Keep operations tight. Protect what you're building."*

Venture-backed companies, she discovered, play by different rules. *"The program was my first deep exposure to what building for hyper-growth actually looks like. It's a different way of thinking about market pull, focus and speed."*

Still, she isn't convinced founders should abandon everything they learned before venture capital entered the picture. Her answer offers perhaps the clearest reflection of how startup financing itself has changed over the past few years.

> *"My takeaway isn't 'grow at any cost,'"* she says. *"It grows fast, but keep enough ground under your feet to navigate what's happening around you."*

That shift was also evident in the experience of **Nurdias Aitbayev**, co-founder of [**MyBots.pro**](http://mybots.pro/?ref=therecursive.com), building AI agents that handle sales end-to-end for SMBs and enterprise teams.

When he joined the accelerator, the company positioned itself primarily as a chatbot platform. During the program, mentors challenged that framing, encouraging the team to think beyond individual AI tools and instead build an AI workforce platform. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/IMCH4323.jpg)

Nurdias Aitbayev, CEO & Co-founder of MyBots.pro

> *“We fundamentally changed our approach to sales and marketing, and the results speak for themselves: 12 weeks of work in the program led to 2x revenue growth,"* Aitbayev explains. 

*"Perhaps the biggest difference is that we started thinking globally," he adds.*

## Learning to think bigger

Unlike most founders pitching that day, **Umid Akhmedov** was part of the 500 Eurasia alumni, returning to share what he had learned since completing the accelerator. As founder of [**Tezbor**](https://tezbor.com/?ref=therecursive.com), for him the hardest lesson of the accelerator arrived in the form of honest feedback.

*"My six-year-old would be able to make a better slide than you."*

He still remembers it almost word for word. After more than fifteen years inside corporations, including Saxo Bank, Ørsted, Microsoft and Danske Commodities, he wasn't accustomed to critique delivered with such directness.

> *"In the corporate world,"* he explains, *"feedback arrives wrapped in three layers of diplomacy. In the startup environment, it arrives raw and direct."*

It didn't change the strategy or product, Akhmedov tells me. *"It changed something more fundamental. It knocked the corporate polish off me."*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/IMCH5080.jpg)

Umid Akhmedov, CEO & Co-founder of Tezbor

Since presenting at Demo Day a year and a half ago, the company has significantly reshaped its business. It pivoted from coordinating individual couriers to building software for logistics companies, expanded its presence in Kazakhstan, and signed its first paying customers in Europe.

The momentum continued with the acquisition of Fargo, one of Uzbekistan's best-known logistics companies, a deal that Akhmedov said doubled the startup's monthly recurring revenue while expanding its delivery network. At the same time, Tezbor has secured commitments from investors including SQB Ventures, Orbit Ventures and a Danish angel as part of an ongoing $1 million seed round.

*“Operationally, we're targeting roughly a doubling of monthly revenue and active clients, and a tenfold expansion of our parcel shop presence in Uzbekistan (around 1,400 shops) with the utilization discipline baked in from day one this time,”* Akhmedov explains. 

## Building companies before they build startups

Whether any of the companies presenting in Tbilisi become the region's next unicorn remains to be seen. What already feels evident, however, is the kind of founders Georgia is helping bring together. A new generation of founders is arriving with expertise earned long before launching a startup — running businesses, leading digital transformation or working inside the industries they now seek to improve. 

If Georgia continues to bring those founders together, its contribution may extend beyond producing the next unicorn. It could help strengthen a regional network of entrepreneurs already building across borders. 

[*The 500 Global Accelerator Program*](https://500.co/founders/eurasia/accelerator?ref=therecursive.com) *in Eurasia combines in-person and remote phases focused on growth, fundraising, and product-market fit. Participating founders receive mentorship, access to a regional founder community, and the opportunity to secure up to $100,000 in funding. The program accepts applications on a rolling basis, with its 11th cohort set to begin in September 2026.*

*\*Photos: Courtesy of 500 Global*
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: The Baltics Have a New Unicorn
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-the-baltics-have-a-new-unicorn/
Last updated: 2026-07-10T12:17:55.000Z
**Vilnius-based Oxylabs** has secured its first-ever external investment, raising [€113.6 million ($130 million)](https://www.therecursive.com/oxylabs-lithuanias-newest-eur3-1b-unicorn-ends-its-bootstrapped-era/) from Warburg Pincus after a decade of bootstrapping. The deal values the company at €3.1 billion ($3.6 billion). The investment marks the first outside capital Oxylabs has accepted since its founding in 2015, making it the second bootstrapped unicorn to emerge from the Lithuanian tech ecosystem builder Tesonet.

AI-powered spend management platform [Payhawk has surpassed **$100 million**](https://www.therecursive.com/payhawk-becomes-a-centaur-after-surpassing-100m-in-arr/) **in annual recurring revenue (ARR)**, becoming what Bessemer Venture Partners calls a ["Centaur"](https://www.bvp.com/atlas/the-centaur-report?ref=therecursive.com) — a private software company with more than $100 million in ARR. The company also reported a 159% year-over-year increase in net new business, a 95% rise in payment volume, and a 75% increase in ARR per employee, which it attributes to a company-wide transformation around autonomous AI agents. 

Warsaw-based edge AI startup **CTHINGS.CO** secured [over €1.8 million from Navivo Capital](https://www.therecursive.com/polish-ai-edge-startup-cthings-raises-eur1-8m-to-power-u-s-expansion/), the new fund's first investment, to accelerate its North American expansion, grow sales, and scale its Orchestra platform for managing IoT, edge, and AI infrastructure. Revenue reportedly grew 17x year-over-year, and the company has landed its first flagship clients in North America.

Romanian software asset management startup **Licenseware** [has raised an €800,000](https://seenews.com/news/romanias-bcr-seed-starter-invests-500-000-euro-in-licenseware-1297739?ref=therecursive.com) funding round led by BCR Seed Starter, the corporate venture capital arm of Banca Comercială Română, which invested €500K. The round also included Inspire Capital, angel investors from Bravva Angels, and existing shareholders. The fresh capital will support the company's international expansion across the US, EU, UK, and other markets, while strengthening its product and enterprise integrations.

Kyiv-based defense technology startup **Trinity Robotics** [has raised more than €500,000](https://resiliencemedia.co/trinity-robotics-raises-more-than-e500000-to-expand-production-of-autonomous-combat-vehicles/?ref=therecursive.com) in funding from Front Ventures, Hede Capital, and Defence Builder Fund I to expand production of its autonomous ground vehicles (UGVs), the company announced. The investment will support the manufacturing of the startup's flagship platform, **Konyk One**, an autonomous unmanned ground vehicle designed to assist military personnel with logistics, ammunition delivery, casualty evacuation, and other frontline operations. 

Estonian startup **Display.de**v has secured [€470,000 in pre-seed funding](https://fomo.observer/ai-agents-collaboration-tool-raises-eur470k/?ref=therecursive.com) to further develop its publishing and collaboration platform for AI agents. The platform enables AI agents to publish documents via shareable URLs, allowing human collaborators to leave comments that agents can read and use to generate updated versions. The pre-seed round was backed by Outlast Fund, FIRSTPICK, Curiosity, and angel investor Henrik Bohman, the first product manager at Wise.

## Latest Fund Updates

Warsaw-based defense and deeptech investor [Expeditions ](https://expeditionsfund.com/?ref=therecursive.com)has closed [its second fund at **€197M($225M)**](https://www.therecursive.com/warsaw-vc-expeditions-closes-oversubscribed-eur197m-fund-ii/), more than doubling its original fundraising target. The fund will back early-stage startups developing technologies across defense, AI, cybersecurity, quantum, and space, with a focus on strengthening Europe's security ecosystem.

The fund is backed by leading European defense companies and institutions, including new limited partners (LPs) BAE Systems, the European Investment Fund (EIF), and Keysight Technologies, alongside existing investors such as the Polish Development Fund (PFR) and the NATO Innovation Fund.
### Biggest Funding Rounds in Hungary (H1 2026)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-in-hungary-h1-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-13T15:35:54.000Z
Check the biggest H1 2026 funding rounds in Hungary and key details about the startups.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Oxylabs: Lithuania’s Newest €3.1B Unicorn Ends Its Bootstrapped Era
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/oxylabs-lithuanias-newest-eur3-1b-unicorn-ends-its-bootstrapped-era/
Last updated: 2026-07-10T09:56:03.000Z
Vilnius-based[Oxylabs](https://oxylabs.io/?ref=therecursive.com) has secured its first-ever external investment, raising **€113.6 million ($130 million)** from Warburg Pincus after a decade of bootstrapping. The deal values the company at €3.1 billion ($3.6 billion).

The investment marks the **first outside capital Oxylabs has accepted since its founding in 2015**, making it the second bootstrapped unicorn to emerge from the Lithuanian tech ecosystem builder Tesonet.

Oxylabs develops web intelligence and data acquisition infrastructure, providing proxy networks and web scraping solutions that enable businesses to collect public web data at scale while bypassing IP blocks, CAPTCHAs, and geo-restrictions.

## "The future belongs to the live infrastructure"

As AI agents increasingly rely on live web data rather than static, pre-indexed information, the company plans to use the funding to strengthen its leadership in web intelligence infrastructure and accelerate the development of next-generation products and capabilities.

> "The next generation of **AI won't be powered by static indexes that only capture yesterday's internet**. As AI agents begin to navigate the web far more than humans ever have, the future belongs to the live infrastructure that grounds these systems in real-time, interruption-free knowledge. This is exactly what Oxylabs has spent the last decade building as a responsible, compliant, and ethical operator — infrastructure that already serves many use cases, and that this new era depends on." 

— said **Vytautas Savickas**, CEO of Oxylabs. 

"*With Warburg Pincus, we will build on our lead in agentic web search infrastructure and product development, while continuing to execute our long-term strategy*," Savickas concluded.

The investment comes as demand for **high-quality web data infrastructure accelerates alongside the rise of autonomous AI agents**. Rather than funding day-to-day operations or helping the company reach product-market fit, the capital will support product development, strategic acquisitions, and the expansion of Oxylabs' AI-focused web intelligence infrastructure.

## The second bootstrapped unicorn from Lithuania

Today, Oxylabs employs more than 2,000 people and serves over 350,000 customers worldwide. The company has reached €305.8 million ($350 million) in annual recurring revenue (ARR) without raising external capital, underscoring the scale it achieved as a bootstrapped business.

> "We have proven our ability to execute as the leader in data infrastructure platforms with our portfolio of leading Fortune 500 and AI company customers. As we continue to scale our platform, we will focus on expanding and strengthening our global network, further advancing our technology, and delivering even greater value to our customers around the world."

— said **Jurgis Gabrielius Rudgalvis**, Chief Financial Officer at Oxylabs.

The deal also reinforces Tesonet's reputation as one of the Baltics' most successful startup builders and highlights the strength of [Lithuania's growing AI ecosystem](https://www.therecursive.com/baltics-ai-communities/). Oxylabs follows cybersecurity company Nord Security as the second bootstrapped unicorn to emerge from the Lithuanian technology group's ecosystem.
### Green Unicorns Don't Fail. They Run Out of Factory
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/green-unicorns-dont-fail-they-run-out-of-factory/
Last updated: 2026-07-09T10:26:07.000Z
Green is sexy. Scaling it isn't. And somewhere in the Valley of Death, there are people building clean water and clean air — if we let them.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### AI House: Curated Conversations and Collective Conclusions from 50+ AI Experts
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-house-curated-conversations-collective-conclusions-from-50-ai-experts/
Last updated: 2026-07-10T16:33:18.000Z
AI House took place just outside Bucharest, over an unassuming summer weekend at the end of June. The initiative was curated by Andrei Ilie, Head of AI at Instantly.ai, and Alex Gavril, CEO of ▲promocrat and founder of Neomixers. 

With support from ElevenLabs and Bolt, its [premise](https://www.therecursive.com/ai-house-2026/) was straightforward: bring together 50 founders, engineers, operators, researchers, and AI practitioners for two days of conversations about how AI is changing the way they build products, run companies, and make decisions.

Before the first session had even begun, attendees were asked to do something rather unusual. Around the venue, a series of boards asked some of the biggest questions surrounding AI today. 

They ranged from whether LLM wrappers can become defensible businesses to whether AI will continue to reduce headcount across organizations. Each one touched on a different aspect of building with AI: products, workflows, customers, data, and organizational change. Rather than debating them immediately, participants simply cast their vote and moved on. 

The boards remained in place throughout the weekend as the talks unfolded around them (quite literally). Spoiler alert, by the time participants returned to vote again on Sunday evening, many of the answers had changed.

Those questions resurfaced during technical panels, workshops, meals, and late-night chats, accumulating perspectives from people working across very different industries. While the specifics changed from one conversation to the next, the tensions underneath them were actually very similar.

## The bigger picture, before the implementation

Before turning to products, workflows, and implementation, the opening sessions zoomed out to examine the direction AI itself is taking.

Emil Muthu, CEO of [Neurony Solutions](https://neurony.ro/?ref=therecursive.com), opened with a presentation on the realities of moving AI from demonstrations into production, arguing that many of the hardest problems emerge only after companies begin deploying systems at scale. The technology itself is only one part of the equation; operational complexity, organizational readiness, and reliability quickly become equally important.

That broader perspective continued during the panel featuring **Sergiu Neguț**, President of Romanian Business Leaders and co-founder of FintechOS, **Matei Psatta**, Chief AI & Growth Officer at Vola and CMO at Blindspot, **Silviu Gresoi**, PhD researcher in Data Science and AI at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, and **Aleodor Tabarcea**, Engineering Manager at Stripe. The talk revolved around AI’s second-order effects: how companies organize themselves, where competitive advantage begins to shift, and which assumptions about work are likely to change over the coming years.

## The LLM question: if the models are becoming commodities, what exactly are customers paying for?

What began as a discussion about wrappers gradually became about where value comes from once the underlying intelligence is available to everyone.

*For Mario Popescu, founder and CEO of Tailent, it begins with the customer rather than the technology. “You need to understand what the customer is willing to pay for. It would be better to start from the money inside the customer's wallet and work your way back through the technology,” he noted.*

He later illustrated the point with an analogy.

*"If you're wrapping an LLM right now, you're mostly creating revenue for the LLM provider. It's like buying a chair from IKEA and putting your own sticker on it."*

**Alexandru Constantin**, co-founder and CTO of **Stock Estate**, took a more nuanced view. Wrappers, he argued, aren't inherently weak businesses. Whether they become defensible depends on where the value sits.

*"Many people use foundation models to build something quickly, but that doesn't mean wrappers can't have a moat. Building software has become easier. That simply means you have to think much more carefully about where your differentiation comes from," he argued.*

Others approached the same question from different angles. **Bogdan Enescu**, VP of Data & AI at **FintechOS**, pointed to the strategic risk of building a company whose roadmap ultimately depends on someone else's model. In his words:

*"If the underlying model changes the way it works, you're out of your business immediately."*

**Lucian Popovici,** founder at **Bridging Gaps,** took the topic back toward implementation, arguing that generic AI assistants often struggle to gain adoption, while systems deeply integrated into existing workflows tend to become part of everyday work.

*"I've seen companies deploy internal ChatGPT wrappers that nobody uses because they're simply not useful. The value starts to appear once AI is integrated with existing systems and the information people already work with." Popovici said.*

By the end of the panel, the topics had largely left wrappers behind. The speakers disagreed on where defensibility begins, but they kept returning to the same building blocks: proprietary data, product design, deep integrations, and a clear understanding of the problem customers are actually paying to solve.

## ▲promocrat, Instantly.ai, ElevenLabs, and the new operating questions

If the panel discussions explored the broader questions, the company sessions focused on the work behind the scenes, exposing the experiments, frameworks, and decisions that shape how AI is adopted inside organizations.

**Alex Gavril**, CEO of ▲promocrat, kicked off day 2 with a deep perspective on how AI is not replacing, but repositioning people in the workplace, with references from how the AI has led to significant changes in consulting models, ranging from Big 4 examples to modern agency models. 

”There are 4 stages in the AI-driven transformation flywheel: fear, adapt, productivity, domination. And the cycle resets every time new technology gets introduced. Even so, if this flywheel demonstrates anything, it’s that human expertise and trust have an essential role in AI-driven transformation. We asked the audience <<if you could automate everything your trusted partner is currently doing, would you fire them?>> Unsurprisingly, no one said they would. That is the power of human connection in business relationships.” 

Alex also approached the topic from the perspective of a growth agency, sharing how AI has become part of its own internal operating model. New ideas are first tested manually, refined through repeated client work, automated where possible, and only then turned into repeatable systems and productized. AI is becoming horizontal infrastructure rather than a specialized capability, making organizational learning itself a competitive advantage, and the companies moving first are those that are quickest to rethink how work gets done. 

That same emphasis on operating models surfaced in [Instantly.ai'](http://instantly.ai/?ref=therecursive.com)s GTM session. The team’s Head of AI and event co-organizer, **Andrei Leonard Ilie**, broke down the mechanics behind modern outbound, showing how buying signals, ICP definition, messaging, and lead qualification change once AI becomes part of the workflow. 

Outbound was framed as one component of a broader growth engine, illustrating how AI is beginning to reorganize entire go-to-market processes. In his own words: *"Outbound is one vertical, not the whole engine."*

[ElevenLabs](https://elevenlabs.io/?ref=therecursive.com) offered an extensive demo on the frontier of generative voice, showcasing the company's latest models and conversational capabilities. But the session spent just as much time on the responsibilities that come with increasingly realistic synthetic speech. Technical progress, deployment, and ethical safeguards were treated as an integral part of the product.

### **Why the format worked**

The informal parts of the agenda turned out to be just as valuable as the formal one. The audience was capped and curated, which meant participants arrived with enough context to contribute meaningfully. Most attendees were already building something, implementing something, or trying to solve a specific problem inside their company. 

The casual format helped as well. The barbeque, coffee breaks, workshops, and poolside mixer offered plenty of spaces for casual business chit chat. The diversity of the audience was a good mix of perspectives, too. Because AI now touches so many functions and industries, the most useful comparisons can come from people working in different verticals. 

This cross-pollination created a ~~room~~ yard where differences between industries were compared to become a source of insight.
### AI, Velocity, and Regulation: What Global Expansion Looks Like Today
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/global-expansion-in-the-age-of-ai-helens-rock/
Last updated: 2026-07-08T14:39:30.000Z
What it takes to scale across borders when AI is rewriting defensibility and why mindset, trust, and focus still decide who wins - insights from Hellen’s Rock Founder Retreat

_This post is for subscribers only._
### What Really Happens When You Live With a Humanoid Robot?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/what-really-happens-when-you-live-with-a-humanoid-robot/
Last updated: 2026-07-08T11:19:51.000Z
Can We Safely Live with Humanoid Robots? 🤖 In this fascinating episode of The Recursive Podcast, we sit down with Emily Kate Genatowski, an AI PhD candidate, historian and domestic robotics researcher who provides a unique, hands-on perspective on our future with machines. Unlike most researchers who work in controlled labs, Emily lives full-time with a humanoid robot named Tova (a Unitree G1) in her apartment in Vienna.   
  
As the founder of PSL (Proportional Stake Liability), an insurtech startup bridging the liability gap in robotics, Emily’s career is dedicated to uncovering the practical, legal, and social friction points that arise when AI gains a physical body. She moves beyond the "AI hype" to explore how humanoid robotics will realistically intersect with our legal regulations, physical infrastructure, and the daily fabric of our communities.  
  
🧠 Why Watch?  
Whether you’re a tech optimist, a skeptic, or someone worried about the future of work, this conversation offers a grounded, practical look at the challenges ahead. Emily moves the needle from philosophical fear to practical empowerment, showing us that we are still the architects of the future we want to see.
### Payhawk becomes a Centaur after surpassing $100M in ARR
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/payhawk-becomes-a-centaur-after-surpassing-100m-in-arr/
Last updated: 2026-07-08T09:58:12.000Z
Bulgarian-founded fintech Payhawk has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), becoming a Centaur company. The company attributes its latest growth to a two-year AI transformation across its products and operations.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why Most Companies Are Measuring AI Success Wrong
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/why-most-companies-are-measuring-ai-success-wrong/
Last updated: 2026-07-08T09:27:19.000Z
What does AI engineering actually look like inside modern enterprises — and how close are we to truly autonomous software development?  
  
In this episode of The Recursive Podcast, we sit down with Karol Przystalski, Chief Data and AI Officer at Exadel, to explore how organizations are moving beyond AI experimentation and into AI-native operations.  
  
We discuss the evolution from AI copilots and coding assistants to fully orchestrated engineering systems, why many companies are measuring AI success incorrectly, and how enterprise leaders should think about ROI, productivity, and organizational change in the age of autonomous engineering.  
  
Karol also shares insights into Exadel Colleague — an AI-powered engineering teammate designed to support entire software teams—and explains why the future of AI isn't about replacing humans, but helping them focus on higher-value work.  
  
In This Episode:  
  
🔹 Why AI adoption is shifting from experimentation to real business value  
How enterprises have moved beyond AI proof-of-concepts and are now focused on productivity, efficiency, and measurable outcomes.  
  
🔹 The difference between AI-enabled development and AI-native engineering  
Why coding assistants are only the first step—and how autonomous systems are transforming entire software development lifecycles.  
  
🔹 How to measure AI ROI beyond token usage  
The metrics that actually matter, including productivity gains, human-equivalent hours saved, accuracy, and business impact.  
  
🔹 The future of autonomous engineering and the role of humans  
Why AI won't replace software engineers, but will fundamentally change how teams work and what skills will matter most.  
  
🧠 Whether you're an engineering leader, CTO, product executive, or simply curious about the future of software development, this conversation offers a practical look at where enterprise AI is headed next.
### Where Is Your Old Smartphone? Rethinking the Way We Buy Tech
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/where-is-your-old-smartphone-rethinking-the-way-we-buy-tech/
Last updated: 2026-07-08T09:22:15.000Z
In this episode of The Recursive Podcast, we sit down with Kilian Kaminski, the co-founder of Refurbed, the Vienna-based marketplace that has become a powerhouse in the European circular economy. Kilian shares insights from his transition from Amazon to entrepreneurship and the ongoing battle to establish refurbishment as a standardized global consumption category.  
  
A former head of Amazon’s Certified Refurbished program in Germany, Kilian left the corporate giant to revolutionize how we consume. Today, Refurbed has surpassed €2 billion in sales, proving that "rethinking new" is not just a sustainable choice, but a massive business opportunity that sits at the intersection of consumer trust and environmental impact.  
  
What we discussed in this episode:  
♻️ The limitations of corporate sustainability and the origins of Refurbed’s marketplace model.  
♻️ Overcoming the "chicken and egg" problem of acquiring sellers and building consumer trust in non-new products.  
♻️ The critical need for standardized European legal definitions and quality criteria for refurbishment.  
♻️ Cultural differences in consumption habits and the untapped "gold mine" of 600 million unused devices in European households.  
♻️ The impact of the "Right to Repair" directive and the role of the European Refurbishment Association (EUREFAS) in policy lobbying.

🧠 This episode is a must-watch for entrepreneurs interested in marketplace dynamics, sustainability advocates, and anyone curious about how the "Right to Repair" legislation will impact the gadgets we use every day.
### Is Your Hiring Strategy Holding Your Ambitions Back?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/is-your-hiring-strategy-holding-your-ambitions-back/
Last updated: 2026-07-08T09:31:30.000Z
Is Your Hiring Strategy Holding Your Ambitions Back? In this episode of The Recursive Podcast, we dive deep into the evolving talent landscape of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) with Ivan Valev, Sales Manager for CEE & the Baltics at Deel.   
  
Deel is a global payroll and HR giant that has scaled from a small tool to a $7 billion powerhouse, helping over 40,000 companies navigate the complexities of hiring and paying talent across 150 countries. Ivan, a SaaS veteran and GTM expert, shares his unique perspective on how CEE has transitioned from a "low-cost destination" to a premiere hub for world-class technical skills and the next generation of global unicorns.  
  
We discuss:  
🎙️ How the region moved from being an offshore destination to an established ecosystem home to over 50 unicorns and 12,000 startups.  
🎙️ Why shoving compliance under the rug is a business-killer and how to avoid the legal traps of international hiring.  
🎙️ Deel’s latest hiring data and the emergence of entirely new roles that didn't exist two years ago.  
🎙️ How founders can test new markets in days rather than months, and why speed is the ultimate currency for snagging top-tier talent.  
🎙️ Moving away from "boring" admin and Excel spreadsheets to focus on culture, leadership, and human-centric growth.  
  
✨ This episode is a must-watch for startup and SME founders, HR leaders, and anyone looking to scale a distributed team without the regulatory headaches.
### Europe Has MIT-Level Talent. So Why Are We Losing It?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/europe-has-mit-level-talent-so-why-are-we-losing-it/
Last updated: 2026-07-08T11:24:00.000Z
Is Central and Eastern Europe becoming the next global cybersecurity hub, or are we still exporting our best talent abroad?  
  
In this episode of The Recursive Roundtable, recorded in Vienna and hosted by Elevator Ventures, we bring together leading voices from the cybersecurity ecosystem to discuss Europe's biggest opportunities and challenges in cybersecurity, AI, digital identity, talent retention, venture capital, and digital sovereignty.  
  
Our guests explore whether Europe can compete with the US in building global cybersecurity champions, how AI is transforming both cyber defense and cyber attacks, and why keeping top technical talent in Europe may be one of the most important strategic challenges of the decade.  
  
We also dive into:  
  
☑️ The cybersecurity talent advantage in Central & Eastern Europe  
☑️ Brain drain and the race for top engineers  
☑️ Why European startups struggle with Series A and Series B funding  
☑️ AI-powered cyber attacks and autonomous defense systems  
☑️ Europe's dependence on foreign cloud and security providers  
☑️ Digital sovereignty and the future of European cybersecurity  
☑️ Scaling cybersecurity companies from Prague, Vienna, and beyond  
  
Featuring:  
  
Maximilian Schausberger, Managing Director (Elevator Ventures)  
Petr Dvorak, Founder & CEO (Wultra)  
Rene Heinzl, CTO (CyberTrap)  
  
💡 Key takeaway:  
Europe has world-class technical talent and cybersecurity expertise. The question is whether it can create the capital, ecosystem, and strategic vision needed to keep that talent, build global leaders, and secure its digital future.
### Fragmentation Is Suffocating European Innovation. How Can We Fix It?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/fragmentation-is-suffocating-european-innovation-how-can-we-fix-it/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:51:48.000Z
Imagine a scenario that plays out across our continent every single semester. Three brilliant minds meet at an academic symposium: a quantum physicist from Munich, an AI engineer from Prague, and a biotechnology researcher from Paris. Inspired by a shared vision and a breakthrough discovery, they decide to skip the traditional corporate track. They turn down lucrative offers from American technology giants and commit to building a deep-tech startup together, right here in Europe. They have the expertise, the drive, and a unique innovation born from years of rigorous research.

But almost immediately, the geography lesson begins.

They realize that simply building a product is far from enough; first, they need to navigate a legal labyrinth. Where do they incorporate? If they choose Germany, the French co-founder faces a mountain of cross-border compliance. If they set up in France, their Czech seed investor scratches its head over local governance norms. And to offer meaningful Employee Stock Options (ESOPs) to a brilliant early hire based in Poland, they must navigate a completely separate, highly punitive tax regime. Before they have even shipped a single line of code, validated a prototype, or spoken to an actual customer, they are already paying a heavy structural tax.

This is the reality of the European tech ecosystem. European founders do not lose to their American or Asian competitors because of inferior science or a lack of ambition. They lose because our legal and technological environment remains fragmented. Universities, investors, and entrepreneurs are structurally discouraged from speaking the same operational language. We do not function as a single market; instead, we operate as a collection of isolated islands, separated by invisible administrative walls.

The tragic irony is that we already possess the core ingredients required for global dominance. We have the raw talent, we have the ideas, and we increasingly have the capital, exemplified by institutional steps like the EU’s new €5 billion growth fund. Yet, because we lack a shared vision, our potential remains buried under piles of bureaucracy.

## The Hidden Gold

The undiscovered gold of Europe’s economic future lies in deep-tech: scientific innovations forged at our universities. Institutions like ETH Zurich, TU Munich, Imperial College, and CTU Prague produce research that rivals many inventions coming out of MIT or Stanford. In specific segments, our smaller regional ecosystems possess an undeniable unfair advantage. Take Munich, for example, which has quietly become a world-class powerhouse for robotics and hardware engineering thanks to its proximity to industrial giants such as BMW and Rheinmetall.

In Silicon Valley, density is absolute. Customers, startups, investors, institutional know-how, and elite talent all sit within a 50-mile radius, operating under one legal framework, one currency, and one cultural attitude toward risk. In Europe, we actually have that same density of excellence, but it is distributed across thousands of kilometers and fragmented by borders. We have the robotics expertise in Munich, the AI talent in Paris, and the software execution in Prague, but we lack the connective tissue to let them grow together.

Because deep-tech innovations require profound scientific expertise and capital-intensive development cycles, the friction caused by European fragmentation hits them first and hurts them most. 

Consider how the engine stalls at the commercialization stage:

- **Missing Spinout Standards:** We need a clear, motivating model for European universities to cooperate on spinning out new inventions. Instead of working in isolation, we must learn from the best and apply those lessons across Europe. This means creating Europe-wide spinout standards inspired by top institutions like ETH Zurich and widely respected by founders, investors, and academia.
- **The ESOP Problem:** To keep top talent, startups need to give employees shares in the company. However, trying to set up employee stock options across European borders is an administrative nightmare. It frequently creates unfair tax bills, forcing employees to pay taxes on shares they own but cannot sell.
- **Scattered Investor Rules:** When a startup in Munich looks for funding, it might talk to investors from France, Czechia, and Germany. Because each country uses completely different approaches to risk, valuation, and cross-border governance, raising money often turns into a slow uphill battle instead of a quick cash injection.

Beyond hurting founders, this fragmentation also weakens our capital markets. Institutional backers and family offices willing to back European deep tech frequently hesitate, not because of the startup’s performance, but because of legal complexity. Managing a pan-European fund structured as a Luxembourg SCSp and navigating marketing rules across a dozen distinct member states shouldn't be the norm, yet today, it is the only path available.

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## Building the Bridge

We can no longer afford to rely on clever legal workarounds to build global companies. We need structural solutions.

To bridge these gaps in the interim, the startup community has had to build its own relational connective tissue. Through initiatives like the Founders Force community, I have deliberately tried to construct that missing pan-European network by bringing together 130+ accomplished founders across 26 countries to co-invest, share know-how, and to open doors to early customers. It works, but it works *despite* the existing infrastructure, not because of it. Community can partly compensate for the unity Europe lacks, but it cannot replace formal legal harmony.

To scale this across the continent, we must champion radical, systemic solutions. Chief among these is the creation of a true [EU Inc](https://www.therecursive.com/eu-inc-28th-regime-legislation-deadline-european-parliament-startup-scaling/) structure, a single, unified company registration valid in all [EU member states](https://www.therecursive.com/eu-inc-uniting-europe-startup-ecosystem-impossible-dream-challenges/), which high-growth startups urgently need.

While the European Commission has begun to acknowledge many of these issues, the current proposals on the table are simply not sufficient. We do not need incremental tweaks or polite guidelines that member states can choose to ignore. [We need](https://www.eu-inc.org/?ref=therecursive.com) a comprehensive, legislative breakthrough that allows a company registered under an EU Inc framework to hire, grant equity, and attract capital across all member states with zero friction.

Simultaneously, we must fiercely support the development of sovereign European technology infrastructure. We cannot build a dominant digital economy if our entire ecosystem relies on foreign layers of cloud services, data infrastructure, and digital tools. [Eurostack](https://eurostack.eu/?ref=therecursive.com)’s pursuit of a unified European digital stack is exactly the type of continental ambition we need to pair with corporate legal reform. But such an idea does not come cheap. To achieve it, we need to activate hundreds of billions of euros lying dormant in the European pension fund system and allocate that capital to startups.

Europe is facing a decisive choice. We can continue to act as a fragmented launchpad, watching our finest scientific minds export their potential to unified foreign markets, or we can finally build a continent where innovation can stay, grow, and lead. The talent is already here. The ideas are flowing. The capital is waiting. Now, we must build a [shared ecosystem](https://www.therecursive.com/eu-inc-was-officially-confirmed-von-der-layen-davos-what-that-means/) that lets trust and innovation travel freely.
### Warsaw VC Expeditions closes oversubscribed €197M Fund II
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/warsaw-vc-expeditions-closes-oversubscribed-eur197m-fund-ii/
Last updated: 2026-07-07T15:18:24.000Z
Backed by BAE Systems, the European Investment Fund, and the NATO Innovation Fund, the new vehicle will invest in early-stage defence, AI, cybersecurity, quantum, and space startups across Europe.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Is Deep Tech the Way to Save the European Project?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/nuqleus-liftoff-conference-2026-eic-eib-deep-tech-moat/
Last updated: 2026-07-08T15:03:21.000Z
At Croatia's Nuqleus Liftoff, EIB and EIC officials outlined a strategic push into deep tech. Backed by new capital to bridge early-stage funding gaps, the focus is on utilizing scientific excellence to drive industrial scale. Can the region help Europe build a deep tech moat?

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Polish Edge AI Startup CTHINGS.CO Raises €1.8M to Power U.S. Expansion
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/polish-ai-edge-startup-cthings-raises-eur1-8m-to-power-u-s-expansion/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T14:15:29.000Z
👯 **Founder(s):** Arnold Wierzejski, Founder & CEO and Shreyas Vinod, Co-founder & CTO

📅 **Founding year:** 2020

🏭 **Industry:** Edge AI / IoT — distributed infrastructure orchestration for Industry 4.0 and smart critical infrastructure.

💥 **Problem:** By 2030, the number of connected IoT devices worldwide could reach \~39 billion, generating exploding volumes of data outside traditional data centers (factories, logistics networks, critical infrastructure). Organizations struggle to securely manage, monitor, and scale this distributed edge/IoT infrastructure — and to move from pilot projects to full production deployments.

📣 **Solution:** CTHINGS.CO's Orchestra Platform lets organizations remotely manage devices, applications, and data across their IoT ecosystem, automate operations, and secure everything under a Zero Trust model — helping them go from proof-of-concept to production at scale.

👥 **Customers:** Enterprises and integrators in logistics, energy, Industry 4.0, and smart critical infrastructure, plus telecom operators looking to monetize 5G/IoT services (existing partners include ASUS IoT, Deutsche Telekom, and Wirepas).

🎳 **Team size:** 11–50 employees 

**💰 Investment amount:** €1.8 million

🌱 **Stage:** Seed 

🚀 **Funded by:** Navivo Capital, specifically the new Navivo Capital Poland fund (PFR-backed, focused on AI, robotics, and medical technologies). 

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor's perspective:** 

> *"At Navivo, we focus on businesses with global ambitions, and we can't wait to support Arnold and the entire CTHINGS.CO team as they take on the U.S. market."*

— Marcin Borowiecki, Managing Partner at Navivo.

💡 **It will be spent on…** Accelerating CTHINGS.CO's expansion into the North American market, growing sales efforts and partnerships, and further developing the Orchestra platform.

💬 **In their own words:** 

> *"North America is one of our key growth areas. We see a growing need there for solutions that help companies securely manage complex, distributed infrastructure in real time. Navivo's support will allow us to accelerate the development of partnerships, drive sales growth, and further scale our technology—including the Orchestra Platform, in international markets."* 

— Arnold Wierzejski, Founder and CEO of CTHINGS.CO.

💪 **Their specialty…** Revenue reportedly grew 17x year-over-year, and the company has landed its first flagship clients in North America. CTHINGS.CO was also recently named a finalist in the Data Center World Innovation Challenge (powered by ABB), represented Poland at the European Innovation Summit during NY Tech Week, and powered the world's first live Wirepas NR+ interoperability deployment at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

🔑 **Business model:** Hybrid hardware-plus-SaaS

💸 **Funding so far:** Over €8.3 million
### Behind Facilization's Seven-Month Build of the Western Balkans' First Fully Digital Bank
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/behind-facilizations-seven-month-build-of-the-western-balkans-first-fully-digital-bank/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T13:06:19.000Z
On June 18, 2026, Jet Bank launched as the first fully digital bank in the Western Balkans. It came with a smooth mobile experience, instant digital onboarding, and a banking journey designed for the smartphone era. 

But behind this seamless launch was an immense challenge: creating an entire bank from the ground up in just seven months.

According to Gjergji Guri, CEO of [Facilization](https://facilization.com/?ref=therecursive.com), the founding technology partner for the project, the greatest challenge was not the technology.

*“People often assume that building a digital bank is primarily about choosing the right technology vendors. In reality, technology is only one part of the equation. The real challenge is integrating multiple enterprise-grade platforms, coordinating several strategic vendors, onboarding an entirely new organization while it is being built, and connecting all the infrastructure required to operate a regulated bank. Delivering all of that within seven months required an exceptional level of collaboration, agility, and ownership, *by all parties involved*.”* — Gjergji Guri, CEO of Facilization

Before Jet Bank even had an executive team, operational structure or technology set-up, its shareholders faced a major question: who could bring together the technology, expertise, and execution needed to turn their vision into a reality?

[Their answer was Facilization.](https://facilization.com/?ref=therecursive.com)

## **Choosing the right technology partner**

Facilization joined the project during its earliest formation stages, supporting shareholders in establishing the technology foundations required for launch.

Over seven months, Facilization’s team of more than 25 consultants worked intensively on the project. They engineered a world-class banking ecosystem, combining global banking platforms with their proprietary solutions and deep local banking expertise to create a single operating digital bank. 

Following the successful completion of the Bank of Albania licensing process, Jet Bank moved forward with transforming its approval into a functioning digital banking platform. 

Facilization led and delivered Oracle’s core banking and payments capabilities, delivered customer engagement, workflow automation and digital lending journeys on Creatio, and supported integration between Backbase’s AI-Native Banking Operating System with Oracle Banking and the broader banking ecosystem. Along with these global technologies, Facilization deployed its own proprietary products, including [F-Analytics for regulatory and managerial reporting](https://facilization.com/regulatory-and-compliance/?ref=therecursive.com) and [F-Connect for payment connectivity and integration services](https://facilization.com/payments/?ref=therecursive.com).

The result is a unified, scalable, and AI-ready banking platform that enables rapid launch of new digital products, quick adaptation to regulatory changes, and continuous standard elevation in customer experience. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/07/2.-Fatbardha-Rino-CEO-of-Jet-Bank-and-logos-during-the-bank-s-launching-evening--secondary-picture.jpg)

## **Technology is only one part of the equation**

During the phase of the building, Jet Bank expanded its internal team to over 70 employees, with Facilization working closely with these teams to transfer knowledge, align operating processes and maintain delivery momentum.

The result is a bank that now sets a new regional benchmark for time to market in digital banking. 

Jet Bank combines a cloud-native, AI-ready architecture with fully digital customer onboarding, mobile-first banking services, and instant EUR payments capabilities. With more than 75,000 prospective customers in its pipeline, the bank is back up by a strong technology foundation for rapid growth and innovation.

*"Jet Bank demonstrates that* [*a fully digital banking model*](https://www.jet.bank/sq-al?ref=therecursive.com) *can be successfully built and operate in Albania using world-class technology, strong partnerships and a customer-centric approach. Our ambition is not only to deliver a better banking experience, but to help redefine expectations for banking across the region”.*

— Fatbardha Rino, CEO of Jet Bank

## **A blueprint for digital banking transformation in the Balkans**

For Facilization, Jet Bank is more than a successful launch, it is a repeatable delivery model for building digital banks quickly and effectively. 

As regulators modernize frameworks and customer demands evolve, financial institutions increasingly require partners capable of managing the complexity of multi-vendor banking ecosystems while maintaining accountability for outcomes.

Jet Bank shows that world-class digital banking can be developed in the region by using the same technologies used by leading global institutions. It establishes a proven, repeatable model for creating digital banks and accelerating the modernization of banking, enabling financial institutions throughout the Western Balkans and beyond to innovate more quickly and confidently.

For the broader banking sector, Jet Bank marks a significant milestone as the region’s first fully digital bank. 

For Facilization, it marks the successful execution of something even more ambitious: helping build a bank from the ground up and creating a blueprint for the next generation of digital banking across the region.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Czech Startup Reaches Nearly Half-Billion-Euro Valuation
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-czech-startup-reaches-nearly-half-billion-euro-valuation/
Last updated: 2026-07-05T10:29:35.000Z
[**EquiLibre**](https://www.therecursive.com/equilibre-technologies-raises-series-a-at-eur438m-valuation-to-scale-ai-trading-agents/) has raised a **Series A round at a €438M valuation**, marking a sharp increase from its previous funding rounds. The Prague-based startup had earlier secured a **$10M (€8.8M) seed round** led by Blossom Capital at a **€122.8M valuation**, following a pre-seed investment from Credo Ventures, an early backer of companies including ElevenLabs and UiPath.

[Prague-based **Wultra**](https://www.therecursive.com/czech-wultra-raises-eur6-8m-series-a-to-expand-post-quantum-digital-identity-platform/), a startup developing post-quantum authentication and digital identity solutions for banks and fintechs, has secured **€6.8M in Series A funding** to accelerate its international expansion and product development. The round was led by **Seventure Partners**, with participation from **ARIADNEXT** founders Marc Norlain and Guillaume Despagne, as well as existing investors **J&T Ventures** and **Elevator Ventures**.

[Croatian startup **Hypefy AI**](https://www.therecursive.com/hypefy-influencer-marketing-series-a-aymo-ventures/)has raised **€6.3M** ($7.2M) in a Series A round led by **AYMO Ventures** — a Croatian VC fund backed by the European Investment Fund and the Croatian Bank for Reconstruction and Development — with participation from existing investors **Interactive Venture Partners, Oktogon Ventures, and Euroventures**.

Romanian VC [**GapMinder**](https://www.therecursive.com/gapminder-ventures-launches-e80m-fund-ii-largest-in-romania-to-drive-tech-innovation-across-see/) leads **€2.6M($3M)** seed round in Slovenian startup **Codeplain**, alongside Silicon Gardens. The investment will fund an AI platform that generates production-ready code from plain-language software specifications. Silicon Gardens, a founders-for-founders VC firm with ties to Sportradar, Outfit7, Photomath, Microblink, and Celtra, co-led the round.

[Authologic](https://authologic.com/?ref=therecursive.com), the eID-native identity platform announced that it will give businesses access to identity credentials stored in Google Wallet for KYC/AML verification. Google Wallet already lets users store verified identity credentials issued by governments, banks, or Google itself on their phones. Using Authologic’s OmniID platform, businesses can now accept all these credentials, including Google ID Pass, the digital passport available in various countries around the world.

## CEE funds

**Orbit Capital** [has announced the second closing of its Growth Debt Fund II](https://www.therecursive.com/polish-orbit-capital-closes-eur107m-growth-debt-fund-ii-to-expand-venture-debt-for-cee-scaleups/) at €107M, [surpassing its initial fundraising target](https://www.therecursive.com/orbit-capital-venture-debt-fund-cee-tech/) (announced at €100M) and further strengthening its position as one of Central and Eastern Europe's leading venture debt investors. The fund will provide non-dilutive financing to technology companies that have moved **beyond Series A**, targeting businesses generating at least €3M in annual revenue and growing by **more than 30% year over year**. Investment tickets will range from **€3M to €15M** and are intended to support international expansion, acquisitions, working capital, and capital expenditure.

Romania's Western region has launched its [first dedicated venture capital fund](https://www.therecursive.com/romanias-west-region-gets-its-first-vc-fund/). **Asternova Vest**, developed by a Romanian-French consortium of Aster Capital Partners, Iceberg+, and Venture Booster, targets **€37M** and will back 18+ tech startups at Seed and Series A with tickets between €500K and €4M. The fund is structured as a French FPCI, managed by Aster Capital Partners — an AMF-authorized firm with over €600M under management across eight funds and a portfolio of nearly 100 companies.

**Fortech Ventures** announces the launch of a **€34 million investment** fund and its transition to a new public identity, **Nucleo Ventures**. Developed in partnership with the North-West Regional Development Agency (ADR Nord-Vest), the fund will invest in startups and innovative companies across Romania and Central and Eastern Europe, with the goal of supporting a new generation of internationally scalable businesses and strengthening Romania’s North-West Region as a destination for entrepreneurs, investment, and technology talent, focused on sectors: Health, Manufacturing, Energy, Finance, and Defence.
### 10 Early-Stage CEE Travel Tech Startups to Watch
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/10-early-stage-cee-travel-tech-startups-to-watch/
Last updated: 2026-07-03T11:22:29.000Z
Ten startups from Poland to Greece are quietly rebuilding how Europe's €1.8 trillion travel industry works — from accessible booking and parametric insurance to hotel analytics and urban gaming. Here are the early-stage CEE companies worth watching.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### "The Czech Republic Could Afford More Ambition"
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-czech-republic-could-afford-more-ambition/
Last updated: 2026-07-03T09:28:27.000Z
In this interview, entrepreneur and CPA Australia Michal Wasserbauer draws on more than 15 years of experience building businesses across Southeast Asia to explain why the Czech Republic has the foundations for a thriving innovation ecosystem.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Czech Orbit Capital Closes €107M Growth Debt Fund II to Expand Venture Debt for CEE Scaleups
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/polish-orbit-capital-closes-eur107m-growth-debt-fund-ii-to-expand-venture-debt-for-cee-scaleups/
Last updated: 2026-07-02T11:15:23.000Z
**Orbit Capital** has announced the second closing of its Growth Debt Fund II at €107 million, [surpassing its initial fundraising target](https://www.therecursive.com/orbit-capital-venture-debt-fund-cee-tech/) (announced at €100M) and further strengthening its position as one of Central and Eastern Europe's leading venture debt investors.

The fund will provide non-dilutive financing to technology companies that have moved **beyond Series A**, targeting businesses generating at least €3 million in annual revenue and growing by **more than 30% year over year**. Investment tickets will range from **€3 million to €15 million** and are intended to support international expansion, acquisitions, working capital, and capital expenditure.

## Institutional investors deepen commitment to CEE venture debt

To date, Orbit Capital has financed more than 20 high-growth companies through its venture debt platforms. According to partner Radovan Nesrsta, the demand for flexible financing is increasing as startups mature and seek capital without diluting existing shareholders.

The latest close attracted backing from several institutional investors, including the European Investment Fund, Rentea, Česká spořitelna, Erste Group, Conseq, and PFR Ventures. Orbit said the participation of Rentea represents one of the first allocations by a Czech private pension fund into venture debt, while PFR Ventures made its first investment in the asset class.

> "At growth stages, access to debt financing can significantly accelerate expansion while limiting dilution for founders," said Bartłomiej Samsonowicz (Investment Director at PFR Ventures), adding that Orbit's experience in the regional technology ecosystem made it a strong partner for supporting CEE scaleups.

The fund has also attracted private investors from Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Slovenia, and Western Europe, reflecting growing confidence in venture debt as an alternative financing instrument for the region's startup ecosystem.

According to general partner Lukas Macko, founders increasingly value financing partners that understand the operational realities of scaling technology businesses while allowing them to retain ownership. Partner Wiktor Namysł added that venture debt has evolved from a niche financing option into a core growth tool for later-stage startups.

**Growth Debt Fund II has already begun deploying capital**, completing five investments to date. These include [Czech startups Sloneek](https://www.therecursive.com/czech-slovak-startup-sloneek-closes-over-eur5m-round-to-turn-hr-software-into-an-ai-colleague/) and IAG, alongside Polish startup Talkin' Things, as Orbit continues to expand its portfolio of high-growth technology companies across Central and Eastern Europe.
### Engaged Investments 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/engaged-investments-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T16:48:42.000Z
📅 **Date:** 21-22 October 2026  
📍 **Location**: Prague, Czech Republic   
🏢 ****Venue:** [National house of Vinohrady](https://www.google.com/maps/place/National+house+of+Vinohrady/@50.0756294,14.4379472,454m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x470b948f7aa403e3:0xfc1057921d1a3298!8m2!3d50.0756294!4d14.4379472!16s%2Fg%2F11bwdzpwyw?entry=ttu&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI2MDYyOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://engaged.investments/?ref=therecursive.com#schedule) 

Engaged Investments is a leading international conference for venture capital investors and founders of early-stage technology companies. It was launched in 2019 by DEPO Ventures and J&T Ventures, and over the past seven years, it has become a key platform for cross-border investment and cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe.

#### The Room

The conference will bring together around 500 investors, founders, and innovation leaders from more than 20 countries. Participants include representatives from leading venture capital funds, startup accelerators, financial institutions, and high-growth technology companies across Europe and the United States. The speaker lineup features Marcel Müller-Marbach, Ben Kolada, Martin Olczyk, Jakob Stein, Christian Noske, and Vuk Lau, alongside investors and ecosystem leaders from across the Central and Eastern European startup ecosystem. 

The event is designed to connect venture capital firms, angel investors, founders, and innovation organizations to foster new partnerships and cross-border collaboration.

#### The Agenda

- **State of Venture Capital** – Comparing the U.S. and European VC markets and exploring the outlook for the investment landscape.
- **Building Companies for Successful Exits** – Lessons on creating long-term enterprise value and navigating international acquisitions.
- **Scaling Startup Ecosystems** – Best practices from global accelerators and strategies for strengthening Central Europe's innovation ecosystem.
- **Deep Tech Investment Trends** – How leading funds identify opportunities in AI, defense, enterprise software, and other emerging technologies.
- **Cross-Border Investing** – Perspectives from investors across Europe and the U.S. on regional opportunities, international expansion, and venture collaboration.
- **Founder & Investor Networking** – Dedicated sessions connecting venture capital firms, angel investors, founders, and ecosystem leaders.

#### What to Expect

- **Insights from leading venture capital investors** on the latest trends shaping the U.S. and European startup and investment ecosystems.
- **Practical advice on building companies with exit potential**, including cross-border growth strategies and M&A opportunities.
- **Discussions on strengthening Central Europe's startup ecosystem**, featuring experienced investors, accelerator leaders, and ecosystem builders.
- **Deep tech and venture investment perspectives** from partners at some of Europe's top VC funds, including Creandum and NGP Capital.
- **Networking with around 500 investors, founders, and innovation leaders** from more than 20 countries, focused on cross-border collaboration and dealmaking.

#### Why It's Different

The conference is also supported by a number of partners who share the belief that the Central European ecosystem needs stronger foundations. These include ICON Corporate Finance, which brings cross-border transaction experience. Other partners include the Polish private equity fund Warsaw Equity Group, which focuses on technology and industrial companies in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Brno-based JIC, which invests in deep tech startups from the Czech Republic and Central Europe through its CZK 400 million fund, especially those commercializing research developed at universities. CzechInvest, through its technology incubation program, is also preparing startups to present directly at the conference.

Early-stage startups will have a dedicated section at the conference called the Engaged Startup Showcase. There, a jury will select the best companies from 50 startups from the region based on live pitches on stage. Startups can apply through the application form.

*The main partner of the conference is the international law firm Bird & Bird, which has long specialized in legal support for technology companies and venture capital investments across Central and Eastern Europe.*

### The Organizer

DEPO Ventures invests in early-stage startups from the CEE region, with a focus on strategic technologies. Since 2019, DEPO has made more than 50 investments. Its notable portfolio companies include the global blockchain platform Tatum, the home heart-monitoring solution Kardi AI, the smart business financing platform Flowpay, the mobile guide SmartGuide, and the logistics platform Ringil.
### EquiLibre Technologies Raises Series A at €438M Valuation to Scale AI Trading Agents
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/equilibre-technologies-raises-series-a-at-eur438m-valuation-to-scale-ai-trading-agents/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T16:16:25.000Z
[EquiLibre](https://equilibre.ai/?ref=therecursive.com) has raised a **Series A round at a €438 million valuation**, marking a sharp increase from its previous funding rounds. The Prague-based startup had earlier secured a **$10 million seed round** led by Blossom Capital at a **€122.8 million valuation**, following a pre-seed investment from Credo Ventures, an early backer of companies including ElevenLabs and UiPath.

The fresh capital will primarily be used to expand the company's computing infrastructure. EquiLibre plans to build one of the largest AI compute clusters in Central and Eastern Europe to support the training of increasingly sophisticated trading models.

## **From Poker AI to Financial Markets**

Founded in late 2021, EquiLibre develops AI trading agents powered by **reinforcement learning,** an approach that allows models to learn through trial and error rather than relying on labeled datasets. After training on historical and live market data, the agents execute trades autonomously and continuously adapt to changing market conditions.

The company initially validated its technology in cryptocurrency markets before expanding into U.S. equities. Today, its AI agents trade **billions of dollars daily** across the **S&P 500** and **Nasdaq** in partnership with quantitative trading firm **Tower Research Capital**. EquiLibre also claims its trading system has not recorded a single losing month since launch, although it has not disclosed performance data or methodology supporting that statement.

EquiLibre was founded by **Martin Schmid (CEO), Rudolf Kadlec (CTO), and Matej Moravčík (CSO)**, who previously collaborated at DeepMind's research office in Edmonton. There, they developed **DeepStack**, the first AI system to defeat professional players in no-limit Texas Hold'em poker.

After returning to Czechia, the founders assembled a team of engineers with experience at Google and other U.S. technology companies. Today, EquiLibre employs around **25 people**, with **Turing Award** winner **Rich Sutton**, one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, serving as an advisor.

> "The market is the judge, and the verdict updates every millisecond. That's what drew us to the problem, and it's why reinforcement learning is such a natural fit. We've proven the technology in the world's biggest and most liquid markets," 

— said CEO Martin Schmid.

For lead investor **Creandum**, the deal represents its largest investment to date, the VC reported. Partner **Carl Fritjofsson Sellers** said the team had demonstrated its technology in one of the most demanding environments possible and is now well positioned to scale.

EquiLibre's latest raise adds to a growing list of [major Czech funding rounds](https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-czech-startups-in-2025/), highlighting the country's growing momentum as one of Central and Eastern Europe's leading startup ecosystems.

The funding comes amid growing investor interest in European AI startups focused on financial infrastructure and capital markets, alongside recent funding rounds for companies such as **9fin**, **Upvest**, and **Midas**.
### Hypefy AI raises €6.3M Series A to automate influencer marketing
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/hypefy-influencer-marketing-series-a-aymo-ventures/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T14:49:32.000Z
Croatian startup [Hypefy AI](https://hypefy.ai/?ref=therecursive.com) has raised €6.3M ($7.2M) in a Series A round led by **AYMO Ventures** — a Croatian VC fund backed by the European Investment Fund and the Croatian Bank for Reconstruction and Development — with participation from existing investors **Interactive Venture Partners, Oktogon Ventures, and Euroventures**. 

The Series A round marks the company's **next growth stage** after spending the past year expanding its customer base and refining its AI platform for enterprise influencer campaigns. The investment comes **just over a year** after its [€1.5M ($1.75M) seed round](https://www.therecursive.com/ai-influencer-marketing-croatian-hypefy-seed-round-interactive-venture-partners/) and will further support its international expansion and continued development of AI-powered influencer campaign automation. 

> "Influencer marketing is growing fast, but the way campaigns are run couldn't keep up," said Stjepan Zelić, CEO and co-founder of Hypefy AI. "Brands want creator-led growth, but they don't want more spreadsheets, DMs, back-and-forth negotiations, and difficult local expansion."

## Landing global brands and millions of influencer impressions

Founded in 2021 by longtime friends **Stjepan Zelić** (CEO), **Davor Šibenik**, and **Filip Špiranec**, Hypefy AI has developed an AI platform that automates the entire influencer marketing workflow. From identifying the right creators and handling negotiations to onboarding, content review, reporting, and payments, the platform takes over the operational side of campaign management, while brands retain control over briefs, budgets, and final approvals.

The platform allows brands and agencies to launch influencer campaigns from a single prompt, with AI handling creator discovery, outreach, pricing, contracts, campaign execution, reporting, and billing. 

Its customer base includes global brands such as **NIVEA, Unilever, ABOUT YOU, Philips, PepsiCo, McDonald's, and Samsung**. According to the company, the platform is now used by thousands of businesses **across 43 countries** and has generated more than 700 million influencer impressions.

Explaining the idea behind the platform, CEO Stjepan Zelić said the company was built to eliminate the operational burden of influencer marketing while leaving strategic decisions in the hands of brands.

> "We built Hypefy so a brand can describe what it wants to achieve, stay in control of the key decisions, and let AI manage everything operational."

— said Stjepan Zelić, CEO of Hypefy AI.

## Expanding not only the markets, but the team

The new funding will also be used to further develop the platform, double the team from around 50 to 100 employees over the next one to two years, and accelerate international expansion. The company plans to hire engineers, creatives, and storytellers while strengthening its presence in key markets, including Germany, the UK, and the US.

Beyond expanding its team and product capabilities, Hypefy AI is also preparing for a broader international push. Alongside **strengthening its presence in Germany, the UK, and the US**, the company plans to continue expanding its commercial and engineering operations across Europe and **North America**.

Speaking about the company's global ambitions, Zelić said Hypefy AI had been built with international campaigns in mind from the very beginning.

> "We started from Croatia, outside the usual AI and adtech hubs, but from day one we built for global campaigns. This investment helps us scale to a category-defining technology in fully managed creator marketing."
### GapMinder Leads €2.6M Seed Round in Slovenian AI Startup
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/slovenian-codeplain-seed-round-gapminder/
Last updated: 2026-06-30T13:36:19.000Z
Romanian VC [**GapMinder**](https://www.therecursive.com/gapminder-ventures-launches-e80m-fund-ii-largest-in-romania-to-drive-tech-innovation-across-see/) leads **€2.6M($3M)** seed round in Slovenian startup [**Codeplain**](https://www.codeplain.ai/?ref=therecursive.com), alongside Silicon Gardens. The investment will fund an AI platform that generates production-ready code from plain-language software specifications. Silicon Gardens, a founders-for-founders VC firm with ties to Sportradar, Outfit7, Photomath, Microblink, and Celtra, co-led the round. 

## Rethinking how software gets built

The idea behind Codeplain is a shift in how developers and AI coding agents work. Instead of writing code directly, they write and maintain structured specifications — Codeplain handles the generation, testing, and updating of the underlying codebase automatically. 

The company calls this approach "*Phoenix Architecture*," a concept popularized by software entrepreneur Chad Fowler. The premise: **software should be continuously regenerated from durable specifications** rather than maintained as an ever-growing, increasingly complex codebase. Specifications become long-term assets; code becomes something that gets generated and regenerated on demand.

Agentic coding tools are producing far more code than before, and the maintenance burden is growing with it.

> "Agentic coding is giving the industry 10 times more code. But unless we fundamentally rethink maintenance, software teams are going to drown in the complexity created by that explosion."

— said **Dusan Omercevic**, founder and CEO of Codeplain.

**Early customers include DevRev, HYCU, and Incode**, which use the platform to maintain integrations with frequently changing external APIs. When an API changes, teams update the specification and regenerate the implementation, rather than manually reworking code.

Codeplain was founded by Omercevic, who previously built Cleanshelf, an enterprise SaaS management platform acquired by SAP LeanIX in 2021\. After the acquisition, he led product development at SAP LeanIX, and before that served as VP of Product at Zemanta, which was acquired by Outbrain. **The company operates from offices in Ljubljana, Berlin, and San Francisco**.

For GapMinder, this investment continues a focus on AI and software companies across Romania and Eastern Europe. Recent additions to the portfolio include [InsiderCX](https://www.therecursive.com/insidercx-seed-round-market-expansion-healthtech-patient-experience/) (patient experience platform), Design Verse (AI platform for enterprise software), [SalesTools](https://www.therecursive.com/salestools-ai-raises-e2m-seed-round-from-gapminder-vc-to-scale-autonomous-sales-agents/) (B2B sales automation), VoicePatrol (AI voice moderation for multiplayer games), and Etiq AI (AI output verification).

> "Codeplain is rethinking how software is built in the AI era by shifting the focus from writing code to managing specifications. We believe this approach has the potential to make software development faster, more reliable and easier to maintain as AI adoption accelerates," 

— said **Cosmin Ochisor**, Partner at GapMinder Ventures.
### Hussain Al Mahmoudi: Why Sharjah Is Building a Tech Corridor to Cluj-Napoca
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/hussain-al-mahmoudi-why-sharjah-is-building-a-tech-corridor-to-cluj-napoca/
Last updated: 2026-07-12T11:04:03.000Z
When [H.E. Hussain Al Mahmoudi](https://www.linkedin.com/in/hussain-al-mahmoudi/?ref=therecursive.com) looks at Cluj-Napoca, he sees Sharjah.

Decades ago, Sharjah's ruler chose its strategy in the things money cannot buy quickly: education, art, culture. Today, Sharjah hosts the largest university hub in the UAE, and Al Mahmoudi runs the innovation engine attached to it. 

As CEO of Sharjah Research, Technology and Innovation Park ([SPARK](https://srtip.ae/?ref=therecursive.com)) Al Mahmoudi oversees an ecosystem of roughly 13,000 companies, built inside a 20-million-square-foot site in the heart of University City. SPARK is a government entity with unusual powers. It operates as a free zone, runs its own labs and accelerators, and issues its own visas. 

Al Mahmoudi was appointed by H.H. Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, and before that ran the Sharjah Chamber of Commerce, with earlier senior roles at Shell, ENOC and Dubai Internet City.

He came to [Techsylvani](https://techsylvania.com/?ref=therecursive.com)a, where The Recursive was a media partner with an agenda: to build a technology corridor between the Gulf and Central and Eastern Europe. It is not his first attempt with the region. Fifteen years ago, he set up a Romanian regional trade centre through the Chamber of Commerce. It did not last. This time, he says, is different - the vehicle is technology. Especially as Cluj-Napoca’s R&D ecosystem has evolved from basic IT outsourcing into a more mature, innovation-driven environment, fueled by strong university foundations and a highly skilled talent pool.

Al Mahmoudi sat down with The Recursive co-founder and Managing Partner [Etien Yovchev](https://www.therecursive.com/author/etienyovchev/) for an exclusive interview, just after a fireside conversation the SPARK CEO had finished with Mark Porter, former CTO of MongoDB and dbt Labs. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/1782289478948.jpg)

## **Where is Sharjah's R&D ecosystem in 2026?**

Sharjah's R&D ecosystem is well established. We have the right ingredients, the infrastructure, the programmes for technology commercialisation, the policies for intellectual property, and the incentives to attract companies and researchers. We have the right investment climate. The UAE as a whole has put enormous resources into technology and innovation, and Sharjah leverages that national drive and strategy.

The way I describe the park is three layers. The base layer is the free zone. One layer up, we are a technology park — that is where the laboratories, the acceleration programmes and the technology-transfer activity sit, and where we work with universities, research centres and startups from all over the world. The top layer is an R&D centre — a launching pad for companies that want to scale and enter the market, with access to labs, infrastructure, investment and projects.

And we did not build it in isolation. Before we started, we benchmarked the park against around 20 cities worldwide. I often point to Kendall Square in the US where you have MIT and Harvard, and everything grew around them. That is the model we work towards: the university, industry, government and the startups all connected, physically and structurally. That is where we are, and where we keep building.

## **And from your perspective, what's the current state of the tech ecosystems across Central and Eastern Europe?**

It's flourishing. There is real momentum behind startups, AI, mobility, communications, environmental tech, and a lot of eagerness from young talent to start their own companies. That is healthy. But those startups need support, guidance and mentorship. They need to scale, and they need access to investment. 

And they need partnerships. That is the keyword. These hubs and centres have to build partnerships rooted in the local mission, growing the local economy, but with a global vision. We live in a small, connected world. You can develop something in Cluj, raise the investment from the UAE, and do part of the development in Bulgaria. You have to be creative about it. But partnership is everything.

## **What's your strategy for building partnerships in Europe?**

We have an umbrella strategy for Europe. We work very closely with the EU, we are part of the European Enterprise Network as an organisation, which gives us access to European programmes, events and collaborations. Under that umbrella, we focus on specific sectors: healthcare, mobility, environmental tech, and advanced manufacturing. And we execute through ground-level programmes with startup communities, universities, research institutes and other ecosystem players.

## **Give me a practical example. If a research institute or university here in the region wanted to partner with SPARK, what would that look like in practice?**

Take mobility, I saw a solar car competition here, and we have a focus on automotive innovation too. The partnership could take several forms. It could be a knowledge exchange. It could be promotion, demos and pilots, actually testing the technology. 

A lot of European countries do not have enough sun, so if you have built something solar, you need to test it in the heat. We can be the platform where you verify it. 

It could be about investment; some of these technologies need capital, and we can help facilitate that. Or it could be about market access; some companies see our region as their growth market and want to open up there, and we provide that landing platform. The form depends on the opportunity. But the infrastructure in the UAE makes a good landing pad for these companies and collaborations.

## **What should European companies, investors and institutions keep in mind when expanding to the UAE and Sharjah? Are there frequent mistakes you'd warn people about?**

They have to be patient. Like anywhere, starting a business is not easy. Do your homework on choosing the right location, and do not just follow the hype. Find the right partners. And be realistic: this is a venture that takes time and work. 

The thing it cannot be is remote. A lot of people think, I'll take a trip, pick up some business, and that business will generate money while I'm back home. That is the perfect formula if it works but it almost never does. 

If you are serious, you have to have skin in the game. You have to be on the ground. As we were saying earlier, it is all about people and communication. The more you connect, the better people know you, and the more they trust you. If you are there, the opportunities are in front of you - morning, afternoon, late at night. 

Online can help, but it cannot do the job. So find a way to have a presence. Ours is one of the few regions in the world right now with access to funding and a genuinely progressive, long-term government vision. I would encourage people to look at it seriously.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/1782294600685.jpg)

## **I want to ask about commercialising scientific research. What's your experience in Sharjah, and how do you cultivate the environment where this is possible?**

It is the same challenge everywhere. University professors are often sceptical of the private sector. They are passionate about their work and believe they know it best, while industry is focused on making money. 

So you need people in the middle who understand both sides and can bring them closer. That is part of what the park does. What we have done is develop our own intellectual property framework and our own commercialisation framework because every country has its own cultural and business characteristics. 

You cannot just import a model from the US or China and paste it on top. People reference Silicon Valley, but it has its own background. You have to build your own, with a vision that is still global enough to work with Bulgarians, Romanians, Americans, Chinese, and Indians. 

And honestly, we like to imagine these things happen bottom-up. In my experience, they only work top-down. Someone has to take the leadership, and I think that is a role for government. We have built a framework that includes academia's vision, the private sector and NGOs, with a mission to serve the local context but a global outlook. It is not easy. But if there is one thing the UAE does well, it is this - we have more than 230 nationalities living there. It is embedded in our DNA. We are comfortable wherever we go, because we already know how people think.

## **For any innovation ecosystem to succeed, you need talent from all over the world, and the UAE has been good at attracting it. From your perspective, what's actually doing the attracting?**

Vision. What you demonstrate to people is that even in difficult times, this is a country that is well-managed, has a vision, and executes it consistently and professionally. 

Leadership matters enormously, because it builds trust, and it is all about trust. People have watched this country through war in the region, through the pandemic, and it never shook.

During COVID, we handled it about as well as any country in the world. Nothing closed. Everyone got their vaccines. We even sent vaccines abroad. People want to secure their future and trust the system, and that is what vision gives them. But execution and consistency matter just as much. 

You do not do one thing this year, decide after two years it did not work, and jump to something else - that confuses people. It is like building a business. If you believe in it, you stay on track. We keep reviewing, upgrading and fixing. It is not a perfect place. We make plenty of mistakes but our mentality is disciplined.

## **What should the role of media be in developing an innovation ecosystem?**

Media plays a big role, especially now. Technology companies want fair, balanced media and smart people who actually understand the technology. 

One of the challenges with deep tech is that not everyone understands it. If you talk to most people about nanotechnology or 3D printing or AI, they do not follow. If the media is equipped and professional enough to make those things easier to understand, it does a real service. 

Having smart companies in a society or a government that does not understand them gets you nowhere. That is often why companies go elsewhere: they hit a wall, and the wall is usually about communication. 

Say I am a government official, and you come to me with cutting-edge 3D-printing technology and want to construct a building with it. If I do not understand it, I will say no, it is too risky. If I am informed, I will say, sit down, explain it to me. 

That is the role of media in this context: to educate society about technology. 

---

Earlier, on stage with Mark Porter, Al Mahmoudi was asked why the Gulf, the US and China are racing ahead on AI while Europe lags, his answer was a single word, repeated - speed. He told the story of Emirates placing a historic aircraft order the same day the aviation industry collapsed after 9/11\. A year later, he said, planemakers were chasing Emirates. The lesson he draws: invest today, because tomorrow is more expensive. Europe is changing, he thinks, but slowly.

The corridor he wants to build with Central and Eastern Europe is framed as the opposite of a race. SPARK runs projects with American, Chinese and European partners, he pointed to Stargate UAE, the data-centre initiative he described as a collaboration between OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and the US government. 

"It's not a zero-sum game," he said. "We're a tiny country. We have to work with everyone." For Cluj, and the region more broadly, it’s similar: pick a focus - automotive, space, healthcare, and SPARK mobilises around it, university to university, company to company, government to government.

Whether the corridor materialises this time is an open question. But his read on the region was unambiguous. "It's all about people," he said. "And I think we have the right people here."
### Where to Build a Blockchain Startup in 2026: A Ukrainian Investor on the UAE, Europe, and the US
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/where-to-build-a-blockchain-startup-in-2026-a-ukrainian-investor-on-the-uae-europe-and-the-us/
Last updated: 2026-07-12T11:03:35.000Z
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.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### INMerge Innovation Summit Concludes Its International Event Series with INMerge Berlin
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/inmerge-innovation-summit-concludes-its-international-event-series-with-inmerge-berlin/
Last updated: 2026-06-30T06:56:29.000Z
After Istanbul and Tashkent, [INMerge Innovation Summit](https://www.inmerge.az/?ref=therecursive.com) concluded its 2026 Event Series in Berlin on June 29 in AXICA Convention Center.The summit brought together founders, investors, corporate innovators, C-level executives, startups, venture capital representatives, and technology leaders to explore new opportunities for investment, partnerships, and market expansion across Europe and Central Eurasia.

As the third and final international stop before the flagship INMerge Innovation Summit in Baku this November, INMerge Berlin served as an official side event of GITEX Europe. 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.

“*INMerge Berlin marks an important milestone in the evolution of the INMerge Innovation Summit. By bringing INMerge to Europe for the first time, we are expanding the conversation beyond regional borders and creating a stronger bridge between Europe, Azerbaijan, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and emerging innovation markets. This event reflects our commitment to connecting founders, investors, corporate leaders, and ecosystem builders around ideas that can shape the future of technology and entrepreneurship”*, said **Farid Mammadov**, **CEO at PASHA Financial Holding**. 

The agenda opened with an opening speech and keynote, continued with panels and a fireside chat and concluded with a Startup Pitch Competition.

The event opened with remarks by H.E. Nasimi Aghayev, Ambassador of the Republic of Azerbaijan to Germany. Martin Gutmann continued with his keynote, *“Are We Celebrating the Wrong Leaders?”*. The session set the tone for the day by reflecting on the evolving qualities of leadership in a fast-changing global innovation landscape and challenging conventional ideas about what effective leadership looks like. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/41---2026_INMERGE-39.jpg)

Followed by the panel discussion “Trust Corridors: Rebuilding Financial Bridges Between Europe and Emerging Markets” focused on financial connectivity and market access, highlighting how stronger institutional trust and cross-border partnerships can drive growth between Europe and emerging markets. Speakers included Ekaterina Galitsyna (KfW IPEX-Bank), Bahruz Naghiyev (PASHA Bank Azerbaijan), Zuzana Franz (ODDO BHF). The panel was moderated by Rza Aliyev (NGIC). The discussion emphasized rebuilding confidence, enabling investment flows, and strengthening links between innovation ecosystems.

The fireside chat “Beyond Efficiency: Wellbeing, Culture and the Future of Work” featured Ad Boon (PASHA Holding) and Martin Gutmann (Lucerne School of Business) and was moderated by Maria Ivanova (Gingo Partners). The discussion explored how organizations can balance productivity with employee wellbeing, inclusive culture, and long-term resilience, highlighting the growing importance of human-centered approaches in evolving work models.

The panel “***From Berlin Labs to Emerging Market Scale: AI, Big Tech and the Next Innovation Bridge***” explored how AI, global tech companies, and emerging market opportunities are shaping the next wave of innovation. Speakers included Mammad Karim (Caucasus Ventures), Mehti Aslanov (PASHA Financial Holding), Alexandra Begue (SAP) and Valeria Sadovykh (Microsoft Germany). The panel was moderated by Tughra Musayeva (PASHA Financial Holding). The discussion focused on how ideas from leading tech hubs can scale into high-growth markets through partnerships, investment, and ecosystem collaboration.

The Startup Pitch Competition judged by leading investors, closed the program, with three selected startups earning the opportunity to join the main INMerge event in Baku on 30 November–1 December 2026\. The winning startup “**Sintro**” will receive a fully funded package, while two additional startups (“**Datfid**” and “**Lan fly**”) will receive partial funding support.

As the final stop in the 2026 International Event Series , Berlin underscored INMerge’s role in connecting Europe with Central Eurasia and strengthening collaboration across borders. The event reaffirmed INMerge Innovation Summit’s mission to bring together ecosystems, capital, and ideas ahead of the **main INMerge event on 30 November - 1 December, 2026.**
### Why Did Accel, ElevenLabs' And Vercel’s CEO Just Back Polish Co-Founded Hardware Startup?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/accel-eleven-labs-vercels-ceo-y-combinator-pocket-investment-gabriel-dymowski-story/
Last updated: 2026-06-29T14:37:29.000Z
"I found someone who was a better entrepreneur than me, who was more visionary… I was like, man, I would love to work for you.” The story of how Gabriel Dymowski left his company to build AI hardware startup Pocket, which just raised €9.65M ($11M) led by Accel.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Czech Wultra raises €6.8M Series A to Expand Post-Quantum Digital Identity Platform
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/czech-wultra-raises-eur6-8m-series-a-to-expand-post-quantum-digital-identity-platform/
Last updated: 2026-06-29T11:21:40.000Z
Prague-based **Wultra**, a startup developing post-quantum authentication and digital identity solutions for banks and fintechs, has secured **€6.8 million in Series A funding** to accelerate its international expansion and product development.

The round was led by **Seventure Partners**, with participation from **ARIADNEXT** founders Marc Norlain and Guillaume Despagne, as well as existing investors **J&T Ventures** and **Elevator Ventures**. Wultra's previous round [was announced in the beginning of 2025](https://www.therecursive.com/romanias-west-region-gets-its-first-vc-fund/), securing €3 million.

Founded in the Czech Republic, Wultra helps financial institutions replace legacy authentication methods with phishing-resistant, post-quantum technologies designed to improve both security and user experience. The company says the new funding will be used to scale its digital identity platform, accelerate development of digital identity wallet capabilities aligned with the upcoming European Digital Identity Wallet ecosystem, and support expansion into the Middle East and the US. The investment will also fund team growth and strengthen the company's focus on large enterprise customers.

*“We see the accelerating need of the global banking industry to deploy post-quantum security solutions already today. Over the last year, Wultra has proven that they are ready to grow internationally,”* said Maximilian Schausberger, Managing Director at Elevator Ventures.

The funding comes as financial institutions and governments increasingly prepare for the transition to post-quantum cybersecurity standards amid rising AI-driven identity fraud and new cryptographic requirements. Wultra's platform is designed to support upcoming regulatory frameworks, including PSD3/PSR and eIDAS 2.0.

## Expanding its global footprint

The investment follows a year of international growth for the company. In 2025, Wultra expanded into Singapore, growing its presence in Southeast Asia, and says it now serves more than 70 clients across 25 countries. During the same period, the company broadened its product offering beyond authentication to include identity proofing, transaction authorization, and electronic signatures.

> "Last year was a highly dynamic period for Wultra. We expanded our product portfolio beyond authentication to cover the broader digital identity journey... We grew our team by nearly 50%, established a presence in Singapore, and now support more than 70 clients across 25 countries worldwide," said founder and CEO **Petr Dvořák**.

As organizations begin planning long-term migrations to post-quantum cryptography, Wultra aims to position itself as a key provider of next-generation digital identity technologies.
### Romania's West Region Gets Its First VC Fund
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/romanias-west-region-gets-its-first-vc-fund/
Last updated: 2026-06-26T13:21:47.000Z
Asternova Vest, developed by a Romanian-French consortium of Aster Capital Partners, Iceberg+, and Venture Booster, targets €37M to back 18+ Seed and Series A startups from Western Romania, the region that produced Movidius, Tazz, and 123FormBuilder.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Technical Debt Slows the Product. Culture Debt Slows the Company.
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/technical-debt-slows-the-product-culture-debt-slows-the-company/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:52:09.000Z
Every founder understands technical debt. In the early stages of building a company, speed often matters more than perfection. Teams make short term decisions, skip documentation, accept imperfect systems, and move forward knowing that some things will need to be fixed later. In many cases, this is not a mistake. It is simply the cost of building fast.

But companies do not only accumulate technical debt. They also accumulate **culture debt**.

Culture debt builds up when the way a company works is not made explicit because, in the beginning, everyone assumes it is already understood. How decisions are made, what ownership means, how communication works, what behaviour creates trust, what gets rewarded, and what the company will not compromise on often live in the founder's head long before they are translated into the organization.

In the early days, this can work. The founder is close to the work, the team is small, and people understand the culture because they see it in action. They hear how priorities are explained, how trade offs are made, what gets challenged, what gets celebrated, and how decisions move. **Culture travels through proximity.**

The problem is that proximity does not scale.

As the company grows, the founder is no longer present in every conversation. New managers join, teams develop their own habits, and functions begin interpreting the same business priorities in different ways. What was once obvious becomes open to interpretation. The founder may still know exactly what the company stands for, but the organization can no longer carry that meaning consistently.

This is where **culture debt starts to affect performance.** It shows up in slower decisions, inconsistent management behaviour, unclear communication, weaker trust, and more effort spent aligning people who should already be operating from the same understanding. From the outside, it may look like normal growing pain. Internally, it becomes a tax on execution.

## Case study on *values translation* *problem*

Over the years, I have worked with leadership teams and growing organizations where the challenge was rarely a lack of ambition. Most leaders were clear about the company they wanted to build. The issue was that this clarity had remained personal, intuitive, and informal for too long. My work often begins at that exact point: helping companies turn founder intent, leadership expectations, culture, and employee experience into a system the organization can understand and use consistently.

One company I worked with had expanded across several markets. On paper, it had a clear identity and a strong set of values. Leadership believed those values were understood because they had been repeated for years. But when we spoke with local teams, a different picture emerged. In one market, employees described the culture as entrepreneurial and empowering. In another, they experienced it as highly centralized. In a third, the same value was interpreted mainly as a demand to work harder during periods of pressure. **The company did not have a values problem. It had a translation problem.**

As the business had grown, local managers had become the primary interpreters of the culture. Some gave their teams context and room to make decisions. Others focused mainly on execution. A few developed their own language and practices because no shared management framework existed.

The solution was not to rewrite the values or launch another internal campaign. We helped turn abstract statements into practical leadership and communication principles. What does this value mean when a manager is explaining a difficult decision? How should it shape onboarding? What should employees experience during periods of change? How does it affect the way leaders communicate priorities?

Once the culture became easier to translate, the organization became easier to lead.

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## Case study on *ownership without decision rights*

I have seen a similar pattern around ownership. In another growing company, ownership was central to the founder's language. People were expected to act like entrepreneurs, move quickly, and take responsibility. The message sounded empowering, but internally people had responsibility without clear decision rights. Teams were told to be proactive, yet important decisions still moved back to senior leadership. Over time, people learned that acting without approval could create unnecessary risk.

Here the issue was not a lack of ownership. **Ownership had never been defined as an operating principle.** We helped the leadership team clarify what the word meant in practice. Which decisions should people make independently? When was alignment required? What information did employees need in order to act confidently? Where had the company confused accountability with control?

This kind of clarification may sound simple, but it has a direct impact on execution. When people understand the boundaries of their authority, decisions move faster. When managers know how to provide context rather than simply pass tasks, teams become more capable. When the founder no longer needs to personally resolve every ambiguity, the company becomes less dependent on a single source of clarity.

## Employer brand as a business tool, not a hiring activity

This is where employer brand becomes a business tool, not a hiring activity.

For many founders, employer branding still sounds like something that belongs to a later stage: a careers page, a recruitment campaign, a set of values, or a polished message for candidates. In reality, employer brand starts much earlier. It is the system of signals people experience every day: how leaders communicate, how managers behave, how decisions are made, how culture is lived, and whether the internal reality supports the promise the company makes to the market.

When those signals are connected, the company becomes easier to understand, lead, and scale. When they are disconnected, employees fill in the gaps themselves, managers interpret the culture through personal style, and the product story, market story, and people story begin to drift apart.

For startups and scaleups, the real shift is from founder led clarity to organizational clarity.

This does not make the founder less important. It makes the founder's intent easier for the company to understand, repeat, and operationalize without depending on the founder to translate it personally every day.

The work does not need to become corporate or heavy. A 30 person company does not need a complex employer brand function. But it does need shared clarity around the areas that directly affect scale.

## 4 steps to start addressing culture debt

### The first step is to **define what should not be left to interpretation.** 

Every growing company needs clear answers to a small set of operating questions. How do we make decisions? What does ownership mean here? What kind of behaviour builds trust? What do we reward? What do we not tolerate? How do we communicate when priorities change? What kind of company are we building, not only what kind of product are we selling?

These questions do not require long documents, but they do require alignment. If they remain implicit, every manager will answer them differently. My role in this process is to help leadership teams identify the principles that genuinely matter, test whether employees experience them in practice, and translate them into usable language for leaders, managers, employees, and candidates. The goal is not to create corporate statements but to create shared understanding.

### The second step is to **connect market ambition with employee experience.** 

Most startups can explain the product, the customer problem, and the commercial opportunity. Fewer can explain the kind of organization required to deliver that ambition. If the business promises speed to the market, employees need enough context to move quickly without creating chaos. If the company talks about ownership, people need decision rights, not only accountability. If it values collaboration, the structure, incentives, and leadership behaviour need to support collaboration in practice.

This is where employer brand strategy becomes more than messaging. It helps leadership teams see where the story is strong, where the experience supports it, and where the gap between message and reality is already creating friction.

### The third step is to **equip managers to become carriers of clarity.** 

At a certain stage, managers become the daily experience of the company. They translate priorities, explain decisions, handle tension, give feedback, and signal what is actually valued. If they are not aligned, culture becomes dependent on individual management style.

Founders do not need to script managers. But they do need to equip them with shared context, language, and principles. In practical terms, this can mean leadership narratives, manager toolkits, communication principles, onboarding messages, and simple decision frameworks. The format matters less than the function. Managers need to carry the same meaning across the organization rather than create separate versions of the company team by team.

### Finally, founders should **audit the gap between what the company says and what people experience.** 

Take three promises the company makes frequently, such as ownership, transparency, speed, collaboration, ambition, or trust. Then ask where people experience those promises in practice, where they experience the opposite, where managers reinforce them, and where processes contradict them.

The purpose is not to create a perfect culture. It is to understand where the company is already paying a hidden cost. Culture debt becomes expensive when habits harden, assumptions become norms, and inconsistencies become accepted ways of working.

Founders often wait to work on employer brand because they associate it with size, budget, and external visibility. But at an early stage, the work is more fundamental. It is about making the company understandable before it becomes complex.

**Every company has a culture. Every company has an employer brand**. The question is whether they are helping the company scale or quietly taxing every decision, conversation, and team interaction.

Technical debt may slow the product. Culture debt slows the company.Stanimira Kovacheva is an Employer Branding and People Communications Consultant helping organizations connect brand, culture, and communication so people don't just join but belong, grow, and advocate.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Nucleo Ventures Launches €34M Fund to Back Startups Across Romania and CEE
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-nucleo-ventures-launches-eur34m-fund-to-back-startups-across-romania-and-cee/
Last updated: 2026-06-26T06:06:28.000Z
**Foodics**, a leading operations and financial management platform in the Middle East and North Africa, [acquires Norma AI](https://www.therecursive.com/greek-norma-joins-saudi-foodics-in-full-acquisition-expanding-its-dedicated-ai-division/), Greece-based AI company focused on the hospitality and restaurant industry.

Almetra, the Berlin-based startup founded by Romanian Silviu Homoceanu and Maximilian Fischer in 2022, [secured **€16.3 million ($19 million)**](https://www.therecursive.com/romanian-founded-almetra-series-a/) **in Series A** funding. With this round, the company's total funding has grown to around €20.8 million, supporting its plans to expand into the US market. The Series A was led by **blisce/, joined by NAP, Merantix Capital, Robin Capital, Underline Ventures, Critical Ventures**, and a group of business angels. 

**Greek robotics startup Acumino** has raised [$11.7 million (](https://letsdatascience.com/news/acumino-raises-117m-seed-to-scale-robotics-deployments-c63b06a0?ref=therecursive.com)10.28 million) in seed funding to scale commercial deployments of its hardware-agnostic physical AI platform for industrial automation. The company is the sole Greek participant in Google DeepMind's first European robotics accelerator cohort — a 15-startup, equity-free program offering access to Gemini robotics models, up to $350,000 in cloud credits, and mentorship from DeepMind engineers, wrapping up with a Demo Day in London in September 2026.

[Czech startup Grid.online](https://www.therecursive.com/czech-grid-online-seed-investment-dff-ventures/) has closed a **€4 million round** to grow its neutral courier infrastructure, off the back of 10× delivery growth and over 1 million parcels delivered in year one. The round was funded by DFF Ventures, Movens Capital, angel investors from the early team of Finnish delivery unicorn Wolt, Reflex Capital, J&T Ventures

[Swiss deep tech investor **Constructor Capital**](https://www.therecursive.com/constructor-capital-backs-ora-computing-ai-model-compression/) has co-led a **€3.5 million seed round** in Ora Computing, a Vienna-based startup that compresses large AI models to make them cheaper and faster to run. The funds will be used for three things: growing the team, expanding compression capabilities to larger frontier models, and launching a commercial product for cloud inference providers and companies that deploy AI at the edge.

[AI startup SuperPlane](https://www.therecursive.com/serbian-superplane-pre-seed-dev-tool/), based in Serbia, secured **€2.28 million** in pre-seed funding to build an open-source control plane that lets AI agents and engineers safely collaborate on production infrastructure. The round was funded by Credo Ventures (lead), First Momentum Ventures; angel investors: Stanislas Polu (CEO of Dust), Mirko Novakovic (CEO of Dash0), Tomas Kratky (Founder of Manta), Andreas Klinger (Prototype Capital).

**Kraków-based agritech firm OneSoil** has raised [€1 million](https://tech.eu/2026/06/18/onesoil-secures-eur1m-to-expand-ai-powered-farming-assistant?ref=therecursive.com) from Yury Melnichek to enhance its AI-powered platform. The company uses satellite imagery and machine learning to provide farmers with real-time field monitoring, crop analytics, and automated agronomic recommendations globally.

**Superpal**, a Vilnius-based AI startup, [has raised €500,000](https://tech.eu/2026/06/22/lithuanian-startup-superpal-raises-eur500k-for-ai-coworker-platform-built-inside-slack/?ref=therecursive.com) in a funding round led by FIRSTPICK, with participation from Outlast Fund, to expand its AI platform that acts as a fully autonomous coworker inside Slack. The platform connects with over 1,000 business tools to execute end-to-end workflows, such as generating reports and presentations, by processing plain language requests directly within team workspaces.

## New CEE fund

Romanian Fortech Ventures has launched a **€34 million investment fund** and unveiled its new identity as **Nucleo Ventures**. Developed in partnership with the North-West Regional Development Agency (ADR Nord-Vest), the fund will back startups and innovative companies across Romania and Central and Eastern Europe, with the aim of supporting internationally scalable businesses while strengthening Romania's North-West Region as a hub for entrepreneurship, investment, and technology talent.

The fund was officially launched on **June 23** in **Cluj-Napoca**, at an event attended by more than 80 representatives from the local startup and business ecosystem, the fund's partners, and ADR Nord-Vest.

## **Across the Atlantic**

After nearly two decades of backing European startups, Seedcamp has raised a record $320 million for its latest fund, marking a significant step in [expanding its presence in the US](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/22/seedcamp-raises-320m-for-its-new-fund-to-expand-its-us-footprint?ref=therecursive.com).

The new capital is split across two vehicles: $220 million will be deployed through Fund VII for early-stage investments, while $100 million will support follow-on funding for high-performing portfolio companies via a newly launched growth-stage fund, Select.
### 22 Cybersecurity Startups in Central & Eastern Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/22-cybersecurity-startups-in-central-eastern-europe/
Last updated: 2026-06-25T13:36:13.000Z
With the increase in proficiency and *creativity* of hackers, enabled by AI tools, cybersecurity has become a major topic of discussion worldwide. The EU's [NIS2 Directive](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/nis2-directive?ref=therecursive.com) now binds **more than 160,000 entities to mandatory cyber obligations**, with fines of up to €10 million or 2% of global turnover, while the [European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) logged 4,875 incidents](https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/enisa-threat-landscape-2025?ref=therecursive.com) across the bloc in June 2024 - June 2025\. The market is racing to keep up: [European cybersecurity spend](https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/europe-cybersecurity-market-156644743.html?ref=therecursive.com) is set to climb from $54.8 billion in 2025 to $83.1 billion by 2030, and [**global venture funding**](https://www.securityweek.com/cybersecurity-firms-secured-14-billion-in-funding-in-2025/?ref=therecursive.com) into the sector hit nearly $14 billion in 2025 — its strongest year since 2021.

Central & Eastern Europe is quietly cashing in. Deep technical talent, lower burn rates, and a regulatory tailwind from the EU have turned the region into one of Europe's most prolific cybersecurity production lines: from post-quantum authentication in **Prague** and behavioral fraud AI in **Brno**, to identity verification in **Sofia**, supply-chain security in **Zagreb**, and offensive tooling in **Bucharest**. 

To have a better view of the CEE’s cybersecurity players, consult the list below. 

*\* Do you know a rising cybersecurity startup building in CEE that we've missed? Let us know at newsroom@therecursive.com.*

## **🇧🇬** Bulgaria

## 

### Alcatraz AI 

(Sofia / Cupertino — Bulgarian-founded)  
**Founder:** Vince Gaydarzhiev  
**Founded:** 2016  
**Solution**: 3D facial recognition reader that replaces badges and PINs at office doors  
**Funding to date**: \~€92M total, including a €46M Series B in April 2026  
**Investors**: BlackPeak Capital, Cogito Capital, ODC Ventures, Taiwania Capital, Almaz Capital, EBRD, Endeavor Catalyst, SeedBlink, entrepreneur Ray Stata

### Evrotrust

(Sofia)  
**Founders**: Konstantin Bezuhanov, George Dimitrov  
**Founded**: 2018  
**Solution**: Mobile app for qualified e-signatures and digital identity  
**Funding to date**: €12.4M with the latest being the €6.6M round in November 2025  
**Investors**: 3TS Capital Partners, Silverline Capital, Bulgarian Development Bank, Capital Investment Fund

### WiseBee 

(Sofia / New York)  
**Founders**: Stoyan Stoyanov, Taha Kazi  
**Founded**: 2024  
**Solution**: Agentic AI security platform for mid-market companies  
**Funding to date**: \~€2.1M pre-seed (August 2025)  
**Investors**: Frontline Ventures and BrightCap Ventures, plus a US investment firm and cybersecurity angels from SecurityScorecard, VMware, Box, Amazon, Deloitte, Verizon, Google

---

## 🇭🇷 Croatia  

### ReversingLabs 

(Zagreb founding, HQ Cambridge MA)  
**Founders**: Mario Vuksan, Tomislav Peričin  
**Founded**: 2009  
**Solution**: Software supply-chain security and malware analysis  
**Funding to date**: \~€119M total across 4 rounds, with the latest being the €35M Series B+ in 2024  
**Investors**: Crosspoint Capital Partners, JPMorgan Chase, ForgePoint Capital, Prelude, In-Q-Tel

---

## 🇨🇿 Czech Republic  

### GoodAccess 

(Ústí nad Labem)  
**Founders**: Michal Čížek, Martin Čížek, and Jiří Hromádka  
**Founded**: 2019/2020 (product launch July 2020)  
**Solution**: Cloud-based VPN and Zero Trust access for SMBs  
**Funding to date**: \~€1.9M  
**Investors**: Nation 1, Fazole Ventures, Google for Startups

### GreyCortex 

(Brno)  
**Founders**: Petr Chaloupka, Michal Drozd, and Petr Chmelař  
**Founded**: 2016 (research lineage from 2009)  
**Solution**: Platform that monitors company networks and flags suspicious activity  
**Funding to date**: \~€1.1M  
**Investors**: Y Soft Ventures

### IP Fabric 

(Prague)  
**Founder**: Pavel Bykov  
**Founded**: 2015  
**Solution**: Software that maps enterprise networks and surfaces weak spots  
**Funding to date**: \~€27.8M total, with the latest being the €23.1M Series B in June 2023  
**Investors**: One Peak Partners, Presto Ventures, Spring Tide Ventures

### Resistant AI 

(Prague)  
**Founders**: Martin Rehak, Lukas Machlica, Karel Bartos, Martin Gril, Tomas Laube, Martin Vejman, Jan Jusko, Josef Stach, Jan Stiborek  
**Founded**: 2019  
**Solution**: AI-native models for document fraud detection and transaction monitoring  
**Funding to date**: \~€58.4M total; €21.6M Series B in October 2025  
**Investors**: DTCP, Experian, GV (Google Ventures), Notion Capital, Index Ventures, Credo Ventures, Seedcamp

### Safetica 

(Brno)  
**Founder**: Jakub Mahdal  
**Founded**: 2007  
**Solution**: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Insider Risk Management (IRM) software  
**Funding to date**: \~€6M total, with €3.8M in January 2025  
**Investors**: Impulse Capital, angel investors

### ThreatMark 

(Brno)  
**Founders**: Michal Tresner, Kryštof Hilar  
**Founded**: 2015  
**Solution**: Behavioral biometrics for banking fraud detection  
**Funding to date**: \~€35.5M total, with €22.14M in January 2025  
**Investors**: Octopus Ventures, Riverside Acceleration Capital (RAC), Springtide Ventures

### Whalebone 

(Brno)  
**Founders**: Richard Malovic, Robert Sefr  
**Founded**: 2016  
**Solution**: DNS-layer security for telcos and governments  
**Funding to date**: \~€16.4M total, with €13.4M Series B in February 2025  
**Investors**: Unbound, Day One Capital, Fazole Ventures, Wayra

### Wultra 

(Prague)  
**Founder**: Petr Dvořák  
**Founded**: 2014  
**Solution**: Post-quantum authentication for mobile banking  
**Funding to date**: +€3M, with €3M Seed+ in January 2025 and an earlier undisclosed amount  
**Investors**: Tensor Ventures, Elevator Ventures, J&T Ventures

---

## 🇭🇺 Hungary  

### BitNinja

(Debrecen)  
**Founder**: George Egri  
**Founded**: 2014  
**Solution**: Server-side security for Linux hosting environments  
**Funding to date**: \~€2.8M total  
**Investors**: Lead Ventures, iEurope, Oxo Technologies Holding, Octogon Ventures, founders of Balabit

### SEON

(Budapest / London / Austin)  
**Founders**: Tamás Kádár and Bence Jendruszák  
**Founded**: 2017  
**Solution**: Risk intelligence platform powered by digital footprint analysis  
**Funding to date**: \~€166M total, with €67.5M Series C in September 2025  
**Investors**: Sixth Street Growth, IVP, Creandum, Firebolt, Hearst, PortfoLion; plus angel founders/execs from Coinbase, Datadog, Figma, Wise, Revolut, UiPath, etc.

---

## 🇵🇱 Poland  

### Authologic

(Warsaw / London / San Francisco)  
**Founders**: Krzysztof Klimczak, Jarek Sygitowicz, and Marek Rogoziński  
**Founded**: 2020  
**Solution**: Identity verification API for bank logins and digital IDs  
**Funding to date**: \~€7.6M across 4 rounds, with €7.6M Series A in October 2024  
**Investors**: OpenOcean, Y Combinator, Peak Capital, SMOK VC

### Cryptomage

(Wrocław / Warsaw)  
**Founders**: Miłosz Smolarczyk, Krzysztof Szczypiorski, and Jakub Pawluk  
**Founded**: 2015  
**Solution**: Network detection and response probe for deep packet threat detection  
**Funding to date**: \~€3M  
**Investors**: European Regional Development Fund and the Polish National Centre for Research and Development (grants), Starfinder Capital, Atende SA

### Cyberus Labs

(Katowice)  
**Founders**: Jack Wolosewicz and Marek Ostafil  
**Founded**: 2015  
**Solution**: Passwordless authentication and IoT security suite  
**Funding to date**: \~€2.8M  
**Investors**: Horizon 2020, Startup Collider by PwC

### ICsec

(Poznań)  
**Founder**: Robert Juszczyk  
**Founded**: 2018  
**Solution**: Industrial network security for OT networks in energy, gas, water, and rail  
**Funding to date**: \~€2.5M  
**Investors**: ORLEN VC, EEC Ventures, PGNiG Ventures

---

## 🇷🇴 Romania  

### Cyberhaven

(Romanian/Ukrainian-founded, HQ Palo Alto)  
**Founders**: Cristian Zamfir, George Candea, Radu Banabic, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, and Vitaly Chipounov  
**Founded**: 2016  
**Solution**: Data lineage platform that tracks information across cloud and endpoints  
**Funding to date**: \~€215M total, with €86M (≈$100M) Series D in April 2025 at a €860M valuation  
**Investors**: StepStone Group, Khosla Ventures, Adams Street Partners, Redpoint, Vertex Ventures, Costanoa, Trinity Ventures, Wing VC, Schroders Capital, Industry Ventures, plus angels including Alex Stamos and Adam D'Angelo

### Cyscale

(Cluj-Napoca)  
**Founders**: Ovidiu Cical, Manuela Țicudean, and Andrei Milaș  
**Founded**: 2018  
**Solution**: Cloud security platform for AWS, Azure, and GCP  
**Funding to date**: \~€3.1M across 4 rounds, with €3M Seed led by Notion Capital in May 2022  
**Investors**: Notion Capital, Seedcamp, GapMinder, NP-Hard Ventures, David Mytton (angel)

### Pentest-Tools.com

(Bucharest)  
**Founder**: Adrian Furtuna  
**Founded**: 2017  
**Solution**: Cloud-based toolkit for penetration testing  
**Funding to date**: Bootstrapped / profitable; minor early backing  
Investors: Orange Fab Romania

### TypingDNA

(Oradea / New York)  
**Founders**: Raul Popa, Cristian Tamas, and Adrian Gheara  
Founded: 2016  
**Solution**: Behavioral biometrics for typing-based authentication  
**Funding to date**: \~€7.3M across seed and Series A  
**Investors**: Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund, lead Series A), Techstars Ventures, GapMinder
### 0100 Emerging Europe 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/0100-emerging-europe-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T08:14:14.000Z
📅 **Date:** 24 September 2026  
📍 **Location**: Budapest, Hungary  
🏢 ****Venue:** [House of Music Hungary](https://www.google.com/maps/place//data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x4741dd46956ca34b:0x1b0365a6f8f3620?sa=X&ved=1t:8290&ictx=111&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://www.0100conferences.com/conferences/0100-emerging-europe?utm%5Fsource=Website%20&utm%5Fmedium=Banner%20&utm%5Fcampaign=Banner&utm%5Fid=The%20Recursive%20%20) 

​​Now in its 15th edition, 0100 Emerging Europe returns to Budapest with the same premise that has made it the benchmark LP/GP gathering for Central and Eastern Europe: fewer people, better conversations, and a room curated for outcomes.

The event takes place on 24 September at a single-day format designed around the quality of the room rather than the size of the stage. With attendance capped at 400 senior PE/VC leaders from 40+ countries, it operates at a scale where every conversation counts.

#### The Room

Already confirmed firms include Schroders Capital, EBRD, MidEuropa, Enterprise Investors, Innova Capital, Abris Capital Partners, Earlybird VC, Molten Ventures, 500 Global, and Anthemis. With 80% of attendees in decision-making roles and a deliberately balanced LP-to-GP ratio, the event is built for the kind of access that doesn't happen at larger conferences.

Senior LPs and family offices attend on a complimentary basis, subject to verification.

#### The Agenda

Six tracks cover the topics driving private markets in CEE and beyond:

- Capital flows, geopolitics & market direction
- Scaling companies & growth-stage capital
- LP strategies, fund selection & co-investments
- Sector focus: strategic technologies & innovation
- Private equity & value creation
- Exits & liquidity pathways

#### What to Expect

- 400 senior PE/VC leaders from 40+ countries
- 70+ expert speakers
- Balanced LP-to-GP ratio
- 80% decision-makers
- Pre-scheduled one-on-ones and intimate dinners
- Complimentary access for senior LPs and family offices

#### Why It's Different

In an era of oversized conference halls and networking apps that nobody uses, 0100 Emerging Europe has built its reputation on the opposite model. Pre-scheduled one-on-ones, intimate dinners, and time deliberately carved out for the conversations that happen between sessions — not despite the agenda, but because of it. For professionals tired of events that optimise for headcount over signal, the format speaks for itself.
### Romanian-Founded Almetra Raises €16.3M to Scale Factory Intelligence Platform
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/romanian-founded-almetra-series-a/
Last updated: 2026-06-25T14:21:33.000Z
[Almetra](https://www.almetra.ai/?ref=therecursive.com), the Berlin-based startup founded by Silviu Homoceanu and Maximilian Fischer in 2022, secured **€16.3 million ($19 million) in Series A** funding. With this round, the company's total funding has grown to around €20.8 million, supporting its plans to expand into the US market.

## "The last big blind spot in the digital economy"

Almetra installs AI-powered cameras above factory production lines. The cameras process footage on-site and turn it into live operational data, including cycle times, machine utilization, output rates, and production stoppages, without requiring integration with existing IT systems. Video is anonymized locally, meaning only short clips are retained when engineers need to trace a specific issue.

Speaking about the rebrand on[ LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/silviu-homoceanu-893b7a5/?ref=therecursive.com), Homoceanu described the factory floor as *"the last big blind spot in the digital economy."* The name Almetra, he explained, is derived from the idea of "measuring everything."

One of the company's strongest proof points comes from eBike Systems, a Bosch subsidiary, which reported a 19% increase in output after deploying Almetra. ABB saw a 15% productivity improvement. Siemens Energy, Viessmann Climate Solutions, Grundfos, and Aumovio (formerly Continental) are also among the company's customers.

## The Series A

The Series A was led by **blisce/, joined by NAP, Merantix Capital, Robin Capital, Underline Ventures, Critical Ventures**, and a group of business angels. The investment follows a €4.5 million seed round secured in April 2024\. 

> "Almetra has proven it can deliver measurable impact for some of the world's leading industrial companies," said Sam Giber, General Partner at blisce/.

The new capital will also support product development and the expansion of the company's robotics capabilities. Almetra has already been accepted into **Google DeepMind's Robotics Accelerator and the Physical AI Fellowship run by AWS, NVIDIA, and MassRobotics**.

[Announcing the raise](https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximilianpfischer/?ref=therecursive.com), Fischer pointed to a problem that remains surprisingly common across the industry: *"critical information is missing, disconnected, or impossible to act on in real time."*

## A Romanian Co-Founder Behind the Company

Romanian entrepreneur Silviu Homoceanu, Founder and CTO of Almetra, has played a key role in building one of Europe's more promising industrial AI startups. The company started as an internal project at Merantix, a Berlin AI studio, before being spun out as an independent venture and rebranded from Deltia to Almetra earlier this year. It now employs around 40 people.

Homoceanu joins a cohort of[ Romanian founders scaling AI companies](https://www.therecursive.com/romania-ai-startup-ecosystem/)[ abroad](https://www.therecursive.com/romania-ai-startup-ecosystem/), reshaping how the region's startup ecosystem is perceived across Europe. With customers including Bosch and Siemens Energy and fresh capital to support its robotics ambitions, Almetra has become one of the clearest examples of a Romanian-founded AI company scaling successfully across Europe's industrial sector.
### Constructor Capital Backs Ora Computing with €3.5M to Build the Efficiency Layer of AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/constructor-capital-backs-ora-computing-ai-model-compression/
Last updated: 2026-06-25T08:06:31.000Z
Swiss deep tech investor [**Constructor Capital** ](https://constructor.capital/?ref=therecursive.com)has co-led a **€3.5 million seed round** in Ora Computing, a Vienna-based startup that compresses large AI models to make them cheaper and faster to run.

## The investors

Constructor Capital is a Switzerland-based early-stage VC investing in deep tech and science spinouts. The round also includes Helsinki-based Greencode Ventures, focused on applied AI across energy, industry and infrastructure, and Austria-based XISTA Science Ventures, which served as a foundational investor in Ora from the start.

> "The era of brute-force AI is hitting its physical limits: hyperscalers reopening nuclear reactors, frontier labs burning billions on compute, reasoning models multiplying inference costs every quarter. The only sustainable answer is to make frontier AI dramatically cheaper to run. That's what Ora Computing does – compresses frontier LLMs so they run anywhere: in the cloud, in your car, in your pocket," says **Valentino Jadrisko, Senior Associate at Constructor Capital.**

AI inference has become a significant and fast-growing cost for companies deploying AI at scale. For large-scale deployments, compute costs can reach tens of millions of euros per month, and the problem compounds as models continue to grow in size. For companies that want to run AI locally on devices like cars or industrial machines, the models are often simply too large to fit. 

[**Ora Computing** ](https://www.oracomputing.com/?ref=therecursive.com)is an **Austrian startup specializing in optimizing and compressing AI foundation models**. Their software reduces model size by up to 80%, making them run four times faster, with an accuracy loss of just 0–5%. 

The startup has already proven this in practice – a 70B-parameter model was compressed in a matter of hours for under $1,000, while the industry typically pays hundreds of thousands for the same result. Unl**ike competitors like Qualcomm and Intel**, whose tools are tied to their own hardware, Ora works across different hardware types and requires no changes to existing infrastructure. 

## From quantum physics to AI efficiency

**Stefan Sack and Raimel Medina**, two quantum computing researchers from the Serbyn group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), founded Ora Computing to tackle what they see as a more urgent problem than quantum computing itself. The company emerged from stealth at the end of 2025\. Their background in quantum physics sets them apart from most AI founders, who typically come from Big Tech or machine learning research. 

> "We founded Ora Computing to challenge the assumption that massive scale is needed to reach useful intelligence"says **Stefan Sack, CEO & co-founder of Ora Computing.**

The funds will be used for three things: growing the team, expanding compression capabilities to larger frontier models, and launching a commercial product for cloud inference providers and companies that deploy AI at the edge.

With [AI investment trends](https://www.therecursive.com/cee-ai-investment-trends-2026-the-shift-to-applied-ai-and-roi/) pointing toward efficiency and cost reduction over raw compute power, Ora Computing is positioning itself at the center of that shift.

> “AI's energy appetite is growing faster than the world can build the infrastructure to feed it. One key approach is to make AI itself more efficient, and that is exactly what Ora does. Compressing models radically without sacrificing accuracy makes a tremendous difference to their customers,” says **Terhi Vapola, Founder and Managing Partner of Greencode Ventures.**
### Serbian SuperPlane Raises €2.28M to Put AI Agents in Charge of Production Infrastructure
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/serbian-superplane-pre-seed-dev-tool/
Last updated: 2026-06-24T08:51:17.000Z
👯 **Founder(s):** Darko Fabijan (CEO) and Marko Anastasov (CPO)

📅 **Founding year:** *2025*

🏭 **Industry:** Dev / Platform Engineering

💥 **Problem:** AI has transformed how code is written, but the operational layer hasn't moved. Deployments, infrastructure changes, incident response, and cross-functional workflows are still fragmented, manual, and locked in the heads of a few senior engineers, meaning faster code generation just creates a bigger bottleneck on the other side.

📣 **Solution:** An open-source, AI-first control plane for event-driven workflows that sits above the existing tooling stack, giving teams a single environment to design, run, and supervise production workflows. AI agents become first-class participants, not given free rein, but operating within guardrails, context, and a policy framework that allows them to act safely.

👥 **Customers:** Engineering and DevOps teams managing complex production infrastructure.

🎳 **Team size:** 9

🌱 **Stage:** Pre-seed

💰 **Investment amount:** €2.28M ($2.6M) 

🚀 **Funded by:** Credo Ventures (lead), First Momentum Ventures; angel investors: Stanislas Polu (CEO of Dust), Mirko Novakovic (CEO of Dash0), Tomas Kratky (Founder of Manta), Andreas Klinger (Prototype Capital)

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor's perspective:** Credo Ventures points to Darko and Marko's track record building and scaling Semaphore, used by the likes of Confluent and Superhuman, as proof they can execute at the DevOps layer, which they see as the next major shift in software yet to happen. First Momentum Ventures frames SuperPlane as a structural infrastructure play for the AI code generation era, arguing it gives engineering teams the guardrails to safely absorb the pace of AI-generated code at scale. 

💡 **It will be spent on…** Accelerating product development, growing partnerships, expanding the open-source community, and launching the hosted version.

💬 **In their own words:**

> *"AI is changing how software gets built, but it still hasn't meaningfully changed how production systems are run. As AI-generated code increases the speed and volume of change, the future of operations cannot be more manual coordination and more tribal knowledge. It has to be supervised automation through systems that engineers can trust. SuperPlane is the next step for engineering teams that want to operate production systems with the speed of AI and the safety of deterministic infrastructure." –* Darko Fabijan, CEO*.*

💪 **Their specialty…** Darko and Marko built Semaphore, one of the early CI/CD pioneers used by Confluent, Replit, and Superhuman, giving them over a decade of firsthand experience operating developer infrastructure at scale. SuperPlane is open source under Apache 2.0 and connects to more than 400 components and integrations across the tools engineering teams already use. 

🔑 **Business model:** Open-source control plane for platform engineering, with a hosted version coming Q2 2026

💸 **Funding so far:** First round €2.28M ($2.6M)
### “Doing Quite Well” Isn't Good Enough for Estonia
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/doing-quite-well-isnt-good-enough-for-estonia/
Last updated: 2026-06-24T10:06:15.000Z
From e-voting to unicorns, Estonia has become a global innovation success story. But according to Startup Estonia's Vaido Mikheim, the next chapter will depend on turning research into companies, scaling deep tech, and thinking beyond national borders.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Automation Is Changing: What the Rise of AI Agents Means for Workflows
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/automation-is-changing-rise-of-ai-agents-workflows/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:52:19.000Z
**Not long ago, automation felt simple**. You defined a rule: “*if this happens → do that*.” For example, if someone opened an email and didn’t take a desired action, a follow-up was sent, or if a recipient clicked a link in your email, they were moved to the next segment.

For many years, this logic powered marketing automation, SaaS platforms, and many of the workflows inside growing companies, and it worked well enough, mind you.

But the more complex our systems became, the more fragile this logic felt. Since people behave unpredictably, markets shift overnight, and campaigns run across multiple channels simultaneously, **those elegant “if-then” automations become dozens of conditions someone has to maintain.**

## From rigid rules to goal-oriented automation

Traditional automation systems rely on predefined logic. You anticipate possible events, create rules for them, and hope the system covers most scenarios.

In stable environments, this works perfectly. **In digital businesses, the environment can change frequently**, and rule-based automation starts to struggle. The result is that teams spend more time adjusting workflows than benefiting from them.

AI agents introduce a different approach that’s not about following a fixed set of instructions. An agent receives a goal and the context necessary to achieve it. It can analyze incoming data, choose among possible actions, and adapt the path toward the outcome to respond to unpredictable situations.

## Modern workflows are too complex for static logic

A standard marketing workflow today rarely involves a single channel or decision. Instead, you’ll find:

- Multiple communication channels (email, push notifications, in-app messages, and ads);
- Behavioral triggers;
- Segmentation rules;
- Testing scenarios;
- Personalization layers.

AI agents can ease this complexity **because they can continuously evaluate incoming signals** and adjust the process accordingly. For example, instead of manually defining which message version to send under which condition, an agent can evaluate engagement signals, behavioral data, and historical performance and then choose the most relevant option.

## Content is no longer a fixed asset

Now, let’s look at the **shift that happens at the content level**. Usually, marketing teams treat content as something static: a campaign message, a landing page, or a notification. However, when you opt for dynamic workflows, your content must also become flexible. AI agents make this possible by integrating multiple capabilities within the same process:

- Generating variations of messages;
- Adapting tone and structure to different audience segments;
- Testing alternatives;
- Analyzing which versions perform better.

Let’s try to apply this approach to a **product onboarding campaign**. Here, we won’t send the same email to every new user. Instead, an AI agent will dynamically adjust the message. A tech-savvy user will get a short, feature-focused email, and a beginner will receive a more guided explanation. If engagement drops, the system can test alternative subject lines or suggest switching channels.

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## Why your workflow needs specialized AI agents

Spoiler alert: **It’s impossible to find a single perfect agent that will manage everything** because complex workflows usually work better with specialized agents. Each subagent focuses on a particular task type: 

- Segmentation of audiences based on behavioral signals;
- Content generation and adaptation;
- Channel selection and timing optimization;
- Experimentation and performance analysis.

A coordinating agent can then combine these results and determine the next action. **Let’s take a SaaS company that is launching a new feature as an example** to see how it works. A segmentation agent identifies three groups:

- Active users who frequently use similar features;
- Dormant users who haven’t logged in recently;
- Trial users who are still evaluating the product.

Then, **a content agent creates three message options**: productivity gains for the first group, ease of use for the second, and onboarding support for the third. 

Next, a channel agent finds out that active users respond better to in-app messages, while dormant users are more likely to interact with email. Finally, your experimentation agent monitors engagement and shifts traffic toward the best-performing combination.

Such an approach works just like your team does. For instance, you don’t ask one specialist to design the campaign, analyze the data, write the content, and run the experiments simultaneously. Instead, your team members handle different parts of the process that they are responsible for. It’s convenient **because when each subagent has a defined role, it becomes easier to understand how decisions are made** and which component influences the outcome.

## Why this subagent architecture matters for automation?

Distributing responsibilities among specialized agents brings several advantages.

****Scalability**. While introducing new tasks to subagents, you don’t need to rebuild the entire system. If a workflow requires a new capability, you can always integrate an extra agent into the process.  
  
****Flexibility**. Different businesses have various constraints. Specialized agents allow organizations to adapt automation to their unique workflows instead of molding everything into a single rigid structure.  
  
****Explainability.** It’s crucial to understand how decisions are made when automation influences customer communication or operational processes. Automation is comfortable when rules are clear, so if something breaks, you can trace the logic. 

With AI agents, decisions become probabilistic, so you might wonder: **how do you audit what the system is doing?** 

For example, your agent can decide to offer a different pricing tier to a segment of users based on engagement signals. It might improve conversions eventually, but for your team, it’s still **crucial to understand why the agent selected this segment**, what signals influenced this decision, and what options were considered. 

This often means **introducing human-in-the-loop checkpoints**. For example:

- Segmentation agents can propose audience clusters, but your human specialists approve them;
- Pricing or offer adjustments may require threshold-based approval;
- Experimentation agents can test variations, but within predefined constraints;
- Performance agents can recommend changes, but not deploy them automatically.

Such a balanced approach can help you benefit from adaptive automation and maintain control over high-impact decisions at the same time.

## SaaS platforms will become environments for agents

So, you might have a question: Where do these agents actually operate? We are used to thinking that SaaS platforms were built primarily for human users. The interface was the main interaction point: dashboards, buttons, configuration panels, etc.

However, if AI agents become active participants in workflows, **the role of SaaS platforms begins to change**. They will become operating environments for humans and AI agents.

In this model:

- APIs become the primary interaction layer, as it’s impossible for 2 programs to interact without an API;
- System logic must be predictable and structured;
- Documentation needs to be machine-readable;
- Data and content should be modular and accessible.

Agents call functions, access structured data, and execute instructions programmatically. This means that **the future competitiveness of many SaaS products may depend on how well they support this new mode of interaction**. Platforms that are easy for AI agents to understand and interact with will become part of larger automated ecosystems.

### Will AI agents replace SaaS?

SaaS platforms will not vanish because they are the infrastructure in which data, logic, and workflows are managed. However, the way we interact with them will change.

> Historically, we moved from command-line interfaces to graphical interfaces because they made technology accessible to people. We are now **witnessing a shift toward interaction through instructions and goals**.

Instead of configuring every step manually, users may increasingly describe outcomes: “analyze this, optimize that, generate alternatives, test variations.” Agents then translate these intentions into sequences of actions executed within the platform. SaaS products evolve from tools that we operate into systems that collaborate with us.

## Wrapping up

Like most technological shifts, the rise of AI agents will not transform everything overnight. Many businesses will continue using traditional automation systems for years, and in many cases, rule-based workflows will remain perfectly sufficient.

However, as processes grow more complex and data become more plentiful, the ability to adapt workflows dynamically becomes vital. 

AI agents offer a way to introduce this adaptability without turning workflows into unmanageable systems of rules. For founders, product teams, and innovators, this is worth paying attention to.
### Czech Grid.online raises €4M after 10× delivery growth in its first year
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/czech-grid-online-seed-investment-dff-ventures/
Last updated: 2026-06-23T10:09:19.000Z
👯 **Founder(s):** Ondřej Krátký (CEO & co-founder) and Patrik Raš (CFO & co-founder)

📅 **Founding year:** 2024 

🏭 **Industry:** Logistics (last-mile delivery)

💥 **Problem:** Last-mile delivery demand swings by 50%+ in a typical week, the delivery mix is rapidly shifting from home delivery to locker and pickup-point networks, and constant price wars are shrinking industry margins year over year, leaving carriers with fleets structurally wrong for today's demand.

📣 **Solution:** Grid.online provides neutral shared infrastructure for local parcel delivery. Through a single API, multiple parcel carriers tap into the same network of flexible local couriers to absorb delivery overflow, without competing with carriers' own fleets, brands, or customer relationships.

👥 **Customers:** B2B, parcel carriers in the Czech market

🎳 **Team size:** 11-50

🌱 **Stage:** Seed

💰 **Investment amount:** €4 million

🚀 **Funded by:** DFF Ventures, Movens Capital, angel investors from the early team of Finnish delivery unicorn Wolt, Reflex Capital, J&T Ventures

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor's perspective:** Investors highlight Grid.online's rare combination of 10× growth and strong unit economics, something they say almost never happens at this stage. They see the platform's neutrality as the key structural advantage that makes it work for carriers at scale, and back it as a category-defining infrastructure bet for European last-mile delivery.

💡 **It will be spent on…** Deepening the network's capacity and resilience, expanding engineering and product automation teams, and laying the foundation for international growth.

> 💬 **In their own words:** *"We built grid.online on the trust of our early clients and couriers, who saw what we saw: that e-commerce delivery is heading toward more vehicles on the streets and tougher economics unless the industry builds a shared alternative. The €4 million lets us keep building that alternative with them — a grid that works economically for carriers and couriers alike, and powers the future of e-commerce,"* — **Ondřej Krátký**, CEO & founder

💪 **Their specialty:** Grid.online was founded as an independent spin-off from Czech mobility platform Liftago, and the founders describe building on several years of prior R&D. In its first full year, the company scaled parcel volumes more than 10× and surpassed 1 million deliveries. The network currently has 1,000–2,000 active couriers, with several thousand more on a waiting list.

🔑 **Business model:** B2B logistics cloud infrastructure platform for parcel carriers.

💸 **Funding so far:** €4.5M
### Greek Norma Joins Saudi Foodics in Full Acquisition, Expanding Its Dedicated AI Division
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/greek-norma-joins-saudi-foodics-in-full-acquisition-expanding-its-dedicated-ai-division/
Last updated: 2026-06-22T14:07:46.000Z
Norma's natural language analytics, already adopted across 10,000 Foodics branches, will now power the next generation of agentic AI for restaurant operations.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### The End of the Employee Survey: When Feedback Becomes Continuous
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-end-of-the-employee-survey-when-feedback-becomes-continuous/
Last updated: 2026-06-22T06:48:55.000Z
*Honest team intelligence, long considered too operationally noisy and legally risky to gather, can now be delivered to leaders in real time.*

For decades, HR tech has struggled to answer a simple question: what's going on inside an organization? Annual surveys, pulse tools, 360 reviews, and listening tours were all designed to make that picture clearer.

Yet many companies continue to struggle with the same challenge: collecting honest feedback consistently, turning it into something actionable, and maintaining trust in the process. Companies would rather not collect what they could not control.

## AI that makes organizational truth operationally possible

When a machine is the first and only entity to process raw people data before it reaches a leader, organizations can approach the problem differently.

This way, the benefit is two-fold: employees become more likely to share candid perspectives when individual responses are not visible to administrators, and leaders receive aggregated insights rather than hundreds of unstructured comments. Tasks that previously required significant manual effort, from categorization to pattern detection, can now be handled automatically. This opens the door to a new infrastructure category: real-time people intelligence.

The first integrated system based on this premise is now in the market, thanks to a startup with European DNA: [Mirror 360](https://www.mirror360.org/?ref=therecursive.com). The company dubbed its system the "Organizational MRI". Leveraging AI moderation, it brings together principles from game theory, standardization, and consumer-grade UX to efficiently gather honest perspectives at work.

## One year into Mirror 360’s first large-scale deployment: what changed

*"HR tech has always asked their buyer, an HR administrator, what they needed to streamline their job. We asked a very different question," says Mirror 360 co-founder and CEO Petar Kralev, a former management consultant and corporate director. "Why are executives the last to know what's broken in their own teams?"*

In its first large-scale deployment, participation remained **above 90% across the first thousand invitations to reflect in a 150-person organization**, an outcome the company attributes to the simplicity and universal anonymity of the system.

Over the course of a year, people developed a new habit: sharing regular reflections on one another and on their work experiences. Survey response rates above 70% are generally considered strong. Maintaining participation at that level over twelve months, with input collected weekly rather than quarterly, provided a more continuous view of how trust, collaboration, leadership effectiveness, and team dynamics evolve over time.

*"People were submitting product feedback, asking why the product skipped to ask them on a Monday," recalled Vassil Bakalov, Mirror 360's co-founder and CTO. "To have employees demand a survey?! It felt like we were witnessing a historic behavioral shift."*

Professionals could now take a more current and honest look at themselves, generated from the latest anonymized input provided by their colleagues. Rather than relying solely on periodic reviews or manager feedback, they could identify recurring patterns emerging from aggregated peer perspectives.

One of the **significant observations** from the deployment was that **nine out of ten employees with perceived performance gaps improved over time**. According to the company, those changes became visible in near real time, without additional interventions such as formal coaching or training.

*"In 25 years in the HR industry, I had seen how feedback training, reviews, and engagement surveys consistently failed to deliver results for the organization," said Iva Panayotova, an independent culture consultant who partnered with Mirror 360 on its first deployment at scale.*

## When the data surfaces what no one will say

Beyond participation rates, the deployment generated measurable changes in how teams functioned. 

By design, Mirror 360 can uncover toxic team dynamics that would otherwise simmer undetected. It happened here. One team's fulfillment score came in at 28%, **a record low in the deployment**. Simultaneously, the team's manager appeared consistently "low impact" in the platform's continuous signaling. Leadership acted and replaced the manager. Three months later, the same team's fulfillment score **had reached 92%**. Leadership could watch the change happen in real time, in the data, as it occurred.

*The client described the shift this way: "Issues that would previously simmer for months, if they surfaced at all, are now visible in real time. Not as one-off complaints, but as clean data."*

Earlier this month, **Iva Panayotova** took first place representing Mirror 360 at the regional Startup World Cup competition in Varna, advancing to the global finals in San Francisco this November.

*"I'm pitching someone else's startup because I'm in love with this technology," she added.*

As companies move from periodic feedback cycles to continuous streams of organizational data, workforce decisions begin to resemble other business functions: less dependent on individual interpretations or speculation, and increasingly informed by observable patterns.

Mirror 360 provides people-visibility infrastructure that helps leaders detect organizational risk, guide managers, and improve performance before problems become expensive.
### How Do You Make University Ecosystem That Makes 3 Unicorns in a Year?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/viktor-olsson-interview-kth-innovation-playbook-tech-transfer/
Last updated: 2026-06-19T11:25:29.000Z
**Viktor Olsson**, the lead for internationalization at Stockholm’s KTH Innovation, is heading to Croatia for the [**Nuqleus Liftoff** conference](https://nuqleus.io/en/liftoff/?ref=therecursive.com) this June. It’s his first time in the country, but **he isn’t there for the Adriatic coast**. He’s there because the boundaries of European tech are expanding, and he’s arriving with **two decades of Stockholm’s deep tech playbook in his back pocket**.

Sweden and Croatia, it turns out, have more in common than the average founder might assume. Both are smaller markets, forcing founders to think globally from day one. Both suffer from deep centralization: Stockholm punches well above its weight, generating a quarter of Sweden's GDP, and reaching top spots on European deep tech reports, while the rest of the country barely registers.

[Nuqleus Liftoff 2026Liftoff 2026 is set to transform Zagreb into the heart of the European deep tech scene, positioning Croatia not just as a tourist paradise, but as a formidable high-tech destination.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/icon/PNG_recrop_resize_logo_only-b2eaf4f1-fac5-415e-9df1-b90844e24949.png)The RecursiveLenka Vranová![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/thumbnail/Nuqleus-Liftoff-2026g1-db9b94f1-dfa7-4ad9-a84c-d0928cf18af0.png)](https://www.therecursive.com/nuqleus-liftoff-2026/)

But as an editor covering the CEE ecosystem, I didn’t find the similarities where I hoped. The **trust, confidentiality, and support** this Swedish university offered, **before demanding anything in return**, are what set it apart. While Central and Eastern Europe has the scientific talent, turning breakthroughs into businesses remains a systemic challenge, largely because the ecosystem lacks this foundational mindset.

Ahead of his visit, Olsson shares a playbook that turns conventional wisdom on its head: one that starts by giving the university’s most valuable asset away for **free**.

## The Professor’s Privilege

In many European countries, the journey of a university spin-off begins with a difficult negotiation over equity and intellectual property (IP). **Universities often claim a significant stake**, sometimes making the new venture uninvestable from day one. Sweden, however, operates under a different legal framework known as the “professor’s privilege”.

*“When you are a researcher at a Swedish university, including PhD students, you own all of your patentable IP,”* Olsson explains. *“Even though the university pays your salary and for the lab space, the things that you take and commercialise are yours.”* This immediately **removes the first, and often biggest, hurdle**.

> *"It changes the entire conversation from ‘What can we take from you?’ to ‘How can we help you succeed?’*

That simple but profound distinction fundamentally **reshapes the relationship** between the university and its entrepreneurs. “*We’re not here for a quick transaction; our legacy is built on being a long-term partner in a researcher’s journey*,” Olsson emphasizes. 

This approach is crucial because **deep tech doesn’t follow a typical startup timeline**, he points.Deep tech *"requires patient capital and, more importantly, patient and persistent support. We are prepared to stand by our founders for years, not just months*.” 

> “Trust is our primary currency. When a researcher knows we have no ulterior motive to grab their IP, they open up. They share the real challenges, the half-baked ideas, the doubts. That’s **where the real innovation support begins**.”

### Earning the trust

And the most important aspect of their approach: KTH Innovation cannot compel researchers to work with them, it has to **earn its place at the table**.

*“We have to be founder-friendly,”* Olsson notes. *“We need to give them an offer that makes them want to involve us, because we cannot just control and try and take what they’re doing.”*

For Olsson, this is not just a philosophy but a **competitive necessity**. *“Being founder-friendly isn’t just a slogan for us; it’s our survival mechanism. It means our advice has to be world-class, our network has to be genuinely useful, and our process has to be transparent. If we don’t add real value, they will simply walk away, and they have every right to do so.”* 

This forces the university to operate not as a gatekeeper but as a genuine partner, providing free, confidential support without taking any equity. And it’s a model that has helped make Stockholm the 13th-best ecosystem in the world for deep tech, with **KTH alumni behind three (of 4 total) city’s AI unicorns last year**.

## Financing an equity-free machine

If KTH Innovation doesn’t take equity, **how does it fund itself and measure success**?

The organisation receives its core financing from Sweden’s Ministry of Education, supplemented by the university’s own budget, and financing from the ERDF for the Stockholm region.

Also, while the initial support from KTH Innovation is equity-free, this does not mean financial backing is off the table. For the most promising ventures ready for investment, they provide a clear path to capital through **KTH Ventures**. This is the university’s own venture capital arm, which invests in early-stage companies born from KTH research.

> “*Think of our innovation support as the foundational stage where we de-risk the project*."

> “*Once a team validates their idea and is ready to scale, KTH Ventures can step in as a pre-seed or seed investor. It’s a separate vehicle, but it’s part of the same supportive philosophy, helping bridge the gap to external capital*.”

The “*beauty of this two-step model*”, as Olsson describes it, is that their innovation support team can remain neutral. "*Our only goal is to make the venture as strong as possible. We don’t push them towards KTH Ventures; we prepare them for any investor. If KTH Ventures happens to be the best fit, fantastic. But our job is to serve the founder, not the fund*.”

## Measuring success beyond the balance sheet

While metrics like number of incorporations, and money the startups later raise, do provide a good measure of KTH Innovation success, Olsson argues the real impact lies in **developing human capital**. Cliche as it sounds, the focus is on the journey, not just the outcome.

“*Failure for us doesn’t really exist*,” he says. “*We are happy if you take it as far as you can, *even if that means you shut it down for good reason*. You still learn something, you still develop as a person.”* He shares that researchers who attempt commercialisation and return to academia often become better scientists. *“We call it ‘recycling talent*’,” Olsson explains.

> “*A researcher who tries to build a company and then returns to the lab is a huge asset to the university."*

*"They bring back an understanding of market needs, project management, and communication that enriches their research and their teaching. *It’s a win for the entire ecosystem, not a loss on a balance sheet**.” They learn to tell their story, package their ideas, and think about real-world impact beyond publications. And this is just a fraction of the mindset KTH Innovation fosters. Their people-centric, community-oriented, long-term view is what drives significant change.

To help founders navigate their complex journey, KTH also created the [KTH Innovation Readiness Level](https://www.kth.se/en/innovation/for-researchers-and-employees/innovation-support-process/kth-innovation-readiness-level-1.890623?ref=therecursive.com), a framework inspired by NASA’s Technology Readiness Level (TRL). But instead of just focusing on technology, it assesses an idea across six dimensions: **Technology, Customer, Business, Funding, Team, and IP**. This holistic view provides a clear roadmap and ensures teams don’t get lost in the lab.

The most frequently neglected dimension by scientists? “*Customer*,” Olsson states plainly. “*The market validation aspect, which is usually customer and business, and that’s the really most important part.”*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/nuqleus-1.png)

## The myths holding Europe back

To truly unlock its deep tech potential, Olsson believes Europe must dismantle **two pervasive myths**.

The first is that researchers cannot be great entrepreneurs. *“I think that’s not true, and I think especially if you look at a European perspective and if you look at deep tech, it’s actually the other way around,”* he argues.

> "*Who better to lead a deep tech company than the person who has dedicated a decade of their life to the core science? They have a depth of knowledge and a resilience that you can’t just hire. Our job is not to replace them with a ‘business person’, but to surround them with the skills and support they need to become great leaders themselves*.”

He advocates for treating **entrepreneurship as a valid and celebrated part of a scientist’s career**, creating synergies where successful commercialisation can fund future research, rather than a conflict where one must be chosen over the other.

The second myth is that universities should act as asset managers, focused on controlling IP and maximising profits. Instead, Olsson calls for universities to become loud, active participants in their ecosystems, leading the charge to create founder-friendly environments.

> “We need to ask ourselves, how are we a good innovation partner for the founders?”

This requires a **shift from a defensive posture to a proactive one**. With growing momentum across the continent, Olsson is optimistic but insists the work must be done collectively. It’s not about waiting for permission from policymakers, but about **ecosystem players taking responsibility**.

“*We need to think about how our universities are active participants and enablers for innovation*,” he concludes. “*It is our responsibility, and it’s also a way for us to stay relevant.”*

**To hear more great insights from Olsson, and other prominent scientists, startups, VCs, and industry representatives, be sure to check* [**Nuqleus Liftoff*](https://nuqleus.io/en/liftoff/?ref=therecursive.com)**, and join the conference to help drive the regional deep-tech ecosystem growth and innovation.*
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Ukraine and France Launch €20M Defense Tech Fund
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-ukraine-and-france-launch-eur20m-defense-tech-fund/
Last updated: 2026-06-19T10:46:57.000Z
## CEE news & deals

**Kyiv-based logistics AI startup Cargofy** has raised [$11 million (€9.6 million)](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/cargofy-lands-11-m?ref=therecursive.com) in a Series A round, including $6 million in primary funding and $5 million in secondary transactions. Founded in 2023 by Stakh Vozniak, Alex Kovalchuk, and Dimitri Alexiou, Cargofy develops AI-powered “digital workers” that automate end-to-end freight operations for shippers, carriers, and third-party logistics providers.

**Warsaw-based Microamp** [has secured €6.5 million](https://www.therecursive.com/warsaws-microamp-eic-investment-5g-6g-network/) from the European Innovation Council to develop Any-G, a software-defined wireless platform engineered to support 5G, 6G and future network standards from a single architecture, without replacing physical infrastructure.

**Czech-Slovak Sloneek**, cloud-based HR and workforce management platform, secured oversubscribed [$6M (€5.18M) Series A round](https://www.therecursive.com/czech-slovak-startup-sloneek-closes-over-eur5m-round-to-turn-hr-software-into-an-ai-colleague/)led by Orbit Capital and Venture to Future Fund. The company wants to extend its platform beyond HR by integrating with systems used across finance, marketing and other departments.

**Slovak startup Definic**, previously known as Nordics, [raised €2.5 million ($2.9 million) in seed funding](https://www.therecursive.com/slovak-definic-seed-round-ai-vendor-intelligence-platform/) to help enterprises pick the right IT vendors through AI-driven vendor intelligence and benchmarking. The round was funded by J&T Ventures (lead), Seed Starter ČS (Česká spořitelna), Slovak Investment Holding (SIH).

**Lithuanian defense-tech startup PDKINEMATICS** [secured a €2 million seed round](https://www.therecursive.com/lithuanian-defense-tech-startup-raises-eur2m-for-nato-uav-guidance/) co-led by Coinvest Capital and Iron Wolf Capital to scale production and deployment of its battlefield-proven Gannet precision guidance system for UAVs across Europe, Ukraine, and NATO markets. 

**Poland-based agritech company OneSoil**, which develops AI-powered precision agriculture tools, has secured €1 [million in funding](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/onesoil%5Fonesoil-secures-1m-to-expand-ai-powered-activity-7473292584942174208-9awP?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=member%5Fdesktop&rcm=ACoAADLXLE4BNNDbYnXXeV2wh%5FDxAc1SssTOf5c) from Yury Melnichek, co-founder of Melnichek Investments.

## Growth across the ecosystem

[Poland has become an equity investor in ElevenLabs](https://www.therecursive.com/poland-becomes-a-shareholder-in-elevenlabs/), the $11B AI voice company founded by Polish childhood friends Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski. Through Vinci, the venture arm of state-owned development bank BGK, the country is putting **$11M directly into the startup,** taking a minority stake in return.

Beyond the equity, the fund is also launching AI Lab Poland — a national initiative to help early-stage AI startups access capital and connections of the kind that took ElevenLabs global, and that the company can now pay forward.

## New fund

Kos Biotechnology Partners, founded by Greek-American life sciences investors **Dr. Simos Simeonidis** and **Alex Tzoukas**, recently announced the third closing of its inaugural fund at [$123 million (€106 million)](https://www.therecursive.com/kos-biotechnology-partners-first-greek-life-sciences-fund/), making it the largest debut venture capital fund ever raised in Greece, and one of the largest first-time life sciences fund launches in Europe.

The fund focuses on bringing US biopharma expertise and capital to emerging life sciences opportunities across Greece and the broader European market.

## Cross-country collaboration

**Ukraine and France** [have launched BRAVE FRANCE](https://tech.eu/2026/06/17/ukraine-and-france-launch-eur20m-brave-france-fund-to-accelerate-battlefield-innovation/?ref=therecursive.com), a new defense tech initiative backed by a joint €20 million fund from Ukraine’s BRAVE1 and France’s Defense Innovation Agency (AID).

The program will support Ukrainian and French companies developing military technologies for frontline needs, with grants of up to €1 million. The first call for projects opens in September, focusing on missile systems, drones, and advanced air defense solutions.

*"The deal represents a highly strategic, win-win format of international partnership: Ukraine gains immediate access to battlefield-changing European technologies, while France secures a unique opportunity to adapt its defence innovations to a high-intensity modern war,"* saidMykhailo Fedorov, The Minister of Defence of Ukraine*.*
### Bulgaria Brought Its First Coordinated Startup Delegation to Startup Grind
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bulgaria-brought-its-first-coordinated-startup-delegation-to-startup-grind/
Last updated: 2026-06-18T14:48:57.000Z
For startup ecosystems, internationalization is often discussed through the lens of funding. Yet founders who have successfully expanded into new markets tend to point to a different factor behind many breakthrough opportunities: access.

More often, the decisive advantage comes from proximity to the people and environments that shape important decisions: potential customers who can validate a market opportunity, investors who can challenge assumptions before a fundraising process begins, and operators who have already navigated the complexities of building and scaling companies internationally.

It is this broader form of proximity that brought a Bulgarian delegation to Silicon Valley this May, where startups, ecosystem builders, and institutional partners participated in Startup Grind Conference 2026, one of the world's largest gatherings focused on entrepreneurship, technology, and venture capital.

Organized through a partnership between the The Executive Agency for the Promotion of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises ([BSMEPA](https://sme.government.bg/?ref=therecursive.com)), Future Unicorns Accelerator, and The Recursive, the initiative marked the first coordinated Bulgarian presence at Startup Grind. Beyond participation in the conference itself, the delegation reflected a broader effort to create stronger pathways between Bulgarian founders and the global networks where companies, partnerships, and investment opportunities are formed.

Held annually in Redwood City, California, Startup Grind brings together thousands of founders, investors, operators, corporate leaders, and technology companies from around the world. The conference has become a meeting point for conversations around company building, venture capital, artificial intelligence, product development, and international growth, offering founders direct exposure to many of the ideas shaping the next generation of technology businesses.

## Why Future Unicorns Accelerator embedded Startup Grind into its Silicon Valley immersion

Participants spent the week engaging with investors, founders, ecosystem leaders, and technology executives, while taking part in networking events, workshops, and discussions focused on the realities of building globally competitive companies. The program offered founders an opportunity to test assumptions, gather feedback, and better understand how their companies are perceived outside their home market.

The visit came at a time when many European startups are rethinking how early they should begin building international relationships. While capital has become global, trust, introductions, and market insight remain highly relationship-driven. Founders are discovering that successful expansion often begins long before a company formally enters a new geography.

That understanding has become central to the mission of Future Unicorns, which works with founders across the region to provide exposure to international networks, mentors, operators, and investors. The Silicon Valley immersion has become one of the accelerator's defining experiences, exposing founders to an environment where conversations move quickly from product development to distribution, category creation, market timing, and scale.

*"The Silicon Valley immersion as part of our accelerator is designed to give founders direct exposure to the people, conversations, and environments that shape the global technology industry. Having the opportunity to participate in Startup Grind during that experience significantly increased the value founders were able to extract from the program. It allowed them to complement their meetings, workshops, and mentoring sessions with access to one of the world's largest gatherings of founders, investors, and operators. For us, this is closely aligned with the mission of Future Unicorns: helping ambitious founders build meaningful international connections earlier in their journey and giving them a clearer understanding of what it takes to compete on a global stage," said Konstantin Kunev, CEO of* [*Future Unicorns Accelerator*](https://www.futureunicorns.io/?ref=therecursive.com)*.*

According to Boyko Takov, Executive Director of the Bulgarian Small and Medium Enterprises Promotion Agency, helping Bulgarian companies establish direct relationships with international markets has become an important part of the agency's work.

*"The long-term competitiveness of the Bulgarian economy will depend on our ability to build companies that can compete internationally, attract investment, and create high-value jobs from Bulgaria. Bulgarian founders are already building ambitious companies, but growth today depends on relationships with customers, partners, investors, and the broader networks that help companies expand beyond their home markets. Through initiatives like Startup Grind, we are creating opportunities for Bulgarian entrepreneurs to engage directly with those ecosystems, build meaningful connections, and accelerate their international development. Every company that succeeds internationally strengthens not only its own prospects, but also Bulgaria's position within the global innovation economy," said Takov.*

The participation was organized under Project BG16RFPR001-1.013-0001, supporting the internationalization of Bulgarian SMEs through the Competitiveness and Innovation in Enterprises Programme 2021–2027, co-financed by the European Union. The initiative also reflects a broader shift taking place across the Bulgarian technology ecosystem.

Over the past decade, Bulgaria has produced a growing number of internationally active technology companies, experienced founders, and venture-backed startups. As the ecosystem matures, the challenge is becoming less about proving that globally relevant companies can emerge from the country and more about accelerating the speed at which those companies connect with international markets.

## Inside the world's most connected startup ecosystem

Silicon Valley remains one of the most influential environments for that process. Despite the rise of strong startup ecosystems across Europe, the concentration of talent, capital, company-building experience, and emerging technology expertise in Silicon Valley remains difficult to replicate. Founders who spend time there are exposed not only to investors and potential partners, but also to the pace at which new ideas are evaluated, funded, and brought to market.

For many founders, the exposure changes the nature of the questions they ask. Conversations become focused on market positioning, customer acquisition, distribution, and long-term competitive advantage. The proximity to experienced founders and investors compresses learning cycles that might otherwise take months or years.

Teodor Antonio Georgiev, CEO of The Recursive, sees initiatives like Startup Grind as an important mechanism for strengthening connections between regional ecosystems and the global technology industry.

*"Startup ecosystems develop through repeated exposure: to customers, investors, operators, and markets that operate at a different scale. Every founder who returns from Silicon Valley brings back relationships, observations, and lessons that become part of the local ecosystem. Over time, those accumulated experiences matter as much as capital in shaping the next generation of companies," said Georgiev.*

As a media partner in the initiative, The Recursive joined the initiative as part of its broader mission to connect founders, investors, and innovation ecosystems across Central and Eastern Europe. Over the years, the publication has documented how international engagement often acts as a catalyst for emerging ecosystems, creating opportunities that extend far beyond a single event or market visit.

## The conversations shaping the next generation of companies

Artificial intelligence dominated many of the discussions across the conference, reflecting its growing influence on technology markets and venture investment. At the same time, founders and investors repeatedly returned to topics such as sustainable growth, product differentiation, capital efficiency, and international expansion.

For startups coming from emerging innovation ecosystems, those conversations carry particular significance. As competition intensifies across global markets, founders are expected to think internationally from the outset. Understanding customer expectations across geographies, building strategic partnerships, and developing access to global networks have become core components of company building.

The objective is not simply participation in a conference. It is creating opportunities for founders to challenge assumptions, build relationships, gain market insight, and return with a clearer understanding of how their companies fit into a global technology landscape. For Bulgaria, the country's first coordinated delegation to Startup Grind represents another step in that process.

The ecosystem has already demonstrated its ability to produce talented founders and globally relevant technologies. The next stage of growth will depend on how effectively those founders connect with international customers, investors, partners, and markets.

Building those connections requires collaboration between founders, institutions, ecosystem organizations, and private-sector partners. The presence of BSMEPA, Future Unicorns, and The Recursive at Startup Grind reflects a growing recognition that startup ecosystems scale through networks as much as through capital.

And as Bulgarian founders continue to expand their ambitions internationally, those networks are likely to become one of the ecosystem's most valuable assets.
### “Investors Should Stop Treating the Global South as a Monolithic Asset Class”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/investors-stop-treating-the-global-south-as-a-monolithic-asset-class-alina-truhina/
Last updated: 2026-06-21T06:32:41.000Z
Treating emerging markets as a monolith is a costly mistake. Utopia’s Alina Truhina explains how to leverage strategic arbitrage between emerging markets and GCC, and why local nuance is the ultimate sourcing advantage.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Trimaranix Launches as One of Southeast Europe's Largest Agentic AI Consultancies
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/trimaranix-launches-as-one-of-southeast-europes-largest-agentic-ai-consultancies/
Last updated: 2026-06-19T10:37:31.000Z
The move creates one of Southeast Europe's largest technology consulting groups focused on helping companies adopt agentic AI. Together, the three companies generate more than €20 million in annual revenue, have delivered more than 1,500 projects for over 800 clients, and employ more than 200 specialists across Salesforce, SAP, e-commerce, data infrastructure, and enterprise AI.

The timing reflects a broader shift taking place across enterprise technology; as organizations move from experimenting with generative AI to deploying autonomous AI agents inside core business functions, demand is growing for the infrastructure, processes, and operational expertise required to make those systems work at scale.

Global enterprise spending on agentic AI is projected to reach $201.9 billion in 2026, making it one of the fastest-growing segments in enterprise software. [Trimaranix](https://trimaranix.com/?ref=therecursive.com) is positioning itself around a simple premise: building an agentic enterprise requires more than access to AI models. It requires the combination of business processes, data infrastructure, and digital commerce systems that allow AI agents to operate inside real organizations.

*"AI agents are no longer a future state: they are a present-tense business imperative. Trimaranix was born from ten years of working side by side, building trust and delivering results together across the world. This strategic alliance is the natural next step: uniting our shared history with the power of the AI era to create measurable, lasting competitive advantage for every client we serve. The companies that act now will define their industries for the next decade, and we are here to make sure ours are among them,"* said **Orlin Dochev, CEO of** [**Next Consult**](https://next-consult.com/?ref=therecursive.com).

*"btProvider has spent years building the data backbone that modern enterprises depend on. Joining forces as Trimaranix means we can pair that foundation with world-class AI capabilities and deliver outcomes at a scale none of us could achieve alone. This is the moment our region steps onto the global technology stage,"* said **Liviu Carcia, CEO of** [**btProvider**](https://btprovider.com/ro/?ref=therecursive.com).

### Three companies, one stack

Putting AI agents to work in a real enterprise takes more than a model. The company's processes have to be redesigned so agents have defined work to do. The data underneath has to be reliable enough for agents to act on. And the commercial front line, where revenue is made, has to be [ready for AI](https://www.therecursive.com/next-consult-introduces-an-ai-powered-digital-workforce-to-transform-customer-engagement/) on both sides of the transaction. Each of the three companies has spent the past decade building one of those pieces. 

**Next Consult brings agents for enterprise processes.** Its consultants redesign the core of how a business operates across sales, service, operations so that AI agents and humans work side by side, with humans firmly in command. 

**btProvider brings agents for data.** The Bucharest-based company builds the decision infrastructure underneath, data that is clean, governed, and real-time. Without it, autonomous agents are guessing. With it, they are safe enough to run the business on. 

**C4 Nexus brings agents for commerce.** Its teams have spent over a decade building e-commerce platforms for global brands, the front line where agents now meet the market, evaluate offers, and complete transactions. 

Process, data, and commerce: together, the three cover the full anatomy of an agentic enterprise. The name of the brand itself nods to the logic, a trimaran owes its speed and stability to three hulls moving as one vessel.

The alliance formalizes a partnership that has been building for over a decade. Next Consult and btProvider formed a joint venture in 2021, making the group one of the largest Salesforce consulting partners in the region and an official Salesforce reseller for Romania and Bulgaria. A second joint venture with C4 Nexus followed in 2022, adding global-grade e-commerce delivery for international brands. Trimaranix unites these threads under a single brand, with a shared leadership structure, while the three companies continue to operate independently.

The group's clients include enterprises across telecom, banking, insurance, manufacturing, retail, and consumer goods in Europe and the Middle East. Trimaranix's stated one-year ambition is concrete: to begin converting its existing client base into agentic enterprises, organizations made measurably more efficient through AI agents and a digital workforce operating alongside human teams.
### Warsaw's Microamp Raises €6.5M to Future-Proof Europe's 5G and 6G Infrastructure
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/warsaws-microamp-eic-investment-5g-6g-network/
Last updated: 2026-06-18T16:30:20.000Z
[**Microamp**](https://microamp-solutions.com/?ref=therecursive.com), a Polish deep-tech startup, has secured **€2.5 million in grants and €4 million** in equity from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, totalling **€6.5 million**, to develop its Any-G mmWave AI-RAN wireless platform.

Microamp, founded in 2020 by **Dawid Kuchta and Marcin Góralczyk**, is a Warsaw-based deep-tech company specializing in 5G mmWave wireless solutions. The company claims to be the first in the world to successfully commercialize 5G mmWave networks, designing and delivering end-to-end networks with ultra-high capacity and near-zero latency, powered entirely by its own purpose-built hardware and software.

## One Platform for Every Generation

[**Microamp's**](https://microamp-solutions.com/newsroom/eic-accelerator-funding?ref=therecursive.com) solutions is the Any-G platform, a fully software-defined system that supports 5G, 6G and future standards from a single architecture. Instead of hardware overhauls, the platform evolves through software updates or swappable RF modules. The result is a fivefold reduction in infrastructure ownership costs, with future capabilities including Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) and non-terrestrial network (NTN) integration for seamless connectivity with satellite layers.

Co-founders Dawid Kuchta and Marcin Góralczyk have spent the past several years building Microamp around a niche few European companies operate in: 5G mmWave infrastructure. While Kuchta oversees the company's commercial strategy as CEO, Góralczyk leads technology development as CTO, aiming to turn the Warsaw-based startup into a recognised player in next-generation wireless connectivity.

## What the €6.5M Actually Covers

**European Innovation Council (EIC)** is the European Union's flagship innovation program designed to identify, develop, and help deep-tech companies grow. The programme supports startups working to turn promising research into commercial products, primarily focusing on deep-tech startups and SMEs. It operates with a multibillion-euro budget, and here the total financial backing is distributed as a €2.5 million EIC grant and €4 million equity from the EIC Fund. 

The funding comes as mmWave spectrum continues to open up across Europe. Yet access to spectrum alone does not guarantee technological independence. Much of the equipment powering modern telecom infrastructure is still designed and manufactured outside the continent, leaving European operators reliant on [foreign suppliers.](https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eca/special-reports/security-5g-networks-03-2022/en/?ref=therecursive.com)

Microamp argues it offers a different path. The company's intellectual property, engineering and manufacturing are all based within the European Union, giving it a rare position in in a market dominated by a handful of large international companies.

> "The spectrum is opening across the EU, but without European technology, critical infrastructure will be controlled and dominated by external incumbents," said Dawid Kuchta, co-founder and CEO of Microamp.

For policymakers increasingly focused on technological resilience and supply-chain security, companies like Microamp represent more than a commercial opportunity. Microamp is not an isolated case. Poland has been steadily building its position in European tech, most recently when the [Polish state became a shareholder in ElevenLabs](https://www.therecursive.com/poland-becomes-a-shareholder-in-elevenlabs/) through a $11M investment via Vinci, the investment arm of state-owned bank BGK.

Companies like Microamp are part of a broader effort to ensure that the next generation of wireless networks is built not only in Europe, but also by European technology firms.
### Poland becomes a shareholder in ElevenLabs
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/poland-becomes-a-shareholder-in-elevenlabs/
Last updated: 2026-06-18T10:02:03.000Z
Poland is investing $11M in ElevenLabs through Vinci, the investment arm of state-owned bank BGK, giving the government a minority stake in the $11B AI voice company.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why AI Alone Won't Work for HNWIs
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/why-ai-alone-wont-work-for-hnwis/
Last updated: 2026-06-18T11:54:18.000Z
Wealthy individuals are perhaps the toughest stress test for any service whose processes are supported and navigated by artificial intelligence. A conceptual and subtle mistake that companies [make](https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/world-wealth-report/?ref=therecursive.com) is **treating HNWI clients as a premium segment of the mass market**, even though the economics here are completely different.

When a retail bank's chatbot makes a mistake, it usually costs the customer service department money. When an AI assistant makes a wrong move with a customer whose annual spending runs into seven figures, the company risks losing a relationship that could be worth millions. And it's quite possible that this customer [will tell](https://www.craftimpact.com/podcast/choosing-financial-advisors-2025-survey-insights-ep-15?ref=therecursive.com) five other wealthy individuals about their bad experience.

**Both private bankers and luxury concierges agree**: they are [primarily engaged](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250121976392/en/CapIntel-Survey-Reveals-That-Trust-Not-Portfolio-Performance-is-Top-Priority-for-Investors-in-Advisor-Relationships?ref=therecursive.com) in a business based on **human trust, not transactions**. Clients stay because of the person who immediately got involved in their problem and understood the context, rather than because of the product’s feature set.

## Service begins where data ends

Imagine that a client sends a message at 11 p.m. requesting a table for nine people at one of Dubai's best restaurants for the following evening, but by morning reduces the reservation to five people. Unfortunately, the restaurant has a strict deposit policy, and your client assumes that everything has already been taken care of.

At this point, the problem becomes much more complicated than simply booking a table – it's about being able to read between the lines and at the same time establishing a relationship with the restaurant manager, with whom you may be working for the first time. **Judgments based on emotional intelligence and cultural competence are important** in solving this problem, exactly where AI still struggles.

A bot can process options and compare prices, but it does not understand social nuances in stressful situations and cannot predict when a restaurant manager will meet you halfway thanks to competent and humane communication.

The same applies to private aviation. The client says, “Something to Nice next week.” That's it. A good concierge knows that this means a trip to the French Riviera, which they take twice a year, with their usual operator, taking into account specific food preferences and with a car waiting for them, rather than a commercial flight to Nice - Côte d'Azur Airport. AI will definitely help with logistics as soon as a person correctly deciphers the request, but the **deciphering itself depends on years of context** in human relationships.

## “That's what the system decided” is not an explanation.

This is precisely why many projects built entirely on AI fail at the stage of non-standard requests. AI excels at monitoring markets, preparing materials, and making recommendations, but the risk increases dramatically as soon as a person allows AI to move from giving advice to performing tasks.

The most obvious example can be found in **large transactions**. The system can correctly determine that a client's portfolio is too heavily exposed in one sector and suggest rebalancing. But executing a multi-million dollar transaction without confirming the client's current intentions, tax situation, or future liquidity needs means **turning analytics into unmanageable risk**.

Moreover, in regulation and compliance, AI can assist with KYC, AML, and sanctions screening, identify inconsistencies, and accelerate initial processing, but the final decision cannot be blindly delegated to the model. Simply because the regulator will not accept an explanation along the lines of “that's what the system decided.”

## The myth of complete AI autonomy and the price of this illusion

One example is last year's Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Air AI. The regulator[ accused](https://www.cfodive.com/news/ai-startup-reaped-millions-using-bogus-claims-ftc-suit/758587/?ref=therecursive.com) the company of marketing its AI as a tool that would replace human sales managers and support agents, while overstating its promises of revenue growth and guaranteed returns. This sends us an important signal that a company is liable not only when the AI itself gives the wrong answer, but also when the company sells false ideas about replacing human control where this is not yet possible.

In [wealth management](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/wealth-management/), the consequences and potential liability are even more serious. Imagine that an AI assistant mistakenly advises a client that they are entitled to a certain tax regime, investment structure, or jurisdictional solution that does not apply to them.

This issue is **particularly sensitive for Europe**, as DORA and the EU AI Act[ strengthen](https://www.smarsh.com/regulations/eu-ai-act?ref=therecursive.com) requirements for risk management and the preservation of human responsibility in processes where AI is used.

## AI for data, humans for relationships

Even when customers are willing to trust AI as a supporting tool, they still trust humans more. A recent study[ showed](https://www.unbiased.co.uk/news/press-releases/7-in-10-brits-prefer-financial-advice-from-a-person-rather-than-artificial-intelligence?ref=therecursive.com) that 74% of consumers would prefer to receive financial advice from a human being: 40% are willing to entrust the management of their investments only to a live advisor, while another 34% would trust an advisor who uses AI as a supporting tool. For the HNWI segment, where confidentiality and personal trust are particularly important, this barrier is likely to be even higher.

However, **this does not mean that AI should play a secondary role**. In a number of tasks, it actually works more efficiently than humans. For example, AI can compare hundreds of flights in seconds, track changes in hotel prices, scan market data, or retrieve customer interaction history.

When working with HNWI clients and special requests, the system can record and take into account details such as client allergies, location preferences, disliked hotel chains, or recurring portfolio questions.

## Relationships are more important than algorithms

The most valuable part of the service for [HNWIs](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/hnwi/) is still related to human interaction.

The system can flawlessly plan a route through several European cities, structuring flights, hotels, and transfers. But a person will notice a small detail: the client's passport expires in four months, and this could become a problem on part of the route. The booking will go through technically, but an experienced concierge will see the risk in advance.

That is why it is important to **build AI around people**. First, technology should strengthen the team from within: help prepare for meetings, compile portfolio reports, conduct research, and perform preliminary analysis. Then it can be used in low-risk client scenarios. Only after that should it be used in assisted execution mode, where a person makes the final decision and bears responsibility.
### CEE Summer of Impact Returns With 30+ VC Partners Across Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-summer-of-impact-returns-30-vc-partners-2026/
Last updated: 2026-06-17T14:07:06.000Z
After one of its 2025 finalists went on to raise **€2.7M**, Tilia Impact Ventures' flagship summer program is back, but this year opening its doors to even more promising founders across the region.

**CEE Summer of Impact**, run by [Tilia Impact Ventures](https://www.therecursive.com/inside-tilia-the-e32m-czech-impact-fund-that-empowers-cee-companies-with-esg-solutions/), a CEE-focused impact VC fund with 20 investments across the region, is a free program for pre-seed and seed-stage impact startups with at least one year of operation. No fees, no equity taken.

This year it launches for a second time, widening its geographic reach to include Turkey and Greece, and broadening its thematic scope to match where the next generation of impact is being built — from climate, health, and education to energy, AI for good, and space.

**As Andrew Gray, General Partner at Tilia Impact Ventures**, put it: *"In Year 1, we proved that CEE is home to world-class impact founders who just need the right visibility and support. This year, we've mobilized top VCs from all across Europe and world-class operators as mentors. We've partnered with the biggest household names in tech to provide credits to supercharge the building. And to top it off, the best founders will be on stage in Barcelona in October."*

## Get seen by 30+ Investors

More than 30 VC firms from across Europe take part in the program as mentors and startup reviewers, giving founders an opportunity to connect directly with potential investors.

Unlike traditional accelerators, the program does not wait until Demo Day to connect founders with investors. Once applications close, participating VCs review the startups and request introductions to those that fit their investment focus, allowing conversations to begin well before the mentoring phase starts.

The program begins with an open application period running from June 15 to July 28\. Once applications close, participating investors review the startups and connect directly with those that match their investment focus. The top 20 selected startups then enter a mentoring phase, where they receive guidance from experienced investors and operators. **In October, eight finalists take the stage in Barcelona** in front of some of Europe's most active impact investors.

The first edition attracted **more than 150 applications**, with 20 startups selected for mentoring and eight reaching the final Demo Day. One of the finalists, [Estonian-Dutch deep-tech startup Spiral Hydrogen](https://www.spiralhydrogen.com/?ref=therecursive.com), went on to raise €2.7 million in pre-seed funding through connections made during the program. The company, which is developing a new type of electrolyzer for green hydrogen production, is now building a pilot.

For impact founders across CEE, Turkey, and Greece, this is one of the few programs that offers direct investor access, charge and equity-free. 

Applications close July 28 at [summer.tilia.vc.](https://summer.tilia.vc/?ref=therecursive.com)
### Lithuanian Defense-Tech Startup Raises €2M for NATO UAV Guidance
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/lithuanian-defense-tech-startup-raises-eur2m-for-nato-uav-guidance/
Last updated: 2026-06-17T13:58:45.000Z
👯 **Founders:** Rapolas Markevičius, Simonas Stasevičius, Dominykas Rinkevicius

📅 **Founding year:** 2022

🏭 **Industry:** Defense Technology / UAV Precision Guidance Systems

💥 **Problem:** Around 300,000 drone-deployed munitions are dropped in Ukraine every month, with most being unguided, limiting accuracy and combat effectiveness. NATO allies are rapidly expanding drone capabilities but lack scalable precision guidance solutions.

📣 **Solution:** PDKINEMATICS develops precision guidance systems for UAVs, including its flagship Gannet system, which enables accurate strikes from up to 700 metres altitude while remaining cost-effective, jam-resistant, and compatible with multiple UAV platforms.

👥 **Customers:** UAV manufacturers, defense integrators, European armed forces, and NATO-aligned defense organizations.

🌱 **Stage:** Seed

💰 **Investment amount:** €2 million seed round

🚀 **Funded by:** Coinvest Capital and Iron Wolf Capital (co-leads), alongside defense-focused angel investors and experienced technology founders.

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor’s perspective:** *"Precision-guided systems are the future of modern warfare. The PDKINEMATICS team combines entrepreneurial drive with deep engineering talent and moves at the speed this moment demands. They have earned credibility in Ukraine, and we believe it positions them to become a defining defense technology company for NATO allies."* — Žygimantas Susnys, Founding Partner of Iron Wolf Capital

💡 **It will be spent on:** Scaling manufacturing, expanding deployments across Europe and Ukraine, growing NATO market presence, and advancing the R&D pipeline, including proximity fuse and anti-electronic warfare (EW) technologies.

💬 **In their own words:** *"We are rebuilding precision guidance for the platforms that actually dominate today's battlefield, applying modern R&D on top of proven guidance principles and packing them into manufacturable, deployable systems for modern UAV warfare."* — Rapolas Markevičius, CEO & Co-Founder

💪 **Their specialty:** Battle-tested, low-SWaP-C precision guidance systems for UAVs that provide high-altitude accuracy, jam resistance, rapid integration, and cost-efficient deployment.

🔑 **Business model:** Developing and supplying precision guidance systems and proprietary UAV components to manufacturers, defense integrators, and military organizations, while serving as a technology provider within NATO defense supply chains.

👩‍🏫 **Market:** European and NATO defense sector, military UAV systems, precision-guided munitions, and drone warfare technologies.

📊 **Traction:**

- Strategic partnership with Bavovna.ai, one of Ukraine’s largest bomber-class UAV manufacturers.
- Systems integrated and deployed in active battlefield conditions in Ukraine.
- Partnership signed with Italian UAV manufacturer SiraLab.
- Selected for Iron Wolf 2026, Lithuania’s largest international military exercises.
- Pilot deployment milestones completed in both Ukraine and NATO environments.

NATO member state naval deployment already in the pipeline.
### Greece’s Startup Ecosystem Has Found Capital. Now It Needs Structural Change
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/greeces-startup-ecosystem-has-found-capital-now-it-needs-structural-change/
Last updated: 2026-06-16T14:05:47.000Z
Greece’s innovation ecosystem maintained its growth momentum in 2025, supported by strong investment activity and signs of a maturing market. More than **€732 million was deployed across 95 funding rounds** during last year, [marking a 35% increase from 2024](https://thefoundation.gr/2025/12/11/fwd-greece-innovation-pulse-2025-2026-report/?ref=therecursive.com).

Yet according to Filippos Zakopoulos, Managing Partner at the innovation platform [Found.ation](https://www.therecursive.com/foundation-creator-on-the-next-stage-for-the-greek-tech-ecosystem/), the next stage of growth will depend less on funding and more on structural transformation.

*"I don't want to use the word mature market because we're still a small market, but we're going there. We're maturing."* For Zakopoulos, the most encouraging sign is not a single funding round or headline exit, but the ecosystem's growing stability.

*"There are a lot of investments, there are still things happening, it's a vibrant ecosystem. And what is really important for us is that the availability of capital seems to have been firmly established."*

## Capital is no longer the biggest concern

One of the strongest indicators of progress is the expansion of Greece's venture capital landscape. In 2025, Greece reached a record **18 active VC funds**, supported largely through initiatives led by the Hellenic Development Bank of Investments (HDBI). Zakopoulos believes this institutional support has been critical to the ecosystem's development.

*"The way the Greek startup ecosystem really got established was through the investment vehicles that were created over the past decade. More recently, HDBI has been carrying the flag, and most of the active venture capital funds are backed by them."*

Another notable development was the rise of venture debt, an instrument that historically played only a minor role in the Greek market.

*"We saw venture debt before, but it was never really established as a financing mechanism. That's why this year we decided to monitor it separately. We believe it could become another path for money entering the Greek ecosystem."*

Perhaps more importantly, Greek startups are increasingly attracting foreign investors. Alongside the growth of local VC funds, an increasing number of rounds **involve investors from Europe, the UK, and the US**. While still early to draw definitive conclusions, this trend may point to a broader interest in Greek startups from global venture capital markets.

## More growth-stage funding

While most investment rounds continue to take place at the pre-seed and seed stages, a growing share of capital is now flowing toward more mature companies.

This is a positive shift for an ecosystem that historically struggled with scale-up financing. *"*Around 70% of the deals were pre-seed and seed*, but most of the capital was invested in Series A and later-stage companies,"* says Zakopoulos*.*

He attributes this partly to changes in how funds are being deployed. *"Earlier generations of funds were synchronized because they were created at the same time. Now the capital is spread more evenly across years and stages, which is healthier for the ecosystem."*

## AI leads, but Greece still lacks sector specialization

Artificial Intelligence was the most active investment category in 2025, followed by HealthTech. Yet Zakopoulos is cautious about reading too much into sector rankings. *"I'm a bit skeptical about highlighting AI as a sector leader because today almost every startup claims to have an AI component."*

Instead, he argues that Greece's challenge is not identifying trends but developing clear areas of specialization. *"Historically, Greece has had startups across almost every sector. What we haven't really developed yet is deep specialization in a few areas where we can become globally known."*

HealthTech remains one of the country's strongest verticals, while defense technology emerged as an increasingly visible category in 2025.

*"Following broader European trends, we saw investments in defense technology. Before that, I don't even know if we had any significant defense investments. Now we're seeing the impact of global developments reflected in startup activity."*

## Brain gain is becoming visible

After years of losing talent abroad, Greece may finally be seeing the first signs of reversal. Zakopoulos describes the shift as gradual rather than dramatic. *"I do believe there is a small trend toward brain gain. Not only because of government initiatives, but because of remote work, technology opportunities, and companies choosing to establish a presence in Greece."*

He points to Pfizer's digital innovation center in Thessaloniki as one example of how multinational investments are helping attract talent back. "*Many of the people working there are Greeks who previously lived abroad and decided to return because they saw a strong employer and a meaningful opportunity."*

On another note, Greece's universities continue to generate strong technical talent, particularly compared to neighboring countries. However, turning research into companies remains a challenge. *"If we compare our universities with others in the region, we have very good universities and very good talent. That's our advantage."*

He argues that the challenge is primarily structural. Many aspects of the legal framework governing spin-offs remain unclear, including ownership arrangements and the role universities should play, creating uncertainty and friction in the process.

At the same time, Zakopoulos sees a gap in entrepreneurship education. While Greece produces highly skilled biologists, engineers and researchers, there is a need to strengthen business capabilities by equipping technical talent with the knowledge and skills required for entrepreneurship and company building.

## The corporate challenge: everyone wants innovation, but few invest enough

Found.ation works extensively with large corporations across banking, insurance, retail, shipping and technology.

From Zakopoulos' perspective, attitudes toward innovation have improved considerably. *"Five years ago many corporations worked with startups mainly for CSR or marketing reasons. Today they increasingly understand that startups can be a source of R&D, new products, new talent and new business opportunities."*

Yet significant barriers remain, Filippos tells me. While most companies recognize the need to transform and invest in new skills, these initiatives often struggle to compete with more immediate business priorities. 

*"Reskilling and innovation don't generate immediate returns. The benefits appear later, while sales and operational investments produce results today,"* he adds.

## The three challenges that will define the next decade

When asked about Greece's biggest obstacles, Filippos identifies three.

**The first is uncertainty.** *"For the first time in many years, I would say that global uncertainty is one of the biggest problems. Companies are hesitant to invest because they don't know what comes next."*

**The second is culture.** *"Historically, Greece became very good at optimization. We became very good operators. What we now need is a culture of creators."*

**And the third is coordination.** *"We still haven't fully connected the three pillars: government, academia and industry."*

While progress has been made, particularly through digital transformation efforts since 2020, he believes the ecosystem's future growth depends on bridging those gaps. *"The ecosystem is moving in the right direction. The challenge now is making sure all the different parts move together."*
### Czech-Slovak Startup Sloneek Closes Over €5M Round to Turn HR Software into an AI Colleague
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/czech-slovak-startup-sloneek-closes-over-eur5m-round-to-turn-hr-software-into-an-ai-colleague/
Last updated: 2026-06-17T11:27:52.000Z
[Sloneek](https://www.sloneek.com/?ref=therecursive.com), cloud-based HR and workforce management platform, secured oversubscribed **$6M (€5.18M)** **Series A round** led by Orbit Capital and Venture to Future Fund. 

The European HR software market was worth more than $4.8 billion last year, yet much of it remains fragmented across dozens of disconnected tools. HR teams still spend significant time moving information between systems, updating records manually and navigating siloed data. Sloneek believes the next step is to replace that complexity with a single AI-powered platform, where tasks can be executed through a simple chat prompt or voice command.

The funding round, led by **Orbit Capital and Venture to Future Fund**, was oversubscribed, exceeding its original target. The round represents the company's largest to date, following a €350,000 pre-seed in 2020, a €1 million seed in 2022, and a [€3.6 million raise in 2024.](https://www.therecursive.com/czech-sloneek-lands-e3-6m-to-power-hr-with-ai-driven-solutions/) 

For Orbit Capital, one of Sloneek's strongest assets was its ability to quickly bring AI-driven features to market while keeping growth sustainable. 

> *"*Sloneek has built a digital product deeply rooted in the SME environment, often becoming the first company-wide system for its customers. What stood out to us was the speed and efficiency with which the company is able to ship AI-powered tools, combined with strong cost discipline and commercial traction. Sloneek was therefore a compelling candidate for venture debt funding,"*,* said **Vít Javůrek of Orbit Capital.**

According to Filip Lukáč, CEO and co-founder of Sloneek, the company was looking for an investor that understood the realities of building a global B2B SaaS business.

> *,,Throughout the entire process, Orbit Capital demonstrated that they think exactly the way we do. That was the deciding factor for us.* 
> *And the fact that our round was oversubscribed with follow-on participation is really just a nice bonus — and proof that our team is executing well.", said* **Filip Lukáč, CEO and co-founder of Sloneek:**

## With 500+ companies across 25 countries

Founded in 2019, Sloneek is a Czech-Slovak HR software company headquartered in Prague. The platform helps businesses manage the entire employee lifecycle, from recruitment and onboarding to attendance tracking, performance management and offboarding.

Sloneek was among the first HR software companies in Europe to integrate generative AI directly into its platform, a move the company says accelerated both customer adoption and international expansion. The company built an agent with the aim to execute tasks more effectively. 

Today, Sloneek serves more than 500 companies across 25 countries, supporting HR operations for roughly 50,000 employees. The company reported annual recurring revenue (ARR) of €2.5 million, having more than doubled year-over-year. Its customer base includes Grant Thornton, MAN, WPP Media and Twisto.

## From HR software to AI-powered workflows

The company's flagship product, [**Sloneek Intelligence**](https://www.sloneek.com/sloneek-intelligence/?ref=therecursive.com), connects employee data and HR workflows into a single platform that can be operated through voice or chat commands.

According to the company, the feature can automate up to 90% of routine HR tasks through an AI-powered assistant. Users can interact with the platform through voice or chat commands rather than navigating traditional software menus. It also provides HR teams with a more comprehensive view of the organisation, bringing together data on employees, teams and workforce performance.

CEO Filip Lukáč sees this as only the beginning. *"In a few years, no one will think of Sloneek as an application — they will think of it as a partner wherever it is needed,"* he said.

Looking ahead, Sloneek wants to extend its platform beyond HR by integrating with systems used across finance, marketing and other departments. The company hopes this will make Sloneek a more integrated part of day-to-day business operations rather than simply another HR tool.
### Two Greek-American Investors Return to Greece to Raise €106M for Its First Life Sciences Fund
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/kos-biotechnology-partners-first-greek-life-sciences-fund/
Last updated: 2026-06-15T14:20:06.000Z
Kos Biotechnology Partners, founded by Greek-American life sciences investors **Dr. Simos Simeonidis** and **Alex Tzoukas**, recently announced the third closing of its inaugural fund at $123 million (€106 million), making it the largest debut venture capital fund ever raised in Greece, and one of the largest first-time life sciences fund launches in Europe.

The fund focuses on bringing US biopharma expertise and capital to emerging life sciences opportunities across Greece and the broader European market.

The $123 million (€106 million) fundraise, completed within six months of the fund's December 2025 launch, was backed by the **Hellenic Development Bank of Investments (HDBI)**, as well as institutional investors and family offices. 

## Greece's largest debut fund across any sector

HDBI's chairman, Dr. **Haris Lambropoulos**, and CEO, Antigoni Lymperopoulou, were among the earliest backers of the vision, according to Simeonidis and Tzoukas, who said the bank's team shared their thesis of bringing US biotech expertise to Greece ["from Day 1"](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7471602354912645121/?ref=therecursive.com). Simeonidis also said the milestone goes beyond life sciences, marking Greece's largest debut fund across any sector.

The fund backs both early-stage and more established companies, investing in biotechnology, drug development, medical technology, and other healthcare innovations. **Epikast, a technology-enabled biopharmaceutical services company**, is one of Kos's first investments. Kos led Epikast's financing round, with Tzoukas joining its board — the company is headquartered in New York but operates out of Athens, exactly the kind of US-Greece bridge Kos is built to fund.

> The firm's presence in the Bay Area gives it direct access to one of the world's biggest biotech clusters, helping life sciences companies in Greece and across Europe connect with US drug development expertise.

## From biotech to VC

Kos was co-founded by Simeonidis and Tzoukas, whose careers span Wall Street biotech research, healthcare investment banking, and private equity. 

**Simeonidis** holds biomedical training from Columbia and Harvard Medical Schools and spent over a decade as a biotechnology analyst at Morgan Stanley, Cowen & Co., and RBC, before moving into investing roles at Sarissa Capital and Ally Bridge Group. **Tzoukas** has more than a decade of experience in healthcare investment banking and private equity, including positions at Deutsche Bank, MTS Health Partners, and Gurnet Point Capital. **Nikos Kostaras**, the firm's third partner, previously served as IQVIA's country head for Greece. 

For Simeonidis and Tzoukas, building Kos meant returning to Greece. As Simeonidis put it, **the goal was to bring home decades of experience gained across academia, Wall Street, and biotech investing in the US**, while helping establish a credible life sciences ecosystem in the country.

The firm's advisory network includes scientists, clinicians, and biopharma executives from the Greek diaspora in the US, providing portfolio companies with access to industry expertise and professional networks.

## Closing Greece's life sciences gap

Kos's launch comes amid what many in the industry describe as a persistent funding gap between Europe's life sciences sector and the US market. Despite a strong scientific foundation, Europe continues to face challenges in financing biotech companies through later stages of growth, with many firms turning to foreign investors or relocating abroad.

Greece's venture capital scene has grown significantly in recent years, [with record funding rounds across sectors](https://www.therecursive.com/greek-startups-h1-2025-top-funding-rounds/) — but until Kos, none of these vehicles focused specifically on life sciences. Backed by HDBI and led by Greek-American investors with deep ties to the US biotech industry, Kos appears to be an effort to build a domestic life sciences investment ecosystem rather than rely on foreign capital to drive the sector's growth.

##
### Slovak Startup Definic Raises €2.5m to Scale Its AI Vendor Intelligence Platform
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/slovak-definic-seed-round-ai-vendor-intelligence-platform/
Last updated: 2026-06-17T11:28:03.000Z
👯 **Founder(s):** Lukáš Řezanina (CEO) and Robert Dečman (also CEO of North America)

📅 **Founding year:** 2020 

🏭 **Industry:** Enterprise SaaS / AI Procurement 

💥 **Problem:** Enterprises often rely on relationships, referrals, and reputation when selecting IT vendors, leading to costly procurement mistakes and failed technology projects. 

📣 **Solution:** An AI-driven vendor intelligence platform that helps enterprises evaluate, benchmark, and select IT vendors using data-driven insights rather than referrals and reputation alone. 

👥 **Customers:** Large enterprises that rely on external technology vendors, including financial institutions, consulting firms, and other organizations with complex IT procurement requirements. 

🎳 **Team size:** 1-10 

🌱 **Stage:** Seed

💰 **Investment amount:** €2.5 million / $2.9 million 

🚀 **Funded by:** J&T Ventures (lead), Seed Starter ČS (Česká spořitelna), Slovak Investment Holding (SIH)

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor's perspective:** 

"*Definic's proprietary Vendor Intelligence technology creates a clear and defensible moat in a market long overdue for disruption. Having followed Robert, Lukáš and Michal for several years, we have seen firsthand the execution discipline and relentless commitment that distinguish exceptional founders. We are convinced Definic is set to redefine the standard for the industry*." — Jan Sova, J&T Ventures

💡 **It will be spent on:** Accelerating expansion into the DACH region, the UK, and the US, plus continued product development.

💬 **In their own words:**

"*Vendor selection today is largely a social process built on relationships, referrals, and reputation. That worked when projects were slower, and the stakes were lower. It doesn't work anymore. Definic is the name that reflects what we are building: a definitive layer of intelligence between enterprises and the vendors they trust with their most critical projects*." — Lukáš Řezanina, CEO

"*I first met Martin Kešner from J&T Ventures at Vodafone Nápad Roku back in 2023\. At that time, we were still early and not yet ready for venture funding, but we stayed in touch and focused on execution... Together with Seed Starter ČS and Slovak Investment Holding, this investment gives us the platform to accelerate product development and take Definic global*." — Robert Dečman, co-founder 

💪 **Their specialty:** An AI-powered vendor intelligence platform that helps enterprises make faster, more informed IT procurement decisions. 

🔑 **Business model:** Enterprise SaaS platform

💸 **Funding so far:** €2.5M / $2.9M
### Is Romania's "World's First Quantum AI Data Center" Only a PR Stunt?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/romania-worlds-first-quantum-ai-data-center-reality-analysis/
Last updated: 2026-06-17T11:28:16.000Z
Romania is buzzing over a promised $1B "Quantum AI" data center in Cluj, but tech experts smell a marketing stunt. Is it a sovereign tech hub or just a massive power drain wrapped in buzzwords? The details don't add up.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Polish SpaceTech Startup Raises Over €8M
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-polish-spacetech-startup-raises-over-eur8m/
Last updated: 2026-06-12T12:08:38.000Z
**Polish startup Sybilla Technologies**, which specializes in space situational awareness solutions powered by a global network of optical sensors for tracking objects in orbit, has secured more than [€8 million in funding](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/sybilla-technologies-lands-8-m?ref=therecursive.com). The round was backed by TCEE Fund IV, advised by 3TS Capital Partners, and Vinci, the investment arm of Poland’s development bank BGK.

**Hungary-based Volteum**, which optimises electric and mixed fleet operations with advanced route planning and management solutions, raised [€2.5m in funding](https://hungarytoday.hu/hungarian-startup-volteum-secures-huge-funding-to-end-mixed-fleet-chaos/?ref=therecursive.com). Movens Capital led the round and was joined by investors including WakeUp Capital, Day One Capital and Techstars.

**Slovak startup Definic** (formerly known as Nordics), has unveiled its new brand identity and secured [€2.5 million in a seed funding round](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/definic-raises-2-5-m-to-scale-ai-powered-vendor-intelligence-platform?ref=therecursive.com) led by J&T Ventures, with backing from Seed Starter ČS and Slovak Investment Holding (SIH), Vestbee has learned. The company develops a Vendor Intelligence platform designed to streamline and enhance IT procurement processes.

**Fintech startup Paymove**, based in Poland, [secured €2.12 million](https://www.therecursive.com/polish-paymove-seed-funding-payment-infrastructure-ai-agents/) in seed funding to build next-generation payment systems tailored for Agentic AI and fuel its expansion across Western Europe. The round was led by by 4growth VC, with participation from Kogito Ventures, and a prominent group of strategic business angels. The company was previously backed by Kogito Ventures, S20, N50, and a group of business angels.

**Czech Merchantee** has secured [€1.8 million in funding](https://tech.eu/2026/06/09/merchantee-secures-eur18m-for-european-marketplace-expansion/?ref=therecursive.com) led by Reflex Capital, with participation from Czech Founders VC and Lighthouse Ventures. The platform watches the market and adjusts each product's price, promotions, and campaigns automatically — Philips, Lindt, and SodaStream are among its customers. The money goes toward expansion into Poland and Germany, with France, the Netherlands, and Italy next.

**Estonian medtech startup Nanordica Medical**, known for developing nanotechnology-powered antibacterial wound dressings for chronic and hard-to-heal infected wounds, has raised [€1.6 million in a funding round led](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/nanordica-medical-lands-1-6-m?ref=therecursive.com) by 2C Ventures. The investment also attracted backing from Specialist VC, Superangel, Amalfi, the Health Founders syndicate, and the EstBAN syndicate.

**Romanian startup Naratix** has raised a [€1M seed round](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/naratix-secures-1-m?ref=therecursive.com) from Early Game Ventures to grow its AI-powered product data platform for e-commerce. The company helps retailers and marketplaces turn incomplete and inconsistent supplier information into structured, enriched product catalogs. The new funding will support its expansion across Europe and Southeast Asia, with the US market next on the roadmap.

**Warsaw-based sunbay.io**, an AI-powered receivables automation platform designed for finance teams, has raised [€550,000 in funding](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/sunbay-io-lands-550k?ref=therecursive.com) from Kogito Ventures, with additional participation from s20 and a group of angel investors. Sunbay.io offers software that integrates directly with companies’ accounting systems, automating the entire invoice collection and receivables management process.
### Meet the 3 Regional Teams Aiming for the Soonicorn Valuation
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/soonicorn-program-digital-serbia-initiative-first-cohort/
Last updated: 2026-06-12T10:16:27.000Z
The Digital Serbia Initiative has just unveiled the premier cohort for its anticipated [*Soonicorn* program](https://soonicorn.co/?ref=therecursive.com) — an equity-free scaling initiative designed to propel high-growth regional startups toward an elusive half-billion-dollar valuation.

Following a rigorous evaluation of top-tier applicants, only three standout teams from Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia secured a spot in the intensive six-month accelerator. Chosen for their explosive market results and global scalability, these selected innovators are already disrupting traditional industries. The regional ecosystem is watching closely, so read further to find out which founders are in, and who is backing them.

## Inside the Soonicorn program

Over the six-month program, mentors will work closely with the three startups developing **solutions for specialist exam preparation, financial planning, and the automation of quotes for interior and exterior design projects**. 

With strong traction, operations across multiple international markets, growing user bases, and backing from VC funds and angel investors, Prepia, Farseer and SaleSqueze demonstrate the region's ability to produce companies that can compete on a global scale. **The teams will receive 40 hours of mentoring**, during which they will tackle key challenges and gain deeper insights into scaling their businesses internationally. 

The ultimate goal is for them to *"double their revenues and secure significant levels of investment over the next year,"* said **Tanja Kuzman**, Executive Director of the Digital Serbia Initiative.

## Three startups, one half-billion ambition

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/PREPIA_Foto_-Stefan-Tripunovi---1.jpg)

Prepia team | Foto: Stefan Tripunović

**Prepia** is an educational platform that uses AI to help users prepare for professional and certification exams across education, healthcare, and IT. The platform supports more than 100 exams, from the SAT and GMAT to medical and legal qualifications, in a market with over 300 identified exam categories. 

Founded in Belgrade in 2024 by **Viktor Pešić** and **Ivan Jurišić**, the startup raised a [€1.5 million seed round in June 2025](https://www.therecursive.com/prepia-raises-1-5m-seed-ai-exam-prep-startup/), led by Polish VC fund Inovo.vc, with participation from Slovenia's Silicon Gardens. The company had reached €1.2 million in annual recurring revenue just nine months after launch when the investment was announced. According to the program's announcement, Prepia now serves more than one million users worldwide.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/FARSEER_Foto_-Farseer-1.jpg)

Farseer

Zagreb-based **Farseer** is developing a financial planning and analytics (FP&A) platform that uses AI to replace Excel spreadsheets and legacy tools for enterprise finance teams. Founded in 2020 by **Matija Nakić, Zrinko Dolić, Luka Mijatović, and Matej Trbara**, the company has raised around €7.5 million to date: a €1.4 million seed round in 2023 led by US fund Apertu Capital, followed by a [€6.07 million Series A in February 2026 ](https://www.farseer.com/blog/farseer-raises-7-2m-series-a-to-build-the-enterprise-operating-system-for-finance/?ref=therecursive.com)led by AYMO Ventures, with participation from existing investors SQ Capital and Apertu Capital, alongside customers, partners, and employees. 

Farseer has built the largest client base in the Adria region, including companies such as Podravka, Končar, Hrvatski Telekom, A1, Dukat, and Violeta, and plans to use the new funding to expand across Europe and Norh America.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/SALESQUEZE-_foto_-Alja---Hafner.jpg)

SaleSqueze | Foto: Aljaž Hafner

**SaleSqueze** is a Slovenian startup developing a 3D configuration and quote automation (CPQ) platform for manufacturers selling complex, customizable products, from pergolas and garage doors to industrial equipment. Customers can configure products in a real-time 3D environment and receive quotes automatically. 

The startup raised a €1.4 million seed round in June 2024, led by Romania's Underline Ventures, with participation from Robin Capital, Fortech Investments, and angel investors including Xenia Muntean, Christoph Zoeller, and Björn W. Schäfer. Its platform is now used by more than 160 companies across over 30 markets, including the US, Australia, and New Zealand.

### More than acceleration program

The program stands out for its specifically designed format and mentors who have already achieved global success.

**Among the mentors are**: **Branko Milutinović**, founder of Nordeus, which was acquired by Take-Two; **Damir Sabol**, founder of Photomath, which was acquired by Google; **Mirko Novaković**, founder of Dash0, which became a unicorn, and **Instana**, which was sold to IBM for USD 500 million; **Ravish Agrawal**, marketing leader at the unicorn Gamma; **Sarah Finegan**, Partner at the VC fund Antler; **Verena De Smedt-Zuegner**, Partner at Simon-Kucher & Partners; and many other experienced founders, operators and investors. 

Beyond supporting the three selected teams, **Soonicorn aims to strengthen the wider startup ecosystem.** As part of the program, each founder and key employee commits to spending at least 100 hours over the following 12 months mentoring other startups, helping share knowledge and experience across the community.

The startups will be publicly presented at an event in Belgrade this autumn. Until then, they will work closely with their mentors as they continue pursuing ambitious growth targets.
### The Recursive Announces Expansion to GCC and DACH
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-recursive-announces-expansion-to-gcc-and-dach/
Last updated: 2026-06-12T14:11:55.000Z
The Recursive, the relationship infrastructure for tech ecosystem players with international ambitions, today announced plans to expand into the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). The move positions the company as the connective tissue between three of the world's most dynamic and increasingly interlinked tech ecosystems: CEE, GCC, and DACH, at a moment when cross-regional deal flow, capital movement, and market entries between them are accelerating faster than mutual understanding.

The Recursive operates across three interconnected lines of business. Its media and journalism tell the stories of the founders, capital, and trends shaping growing tech ecosystems. The Recursive Studio is a full-stack market entry partner: from positioning strategy and narrative through PR and thought leadership to curated access to clients and investors. The Recursive Events convene decision makers in person through formats built for creating actual relationships, the most valuable currency in the AI era.

**Running all three across CEE, GCC, and DACH means founders, investors, and builders in each ecosystem can find, understand, and transact with their counterparts in the other two - faster, with better information, and with fewer costly missteps.**

*“We started The Recursive in the middle of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It feels natural that we take the next most ambitious step in our evolution in the middle of today's geopolitical challenges. We are in a unique position to bring these regions with complementary strengths closer together, and it's our responsibility to act now with conviction rather than wait for more certain times*, said Etien Yovchev, co-founder and Managing Partner of The Recursive.

“*Cross-border deals do not happen between strangers. They happen between people who already understand each other's context. The CEE, DACH, and GCC ecosystems are increasingly each other's customers, capital sources, and partners — but they still do not understand each other well enough. The Recursive Media’s role is to produce the needed context — and then turn it into commercial outcomes through Studio and Events,*” commented Teodor Antonio Georgiev, CEO of The Recursive.

### GCC Plans

In the GCC, the groundwork will be led on the ground by Etien Yovchev, who will be present across Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Riyadh through 2026\. He will be supported by Slavena Tisheva, a UAE-based ecosystem builder who will act as GCC Market Advisor.

The Recursive will build on its existing network and previous projects with organizations like GITEX Global, Endeavor, AI Everything Abu Dhabi, Saudi Makes Future, and Doers Summit Dubai.

The 2026 activities will begin with original reporting from the local market, followed by the company's first regional market reports and on-the-ground events.

*I’ve spent four years at the intersection of GCC and European markets, and the same problem shows up every time: smart companies on both sides making expensive decisions based on incomplete pictures. The Recursive has built exactly the editorial credibility in CEE that GCC is missing - and the expansion makes sense because the underlying thesis is the same. Ecosystem intelligence, not noise. That’s the standard I hold myself to, and it’s why I am partnering with The Recursive,*" said Tisheva.

### DACH Plans

In DACH, the initiatives will be spearheaded by Teodor Antonio Georgiev, CEO of The Recursive. Educated at LMU Munich and the University of Vienna, and having lived in the DACH region for over seven years, Teodor brings an extensive track record of connecting CEE with German-speaking markets. 

Here, The Recursive will draw on established relationships with institutions like EWOR, Vienna Business Agency, WeXelerate, UnternehmerTUM, Bits & Pretzels, and Invest in Bavaria, as well as leading VC firms, including Earlybird VC and Creandum. 

Through community events and dedicated ecosystem coverage, The Recursive will be active across Vienna, Munich, and Berlin throughout 2026\. 

### Vision 2029

The 2026 activities across both regions are designed to lay the foundation for The Recursive's full local presence in the 2027-2029 period. The goal is not to be a foreign entrant with a regional bureau — it is to become a genuine part of the local communities the company covers and serves, earning the trust of founders, investors, and institutions on both sides of each bridge before scaling.

"*We have already organized double-digit events in Dubai, Berlin, Vienna, and Munich, covered more than 100 stories from those markets, and helped clients expand into them,"* said Yovchev*. "However, we know from that experience that the only way to be genuinely effective at building this bridge is to be an actual part of the local communities, and to add value to the needs of those local communities. That’s what this next step is about*.”

### About The Recursive

Founded in 2021, The Recursive has become the definitive English-language voice of tech in fast-growing tech ecosystems, building a global network of founders, investors, enterprise leaders, journalists, and government stakeholders along the way. To date, the company has published 3,800+ stories reaching 3.2 million readers and viewers worldwide, supported 550+ companies with international expansion through The Recursive Studio, and convened ecosystem leaders at 80+ community events across Sofia, Dubai, Vienna, Munich, London, Warsaw, San Francisco, Helsinki, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Prague, Bucharest and others.
### Polish Paymove Raises €2.12M to Build Payment Infrastructure for AI Agents
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/polish-paymove-seed-funding-payment-infrastructure-ai-agents/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T13:15:15.000Z
**Fintech startup Paymove, based in Poland,** secured €2.12 million in seed funding to build next-generation payment systems tailored for Agentic AI and fuel its expansion across Western Europe.

**👯 Founder(s):**

- Piotr Mazur – Founder and CEO
- Kamil Kuper – Founder and COO
- Tomasz Gęsior – Founder and Product Lead

**📅 Founding year:** 2023

**🏭 Industry:** Fintech

**💥 Problem:** The offline payments market remains heavily under-digitalized and burdened by outdated, expensive physical infrastructure like traditional POS terminals and cash desks. Additionally, emerging autonomous AI agents lack native payment tools to seamlessly execute financial transactions in the physical world.

**📣 Solution:** Paymove digitizes unattended commerce by replacing legacy hardware with instant, secure QR codes that require no app downloads or registration for users. Concurrently, they are building a next-generation architecture dedicated specifically to autonomous Payment-as-a-Service for AI agents.

**👥 Customers:** Merchants and providers in the offline unattended commerce sector (including paper invoices, payment demands, parking, public transit, ticketing, and administrative fees).

**🎳 Team size:** 12 employees 

**🌱 Stage:** Seed

**💰 Investment amount:** €2.12 million 

**🚀 Funded by:** Led by 4growth VC, with participation from Kogito Ventures, and a prominent group of strategic business angels. The company was previously backed by Kogito Ventures, S20, N50, and a group of business angels.

**👁️‍🗨️ Investor’s perspective:**

> *"The offline payments market remains heavily under-digitalized, burdened by outdated and expensive physical infrastructure. The Paymove team excels at precisely defining merchant needs, offering a frictionless entry point with zero implementation or hardware costs, while delivering an ultra-simple interface for the payer... We see massive scalability here."* — *Jan Kastory, Managing Partner at 4growth VC.* 

> *"Since our initial discussions two years ago, Paymove has made tremendous strides, proving that its model can rapidly capture untapped market share in Poland. This successful domestic validation paves the way for the next phase of growth: dynamic international expansion..."* — *Marcin Jaszczuk, Managing Partner at 4growth VC.* 

**💡 It will be spent on…** Developing payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents (Agentic AI Payments) and driving international expansion across Western European markets, with advanced contract negotiations underway in Spain, Portugal, and Italy.

**💬 In their own words:**

> "Paymove’s ambition is to build a cohesive payment ecosystem for partners seeking technologically straightforward and cost-effective solutions. Our goal is to transform our services into a comprehensive Payment-as-a-Service platform built on three pillars: occasional payments, e-commerce & mobile, and agentic payments driven by AI models." — Piotr Mazur, CEO of Paymove.

**💪 Their specialty…** They operate as an authorized Small Payment Institution (SPI) under the supervision of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) and plan to apply for an Authorised Payment Institution (API) license. Their solution relies on highly secure, instant QR technology designed to seamlessly merge e-commerce convenience with offline environments.

**🔑 Business model:** Payment-as-a-Service (PaaS) framework

**💸 Funding so far:** €2.8M
### Techsylvania 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/techsylvania-2026/
Last updated: 2026-06-23T10:00:05.000Z
Techsylvania draws over ****3,000 participants from more than 30 countries**, including founders, engineers, investors, and executives. 

The event spans two days of conference programming, technical workshops, executive roundtables, and a week-long series of satellite events hosted across Cluj-Napoca.  
📅 **Date:** June 24–25, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Cluj-Napoca, Romania  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Cluj Innovation Park](https://clujinnovationpark.ro/?ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://techsylvania.com/agenda/?ref=therecursive.com) 

The paradox of 2026 is that the more artificial intelligence saturates our digital lives, the more valuable a handshake becomes. As inboxes flood with AI-generated outreach and screen fatigue becomes the default state, a counter-movement is gaining ground. Against this backdrop of digital noise and physical overload, the events that thrive are not those that shout the loudest, but those that offer a clear, concentrated value.

### A Hub for the Full Tech Lifecycle

In Eastern Europe, this strategic focus is crystallising in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Techsylvania, scheduled for 24-25 June at the Cluj Innovation Park, is the capstone of a two-month period that showcases the region’s entire innovation pipeline.

The season begins with Cluj Innovation Days, focusing on policy and academic research, and continues with The Developers, a deep-dive engineering conference. Together, these events create a unique narrative, allowing a visitor to witness the full journey from talent development to commercialisation and venture capital at Techsylvania. It is a concentrated demonstration of a mature ecosystem for investors and strategic partners.

### Techsylvania 

Now in its 12th year, Techsylvania has evolved into the flagship deal-making event for the region, expected to draw over 3,000 participants from more than 30 countries. Its stages have previously hosted leaders like Tim Draper of Draper Associates and Daniel Dines, founder of UiPath.

The real value, however, may lie beyond the keynotes. The event is structured as a multi-layered marketplace designed for outcomes. The agenda is built around engineering trust, transformation, and visionary leadership, with a practical focus on AI, product development, and business growth.

The event features a dedicated platform for emerging companies to connect with investors and partners, executive roundtables, and technical workshops. 

Past editions have reportedly facilitated over €20 million in deals annually. In an era where cold emails yield a 2% response rate, the nearly 40% conversion rate that can come from in-person meetings makes a compelling case for attending.

### Speakers 

The 2026 speaker lineup spans the full tech stack — from global platforms to regional builders. On the big-company side, Guido Brinkel represents OpenAI as Policy & Partnerships Lead for Germany and CEE, while Michael Buzinover brings a product perspective shaped by stints at TikTok and Perplexity. The investor bench includes Hermann Hauser, co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners, Nenad Marovac of DN Capital, and Jon Staenberg of Agate Hound Fund. On the founder side, Sacha Dragic, Jeanie Fang (Crunchbase), and Vladimir Danila (Linearity) join Romanian voices like Vadim Toader and Oana Ruxandra. The lineup also reaches into less obvious territory: Mark Porter, former CTO of MongoDB and dbt Labs, covers engineering leadership; Dr. Farid Khan represents bioentrepreneurship; and Laura Calmore, a mindfulness facilitator, signals the event's interest in the human side of high-performance work.

Techsylvania will take place on June 24-25, 2026 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and [discounted tickets](https://techsylvania.com/tickets/?ref=therecursive.com) are still available.
### The 1st Index Measuring Strategic AI Readiness Across 11 CEE Countries
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-ai-index-2026-rankings-the-recursive/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T12:40:54.000Z
[**CEE AI Index**](https://www.ceeindex.ai/?ref=therecursive.com)is the first index focused on assessing the ability of Central and EasternEuropean countries to develop, operate, and host AI efficiently, safely, and in agoverned way.

Evaluated across 33 indicators and 363 data points, the CEE AI Index delivers a deeper insight about region that is at a critical structural crossroads, splitting cleanly into two trajectories: **the shapers** (nations structurally prepared to lead and anchor European AI) and **the consumers** (nations still struggling to lay foundational infrastructure).

The index was built to give policymakers, investors and ecosystem builders a factual basis for understanding where the region stands – and where it needs to move. "*Central and Eastern Europe has been building the conditions that serious AI investment requires: governance frameworks, talent pipelines, and in several markets, infrastructure that is already operational*," **says Tomasz Snażyk, CEO of the AI Chamber**. 

> "*What has been missing is the data to make that case with precision. For anyone allocating AI capacity in Europe over the next few years, the picture this index paints is one that is hard to ignore and early enough to act on*."

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/Why-Index-for-the-CEE-2.png)](ceeindex.ai)

## The core philosophy: Strategic AI Readiness

Discarding global benchmarks that are skewed by the massive market outliers of the US and China, the **CEE AI Index 2026** evaluates the Central and Eastern European region on its own terms. Rather than measuring the capacity to compete with global tech giants, the index looks at **strategic AI readiness:** the structural capacity to safely, efficiently, and securely host and operate an AI ecosystem.

It evaluates performance across three foundational pillars:

1. **Environment:** Governance frameworks, regulatory coordination, policy continuity, and infrastructure.
2. **Resources:** Talent density, and the capital activity.
3. **Deployment:** Enterprise AI adoption rates and academic/scientific research outputs.

Furthermore, in 2026, simply *using* AI is no longer the benchmark for progress. This Index introduces indicators designed to capture a nation's readiness to transition toward high-performance, sovereign, and aligned AI.

## CEE AI Index 2026 Leaderboard highlights

CEE is splitting into countries that will shape AI in Europe and countries that will consume it. The difference isn't size, but sovereignty, governance readiness, talent investment and institutional ambition across the region.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/cee-ai-bar-chart.png)

Here is the overview of top 5 placements:

**Estonia (1st Place):** The regional pioneer. Estonia leads the *Environment* pillar with an impressive score of 73 points, driven by its world-renowned digital ecosystem, institutional maturity, and cohesive AI frameworks.

**Slovenia (2nd Place):** A powerhouse for deep tech and academia, Slovenia stands out heavily for its immense research intensity and robust STEM pipeline capacity.

**Lithuania (3rd Place):** Punches well above its weight, scoring high in *Environment* (64 points) due to exceptional open data governance and an aggressive market demand for AI professionals.

**Poland (4th Place):** The undisputed heavyweight market of the region. Poland ranks 2nd in the *Environment* pillar (65 points) and anchors the CEE in raw scale; boasting the region’s largest AI workforce, the highest volume of scientific research output, and the greatest high-performance computing (HPC) capacity.

**Czech Republic (5th Place):** A commercial leader that co-leads alongside Poland in the *Deployment* pillar, showing exceptionally deep enterprise adoption and commercial integration of AI tools.

*Other Regional Progress:* **Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Latvia and Croatia** are successfully building highly localized competitive advantages, ranging from specialized tax incentives and experimentation sandboxes to niche technical expertise and education programs.

## Key regional findings of the CEE AI Index 2026

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/pillar-comparison-sq.png)

CEE is one region, but not one story. What the index reveals is a distributed set of strengths that, taken together, make a compelling case for the region as a whole. For that matter, here are key insights from the overall Index findings:

**Governance is the ultimate differentiator.** While almost all evaluated CEE nations have drafted official national AI strategies, the index proves that a policy on paper does not equal operational readiness. Countries that have built mature institutional capacity and regulatory clarity are successfully converting those frameworks into enterprise trust, making them much more attractive to investors.

**Agility over scale.** Economic or geographical size does not dictate AI success in the region. Several smaller nations are heavily outperforming larger economies by executing highly targeted investments in data governance, specialized talent, and digital infrastructure.

**The emerging regional divide.** A distinct structural gap is forming between the top tier (nations structurally prepared to help shape Europe’s broader AI landscape) and lower-tier countries that are still gridlocked in constructing foundational prerequisites.

**Complementary patchwork strengths.** Rather than aggressively competing against one another, CEE nations present a matrix of highly compatible ecosystem strengths. While one country provides raw market scale and workforce volume, another provides peerless open-data structures or research intensity.

**The global representation deficit.** A major editorial takeaway from the findings is a disconnect in global visibility. Despite boasting highly advanced digital governance, operational infrastructure, and a deep pool of technical experts, the CEE region remains vastly underrepresented in major global AI investment and development dialogues.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/06/Why-Index-for-the-CEE-4.png) 

## ****CEE AI Index**

AI Chamber, in partnership with The Recursive Media and collaboration of Europe Cloud, has launched the CEE AI Index 2026, the first index focused on assessing the ability of Central and Eastern European countries to develop, operate, and host AI efficiently, safely, and in a governed way.

[Check the rankings!](https://www.ceeindex.ai/?ref=therecursive.com) 

### The AI Act as a Wedge

The upcoming enforcement of the **EU AI Act** is set to widen the regional divide. 

Countries with pre-existing, mature institutional governance (Estonia, Poland, Czechia) are in a prime position to flip regulatory compliance into a competitive advantage, converting strict rules into enterprise trust to attract risk-averse institutional investors. 

Conversely, countries still building core governance frameworks will face a grueling double-whammy: trying to accelerate domestic innovation while suffocating under complex European compliance frameworks.

## What the index means for the region

The CEE AI Index 2026 arrives at a moment when AI sovereignty is no longer an abstract concept. For investors and policymakers, the Index offers a granular map of where AI readiness in Europe is already operational - and where it remains aspirational. 

"*Central and Eastern Europe is home to some of Europe's strongest AI talent, yet a significant investment gap with the rest of the continent persists – in both public and private funding*", points **Mark Boris Andrijanič**, former Minister for Digital Transformation of Slovenia and former lead EU Council negotiator on the DMA and DSA.

> *"Estonia, Lithuania, and Slovenia lead the CEE AI Index, outperforming countries many times their size in digital governance, talent, and infrastructure. Yet despite this rapid rise, the region has only recently begun to feature in the conversations where Europe's major AI investment decisions are made. This index brings both the arguments and the urgency those conversations have been missing."*
### Polish co-founded ICEYE Raises €450 Million and Reaches Decacorn Status
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/polish-finnish-iceye-reaches-decacorn-status/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T12:48:14.000Z
ICEYE, the company behind the world's most advanced SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite constellation, has secured a landmark funding round.

The round comes at a time of strong growth for the Finnish company, led by Polish co-founder and CEO Rafal Modrzewski. In 2025, ICEYE crossed **€250 million** in revenue and **€100 million in EBITDA** — making this a raise from a position of strength, not necessity.

Just six months after closing a Series E at a €2.4 billion valuation, ICEYE has returned with a Series F [valuing the company at over €10 billion](https://www.iceye.com/newsroom/press-releases/iceye-leads-a-new-era-of-sovereign-intelligence-from-space-with-1b-funding-round?ref=therecursive.com) — a more than fourfold increase in half a year.

A strong mix of Finnish institutional investors joined the round, including Solidium, Tesi, Varma, Ilmarinen and Lifeline Ventures — alongside Nokia, Qatar Investment Authority and TCV. As resilience and national security increasingly converge, the diverse investor base reflects growing recognition that sovereignty and commercial access to space-based intelligence are no longer optional.

Nokia, joining as a new strategic investor, underlined this shift. "*Modern defense increasingly depends on combining trusted connectivity with real-time visibility*," said Nokia President and CEO Justin Hotard. "*Nokia and ICEYE bring complementary strengths that can help advance Europe's defense, resilience and technological sovereignty."* 

The company has made a breakthrough in the space industry and dual-use technologies. It's satellites can capture images through clouds, day and night, enabling continuous, subdaily monitoring of changes on the ground.

To date, ICEYE counts seven European governments among its clients — each with their own sovereign satellite system, a scale no other European provider has reached. The startup is building its globally recognized footprint, scaling satellite production from 50 to 100 units annually by 2028, supported by a contracted backlog of more than €1.5 billion in future revenue from already signed deals.

Most recently, ICEYE delivered a fully operational satellite system to the Polish Armed Forces within 12 months of signing, a timeline reported to be among the fastest sovereign space deployments in history.

## Two Students, One Nanosatellite

The Finnish startup was founded in 2014 by Rafal Modrzewski and Pekka Laurila as a spin-off of Aalto University. The two met at Aalto while working together on [Aalto-1 ](https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/aalto-1?ref=therecursive.com)—[ Finland's first nanosatellite](https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/aalto-1?ref=therecursive.com), where the idea for ICEYE took shape. Modrzewski, born in Poland, studied Electrical Engineering at Warsaw University of Technology and later at Aalto. While he oversees the overall vision and organizational growth, Laurila, as CSO, directs the company's strategic initiatives and commercial operations. 

The company's original focus was Arctic maritime logistics, monitoring sea ice in conditions where traditional satellites are blind, and that's where the name ICEYE comes from. Not only have they devoted their time to developing the world's largest SAR constellation, but they are pioneers in miniaturizing SAR satellites under 100kg. In 2025, Modrzewski and Laurila were awarded Software Entrepreneurs of the Year in Finland — a recognition that underscores their journey from a university project to a €10 billion company in just 12 years. 

For Europe's dual-use space sector, ICEYE's Series F reflects a broader shift toward sovereign intelligence capabilities built and controlled within the continent. Modrzewski said, *"Sovereign intelligence from space is entering a new era and the window to build it is now."*
### How AI Changed Cyberattacks, and What Should Companies Do to Stay Safe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-ai-changed-cyberattacks-how-can-companies-stay-safe/
Last updated: 2026-06-09T07:28:39.000Z
AI has drastically accelerated the speed of cybersecurity attacks, from rapid exploitation to highly personalized phishing. Luckily, security teams can leverage the same tools. How can companies prepare? We consulted three experts from the field.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Impact Night — Summer Edition
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/impact-night-summer-edition/
Last updated: 2026-07-13T13:36:08.000Z
📅 **Date:** June 11, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Prague, Czech Republic   
🏢 ****Venue:** [Design Hotel Neruda Prague](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Design+Hotel+Neruda+Prague/@50.0886776,14.3976998,454m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m9!3m8!1s0x470b951c2bf6b1c1:0xaa2009776f7f5a56!5m2!4m1!1i2!8m2!3d50.0886776!4d14.3976998!16s%2Fg%2F1td290%5Fr?entry=ttu&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI2MDYwMy4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://luma.com/jw3j1h2s?ref=therecursive.com) 

​​AI is not only changing tools. It is changing how companies hire, how teams work, how leaders make decisions, and how businesses stay relevant.

​For business owners, scale-up leaders, SME managers, and ambitious professionals, the question is no longer only: **“How do we keep up?”**  
The better question is:

​**How do we lead better while the market, the team, and the rules of work are changing?**

​On **June 11**, **Impact Night** is bringing a carefully selected group of business owners, founders, leaders, operators, and ambitious professionals together on the summer terrace of **Design Hotel Neruda**, in the heart of Prague, for an evening of practical insight, creative leadership, good food, high-quality conversations, and focused access to mentors.

### Opening Talk: David Papa

**Does Not Work Well With Others — A Workplace Roast and Creative Leadership Survival Guide**

We’ll kick off the evening with David Papa, who combines improv, stand-up comedy, and leadership insights to explore the realities of modern work. From endless meetings and innovation theatre to awkward feedback and performative leadership, David brings humor to the challenges we all recognize.

Having worked with more than 500 leaders across companies including Zapier, Peloton, Nokia, and Maersk, David shares a simple but powerful message: the leaders people want to follow are often the most human, creative, and present. Expect laughter, honest reflection, and practical ideas for leading with greater authenticity, creativity, and impact.

### Fireside Chat: Ondřej Illek, Co-founder & COO, Finlay

Following David’s opening session, we’ll sit down with Ondřej Illek for a candid conversation about the evolving tech hiring landscape, the impact of AI on roles and organizations, and what companies need to do to attract and retain top talent.

We’ll discuss what makes professionals valuable beyond their job titles, how leadership approaches to talent are changing, and how businesses can adapt in a rapidly shifting market.

### What Makes This Evening Different

Attendees will have the opportunity to pre-book up to three focused 1:1 mentor conversations throughout the event, based on their interests and mentor availability.

Whether you're looking for guidance on leadership, business growth, team development, AI adoption, branding, financial health, career progression, or personal effectiveness, these conversations are designed to provide practical insights and actionable next steps.

### Mentor Conversations for Sustainable Growth

Throughout the evening, experienced mentors will be available for focused one-on-one discussions, helping attendees navigate the challenges and opportunities that come with leading a business, managing a team, growing a function, or planning their next professional move.

### Who this is for

​▪ **Business owners and SME leaders** who are managing people, clients, growth, and change.

​▪ **Scale-up founders and co-founders** who are leading teams, hiring, improving culture, and adapting to AI.

​▪ **Managing directors and team leaders** who want sharper thinking around leadership, people, and the future of work.

​▪ **Consultants and fractional leaders** who advise companies and want stronger conversations around business, positioning, AI, and growth.

​▪ **Product, design, business, HR, and operations leaders** who want to stay relevant as AI changes how work gets done.

​▪ **Ambitious professionals** who are responsible for projects, teams, clients, or business outcomes and want to make better decisions about their next stage of growth.

​▪ **Professionals navigating career or market change** who want sharper thinking around AI, leadership, personal positioning, health, relationships, and financial stability.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Bulgarian Startup Paypercut Raises Seed Round Backed by Regional VCs
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-bulgarian-startup-paypercut-raises-seed-round-backed-by-regional-vcs/
Last updated: 2026-06-05T14:14:32.000Z
**Polish** Ingenix.ai has raised a **€13 million** seed round led by Sofinnova Partners, with participation from Inovo.vc and OTB Ventures. The funding aims to scale their Biological Reasoning Engine and extend the team's work with pharma and biotech partners through the Qualified Access Program, which is now open for applications.

**Hungarian**\-founded Kodesage, an on-premise AI platform that helps enterprises understand, document and modernise critical legacy software systems, has raised a **$6.6 (€5.67) million** [seed round](https://www.therecursive.com/hungarian-kodesage-raises-eur5-67m/) led by Greek VentureFriends. Pre-Seed lead investor Portfolion joined the round, alongside notable angel investors including Christian Szegedy, co-founder of xAI, and Mario Götze, the German footballer and World Cup winner.

**Sofia**\-based fintech Paypercut [has secured a **€5 million** seed round](https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-fintech-paypercut-raises-eur5m-to-expand-its-payments-platform-across-cee/) co-led by Concentric, Passion Capital, and Araya Ventures, bringing its total funding to €7M. Additional investors in the round included SMOK Ventures, Portfolio Ventures, BrightCap Ventures, BlackWood, SABAH.fund, MFG Invest, Main Set, and payments entrepreneur Matt Doka, bringing Paypercut's total funding to €7M.

Molfar Defence Technologies, a **Polish-Ukrainian** defense tech company developing tactical radar systems for the detection of small unmanned aerial systems, today announced the close of the first tranche of its **€2 million** funding round. Front Ventures, a Swedish investment company, has committed €1.5 million as the lead and first institutional investor.

### M&A deals

**North Macedonian** entrepreneur Vanja Josifovski, former CTO of Airbnb and Pinterest, has achieved a major exit after Nvidia acquired Kumo.ai, the predictive AI startup he co-founded and leads as CEO. According to reports, the deal is worth at least $400 million, although Fortune, [which confirmed the acquisition](https://fortune.com/2026/06/03/nvidia-snaps-up-kumo-ai-in-latest-acquisition/?ref=therecursive.com) through two sources, said the financial terms were not disclosed and Nvidia declined to comment.

**Romanian** entrepreneur Chris Ţurlică [has achieved one of the largest founder-led exits](https://economedia.ro/un-roman-intra-in-clubul-exiturilor-de-miliarde-autodesk-cumpara-compania-fondata-de-chris-turlica-cu-36-miliarde-de-dolari.html?ref=therecursive.com) by a Romanian-born entrepreneur after software giant Autodesk announced the acquisition of his company, MaintainX , in an all-cash deal worth approximately $3.6 billion. Founded by Ţurlică in San Francisco in 2018, MaintainX develops software that helps companies manage maintenance operations and industrial assets.

### CEE VCs investing cross borders

US defense-tech startup Picogrid has raised $45 (€38.63) million in a Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with additional backing from Washington Harbour, GSBackers, and existing investors, including **Czech VC fund Credo Ventures**. The capital will be used to speed up product development, broaden Picogrid’s integration platform into additional operational areas, and support larger-scale deployments with US and allied military organizations.
### Marius Istrate Joins 3VC as Partner, Bringing CEE Depth to One of Austria's Largest VC Funds
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/uipaths-marius-istrate-joins-3vc-as-partner/
Last updated: 2026-06-05T13:53:10.000Z
Marius Istrate, former UiPath Chief People Officer and angel investor, has joined Vienna-based VC firm 3VC as a Partner. The move deepens 3VC's focus on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Managing €200M, the fund invests €2–10M at Series A, aiming to back ambitious founders building global companies.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### London VCs Are Getting More Selective. CEE Founders Should Pay Attention.
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/london-vcs-are-getting-more-selective-cee-founders-pay-attention/
Last updated: 2026-06-05T09:24:05.000Z
We sat down with co-founders of the London VC Network (LVCN) to discuss the biggest shifts already happening across venture capital, startups, AI, and emerging ecosystems.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Backed by xAI Co-Founder Christian Szegedy, Hungarian Kodesage Raises €5.67M
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/hungarian-kodesage-raises-eur5-67m/
Last updated: 2026-06-04T08:36:19.000Z
[Hungarian-founded Kodesage](https://www.therecursive.com/hungarian-startup-kodesage-raises-e-2-3-m-to-modernize-legacy-systems-with-ai/), an on-premise AI platform that helps enterprises understand, document and modernise critical legacy software systems, has raised a **$6.6 (€5.67) million Seed round** led by Greek [VentureFriends](https://www.venturefriends.vc/?ref=therecursive.com). Pre-Seed lead investor Portfolion joined the round, alongside notable angel investors including [Christian Szegedy](https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-szegedy-bb284816/?ref=therecursive.com), co-founder of **Elon Musk’s xAI**, and Mario Götze, the **German footballer** and World Cup winner.

The new funding will accelerate Kodesage’s go-to-market in the United States and Europe, and will power continued investment in the organisation’s engineering and product teams to deliver on Kodesage’s vision of **self-healing enterprise applications**. 

### Transforming legacy software knowledge into actionable intelligence

Founded in 2024 by enterprise software entrepreneurs Gergely Dombi, Miklos Szurdi and Gyorgy Szilagyi, Kodesage is aiming to transform how enterprises understand and use the information buried inside complex legacy software stacks. Its platform extracts information from code and documentation to create a live knowledge layer that enables teams to **maintain and migrate mission-critical software with less risk**. 

The platform performs automated deep discovery of complex codebases, generates and maintains living documentation, supports migration with context-aware code conversion, automates test generation and enables AI-powered production support.

The idea was sparked by Dombi and Szurdi’s experience building a 300+ person software consultancy that specialised in modernising legacy systems. These projects were often slow and lengthy, as they depended on fragmented knowledge and a small number of specialists. Together with Szilagyi, an exited co-founder of Tresorit, they set out to make software modernisation **scalable and repeatable**, compressing projects that would previously take years into months. 

*"Software modernisation is rarely clean cut. In regulated environments, legacy and new systems often coexist for years, whilst the support burden grows as institutional knowledge thins out. This is a multi-trillion-dollar drag on enterprise IT. Kodesage’s living knowledge layer helps teams modernise legacy systems faster, resolve incidents and reduce repeat issues through powerful AI-assisted support,"* said **Gergely Dombi, co-founder & CEO of Kodesage.**

### AI-powered modernization for regulated enterprises

The Kodesage technology is built for **highly regulated industries** such as banking, insurance, energy, transportation, telecoms and the public sector. The platform is designed for organisations with strict data residency, sovereignty and compliance requirements. Unlike cloud-based AI tools, it runs entirely within the customer environment, whether on-premise, in a virtual private cloud, or fully air-gapped, ensuring source code, schemas and database content never leave the organisation’s control. This enables secure AI-powered modernisation of legacy systems.

*“There are numerous enterprises globally struggling to maintain and upgrade legacy software systems that reside on-premise. Starting with Oracle applications, Kodesage can help companies understand, maintain, and modernise complex, undocumented legacy codebases. As a result, they save them time and cost while cutting their dependence on retiring experts. Gergely, Gyorgy and Miklos have deep experience in the space, and we couldn’t be more excited to back them in their journey,” said* **Apostolos Apostolakis, Founding Partner of** [**VentureFriends**](https://www.venturefriends.vc/?ref=therecursive.com)**.**
### AI House 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-house-2026/
Last updated: 2026-06-18T12:29:10.000Z
The event is limited to ****50 selected participants from AI startups**, ****technology companies**, **investment firms**, **research organizations**, and ****product teams**. Attendance is application-based, with organizers aiming to create a curated environment for meaningful discussions and knowledge exchange.  
  
📅 **Date:** June 19-20, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Bucharest, Romania  
🏢 ****Venue:** Private Venue, Otopeni

[Check the agenda! ](https://luma.com/uj9v0i78?ref=therecursive.com) 

The initiative is curated by Andrei Ilie, Head of AI at Instantly.ai, and Alex Gavril, CEO of ▲promocrat and founder of ▲neomixers.

Andrei Ilie brings experience across AI engineering, automation, product development, and growth, with a focus on deploying AI systems and building AI-driven businesses through ASYNNC GROUP. Alex Gavril contributes the ecosystem-building perspective. Through ▲promocrat, he has spent more than a decade supporting the local technology ecosystem through consulting, mentoring, investments, and community initiatives, while ▲neomixers has grown into one of Bucharest's most active curated tech communities.

Together, the organizers aim to create a gathering that combines the depth of an executive offsite with the openness of a community-driven event, bringing together people actively working on the development, adoption, and implementation of AI.

Instantly.ai joins AI House Bucharest as Main Sponsor, reflecting the event's focus on practical AI applications across growth, sales, automation, and go-to-market functions.

The event is also supported by ElevenLabs as Experience Partner and Bolt as Mobility Partner.

**SPEAKERS**

Among the speakers confirmed so far are **Sergiu Neguț**, co-founder of FintechOS, **Mihail F**., Software Engineer at ElevenLabs, **Matei Psatta**, co-founder and CMO of Blindspot and Chief AI & Growth Officer at Vola, and **Emil Muthu**, CEO of Neurony Solutions and AI Implementation Strategist. Additional speakers and guests are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

**What to expect**

Across the two days, participants can expect a program built around the practical realities of building, adopting, and scaling AI. The agenda includes keynote sessions, live discussions, workshops, builder hot seats, think tank-style conversations, curated introductions, and networking opportunities designed to encourage knowledge sharing between participants.

Beyond the formal sessions, AI House Bucharest also places a strong emphasis on creating space for informal interactions. Shared meals, evening gatherings, music, and hospitality experiences are intended to help participants build relationships beyond the conference setting.

The event is intentionally designed for a small, curated audience. The core experience is limited to 50 approved participants, with applications reviewed to ensure a mix of founders, operators, investors, researchers, practitioners, and technology executives.

The two-day gathering will conclude with an expanded evening mixer, bringing together AI House participants and additional guests from the wider technology and AI ecosystem.

AI House Bucharest will take place on June 19-20 in Otopeni, near Bucharest. Applications are now [open](https://luma.com/uj9v0i78?ref=therecursive.com).
### Digitalk 2026 Spotlights the Future of AI, Space Tech, and Startups
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/digitalk-2026-spotlights-the-future-of-ai-space-tech-and-startups/
Last updated: 2026-06-08T06:52:01.000Z
For over a decade, [Digitalk](https://www.therecursive.com/digitalk-conference-ai-2026/) has showcased founders and innovators. With discussions spanning AI, venture capital, deep tech, infrastructure, and entrepreneurship, Digitalk 2026 reflects the broader shift in Europe's technology ecosystem.

### Building Europe's strategic technologies

Among the headline speakers is Raycho Raychev, founder of [EnduroSat](https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-in-bulgaria-h2-2025-endurosat-still-leads-among/), who will share his perspective on building a globally recognized space company from Sofia. Joining him is Delian Asparouhov, Partner at Founders Fund and co-founder of Varda Space Industries, who will discuss the future of space as critical infrastructure.

Anton Aleksandrov from [INSAIT](https://www.therecursive.com/insait-netflix-void-ai-video-editing/) will explore the growing importance of sovereign AI models, systems trained on local data, designed for local languages, and aligned with regional security requirements. As Europe seeks greater technological independence, this topic has moved from theory to strategic necessity.

AI is increasingly becoming a decision-maker, not just a productivity tool. Nikola Lazarov, CEO of Eilla.ai, and Alexander Ivanov, founder of CreateX, will discuss Europe's first AI-led M&A transaction and what it signals for the future of corporate dealmaking.

Petar Dobrev, CTO and co-founder of Jest, will share the company's journey in building a marketplace for mobile games within chat applications, including its recent $7 million seed round led by Innovation Endeavors, the venture fund founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

## Scaling globally

Vince Gaydarzhiev, founder and CEO of Alcatraz, will discuss building enterprise technology for customers such as Meta after previously contributing to the development of Face ID prototypes at Apple. Earlier this year, [Alcatraz secured a $35 million funding round](https://www.therecursive.com/blackpeak-capital-alcatraz-series-b-investment/) led by BlackPeak Capital, bringing the company's total funding above $100 million.

He will be joined on stage by Ivaylo Gospodinov, Managing Partner at BlackPeak Capital, as part of a series of founder-investor conversations scheduled throughout the conference.

## From inspiration to execution

Teodor Antonio Georgiev, CEO of The Recursive, is moderating a panel titled *What are the ingredients of a functioning ecosystem*. The discussion features Tony Aleksandrov (WorkBetter), Georgi Tonchev (MyCFO), Irina Stoyanova (Wave Solutions), and Zarko Ackovik (Dubai World Trade Centre), who will each bring perspectives from community building, financial infrastructure, scaling operations, and global ecosystem development.

Beyond panels and keynote sessions, Digitalk 2026 places a strong emphasis on practical application. Attendees can participate in hands-on AI workshops, including the Build Sprint led by Lovable ambassadors Boris Rangelov and Ivaylo Sekulichki, where founders and product teams will build functional prototypes in real time.

For teams looking to go further, the conference's official hackathon, Digithon, offers an opportunity to develop and test ideas in a collaborative environment ahead of the main event.

## More industry leaders take the stage

The program also features:

- Bogdan Iordache, General Partner at Underline Ventures and founder of How to Web
- Daniel Dimanov, Counting Lab
- Tomislav Tomov, Meta
- Jakub Krikava, Credo Ventures
- Dylan Sisu, e2vc
- Alex Stroud, Concentric
- Stoil Vassilev, Paypercut
- Ofir Eyal, CEO of Rakuten Viber
### Bulgarian Fintech Paypercut Raises €5M to Expand Its Payments Platform Across CEE
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-fintech-paypercut-raises-eur5m-to-expand-its-payments-platform-across-cee/
Last updated: 2026-06-04T14:10:20.000Z
Sofia-based fintech Paypercut has secured a €5M seed round co-led by Concentric, Passion Capital, and Araya Ventures, bringing its total funding to €7M. Additional investors in the round included SMOK Ventures, Portfolio Ventures, BrightCap Ventures, BlackWood, SABAH.fund, MFG Invest, Main Set, and payments entrepreneur Matt Doka, bringing Paypercut's total funding to €7M.

The company, which helps online merchants accept payments across Central and Eastern Europe through a single integration, plans to use the fresh capital to expand across the region, develop new products, and support its application for an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence in Ireland.

*"CEE has always been treated as an afterthought by the payments industry, seen as too fragmented, too many local specifics, too complicated. We built Paypercut to fix that. This round gives us the resources to go further and faster: more markets, more payment options for merchants, and the infrastructure to move money in the way it should have always worked, instantly and at a fraction of the cost,"* said Stoil Vasilev, Co-Founder and CEO, Paypercut.

### A payments platform for CEE merchants

Founded to address the fragmentation of CEE's payments landscape, Paypercut has evolved from a BNPL aggregator into a broader payments platform. Since raising a [€2M pre-seed round in July 2025](https://www.therecursive.com/paypercut-raises-2m-bnpl-aggregator-cee/), the startup says it has onboarded more than 200 merchants across eight CEE markets.

*"We backed Paypercut at pre-seed because we believed in the team and the opportunity. A year later, the execution has matched the ambition. CEE is one of the most underserved payments markets in Europe, and Paypercut is building the infrastructure layer the region has been missing. We are proud to continue leading this journey,"* said Will Orde, Partner, Passion Capital. 

Paypercut offers merchants access to card payments, local payment methods, Buy Now Pay Later options, payment links, QR code payments, multi-currency settlements, and billing tools through a single integration. The company aims to simplify expansion across the region by removing the need for separate payment providers and contracts in each market.

### Beyond merchant payments

As part of its product roadmap, Paypercut is launching Express Checkout, a new feature that enables one-tap payments via Apple Pay and Google Pay directly from product pages. The company says the solution is designed to reduce mobile checkout abandonment and streamline the payment process for consumers.

Beyond merchant payments, Paypercut is also building stablecoin-based infrastructure for cross-border transfers in CEE. The startup is initially targeting high-volume corridors such as EUR-to-PLN and EUR-to-RON, aiming to reduce the costs and delays associated with traditional cross-border payments.

The company currently operates through regulated partners across the European Economic Area and expects authorisation for its own Irish EMI licence in Q4 2026.
### Croatian VC Fil Rouge Capital Marks One Year and 4 New Investments in Romania
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/croatian-vc-fil-rouge-capital-marks-one-year-and-4-new-investments-in-romania/
Last updated: 2026-06-01T08:54:13.000Z
Fil Rouge Capital (FRC) marked one year since opening its Bucharest office, growing its Romanian portfolio to three startups, and evaluating over 100 local companies, according to Romania Partner Matei Dumitrescu.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Over a Billion and One Nights: Inside the Science of Sleep
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/over-a-billion-and-one-nights-inside-the-science-of-sleep/
Last updated: 2026-06-01T12:50:39.000Z
For more than a decade, Swedish sleep-tech company Sleep Cycle has been exploring one question: is there an ideal moment to wake up? What began as a smart alarm clock has evolved into an AI-powered platform that analyzes sleep and breathing patterns using only a smartphone.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### AI National Security and a Country Moving at Two Speeds
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-national-security-and-a-country-moving-at-two-speeds/
Last updated: 2026-05-31T08:58:55.000Z
When Google Cloud Day Bulgaria debuted in 2024, it read as a coming-of-age moment: confirmation that the country's cloud-native scene had grown serious enough to merit its own stop on the regional map. Three editions in, the May 20 gathering at the Sofia Event Center has become a fixed point on the calendar, and this year it arrived with news that traveled well past the nearly 800 engineers, architects, and enterprise leaders in the room.

## **A national cybershield**

On stage, Bulgaria's Information Services, the state-owned national system integrator, and Google Cloud [unveiled](https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2026-05-20-Bulgarias-Information-Services-and-Google-Cloud-Launch-AI-Powered-National-Cybershield?ref=therecursive.com) one of the first deployments of Google Cloud's Cybershield in the European Union: a centralized, AI-powered defense system for the Bulgarian state. The project, quietly underway since earlier this year, is built around a federated Security Operations Center (SOC) that gives a single, coordinated view of threats across government and is designed to eventually fold in 54 ministries and agencies.

The architecture is the whole point. For years, each Bulgarian institution largely defended itself, a decentralized arrangement that left repeated openings for attackers. The new model consolidates security telemetry and intelligence into one place, pairing Google Cloud Security Operations for planet-scale analytics with Google Threat Intelligence and Mandiant's frontline insight, and layering in specialized analyst capabilities to chase down complex intrusions. The intended effect is a move from a reactive posture to a proactive one, compressing the mean time to detect and respond to an attack. The build is backed by EU funding, framed explicitly as part of the bloc's push to harden its eastern border.

"Our partnership with Google Cloud is the result of an eight-year relationship built on trust and technical excellence," said Simeon Kartselyanski, Cyber Security Manager at Information Services and head of the Bulgarian National Cyber Security Operations Center. He cast the project as "a model for how EU nations can utilize centralized capabilities to stay ahead of persistent adversaries."

Google Cloud's director for Central and Eastern Europe, Boris Georgiev, put it more bluntly. The aim, he said, is to "transform Bulgarian national security from a manual craft into an automated science, fighting AI-powered threats with superior AI-powered defenses." That logic threaded through the technical program too: the deep-technical track opened with a Google session on agentic triage and investigation inside the SOC, the same automation applied to the daily grind of analyst work.

## **The floor: Gemini Enterprise, developer velocity, and a car shipping platform**

If Cybershield set the strategic frame, the customer sessions showed what the technology does once it leaves the keynote stage. Telecom operator Yettel walked through how it is putting Gemini Enterprise to work across the business. JetBrains, the developer-tools company with deep regional roots, argued for AI as a genuine lever on developer velocity rather than a demo-day novelty.

A deeper case study came from Ship.Cars, a US-market vehicle-shipping platform that moves thousands of cars across the country every day and had watched its database growth outrun its infrastructure. 

Working with Sofia-based [Europe Cloud](https://www.therecursive.com/google-cloud-day-returns-to-sofia-for-a-third-year-with-ai-agents-and-sovereignty-in-focus/), a Google Cloud Partner of the Year for 2023, Ship.Cars rebuilt its stack on Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Kubernetes, Cloud Storage, and Pub/Sub, guided by weekly consulting sessions. Presented jointly by Ship.Cars' senior DevOps engineer Svetozar Kolew and Europe Cloud's DevOps team lead Kaloyan Siriyski, the payoff was the unglamorous sort that decides whether a company can keep scaling: steadier performance, a tighter security posture, and engineers freed from firefighting capacity.

"We don't just help businesses move to the cloud," Siriyski said of the work. "We help them build something better on top of it."

## **The number behind the optimism**

For all the on-stage momentum, Georgiev was candid elsewhere about the gap underneath it. [Speaking to Bloomberg TV Bulgaria](https://www.bloombergtv.bg/a/19-svetat-e-biznes/159772-b-georgiev-samo-9-ot-biznesa-v-balgariya-izpolzva-ai?ref=therecursive.com), he attached hard figures to Bulgaria's split-screen AI moment: only about 9% of companies in the country currently use AI, well below Western European levels, even as roughly 22.5% of Bulgarian individuals already do. Demand from people, in other words, is running ahead of adoption by the businesses meant to serve them.

The reasons, he suggested, are part structural and part cultural. Eastern Europe has historically picked up new technology later than the US, and within companies, the holdouts are predictable - finance, legal, and procurement, where caution is the reflex. But the leading edge is moving quickly: regulated sectors, especially banks and telecoms, alongside digital-first firms selling into global markets, are migrating to the cloud and using AI to understand and personalize how they serve customers. Once that mindset spreads from a single department to the whole organization, Georgiev argued, Bulgaria and the wider region should see the same adoption surge already visible further west.

His pick for where Bulgaria's edge might come from is specific: [INSAIT](https://www.therecursive.com/insait-netflix-void-ai-video-editing/), the Sofia-based AI institute Google has supported from the outset. Keep investing in it and keep drawing companies around it, he said, and it could become one of Bulgaria's defining advantages in Europe, a dividend not only for the education system but for the economy.

## **What the day actually showed**

Strip away the keynote gloss, and Google Cloud Day Bulgaria 2026 documented a country pulling in two directions at once. On cybersecurity, Bulgaria has positioned itself near the front of the EU pack, converting an eight-year integrator relationship into one of the bloc's first national Cybershield deployments. On enterprise AI, it is still a laggard, albeit one with a fast-moving leading edge and a population already more AI-fluent than its companies.

The throughline the organizers kept returning to sovereignty, control, and the freedom to build on a global foundation without giving up your data is precisely the argument the region has been waiting to hear. Whether Bulgarian businesses act on it as decisively as the Bulgarian state just did is the question the fourth edition will have to answer.
### How to Web 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-to-web-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T13:51:11.000Z
Eastern Europe's leading startup & technology conference. Three days in Bucharest for founders, operators, and investors who want a sharper read on the year ahead.  
  
📅 **Date:** October 6-8, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Bucharest, Romania  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Face Convention Center](https://www.google.com/maps/place//data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x40b20339d65b92b5:0xe8ba8b92e396027b?sa=X&ved=1t:8290&ictx=111&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://www.howtoweb.co/?ref=therecursive.com) 

We are living through a rare moment: the tools to build almost anything are finally available to almost anyone. The constraints that used to define what was possible – resources, technical complexity, access – are dissolving. Speed used to be the biggest advantage in the startup and technology world. Now it's the entry ticket.

In a world where almost anything can be built, the noise is louder than ever. The wrong ideas are just as easy to build as the right ones. Direction has become the new competitive edge, and finding it requires something harder to acquire than tools: clarity of thinking, the right conversations, and the people who push you further.

How to Web Conference is where that training happens. This year, the question is: what will you build when you can build anything? Come and figure it out.

**TOPICS**

- **AI & Future Tech** – Exploring how artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are transforming products, businesses, and industries.
- **Engineering** – Best practices in software development, platform architecture, scalability, developer tools, and building high-performing technology products.
- **Startups & Investments** – Insights on fundraising, venture capital, startup growth, scaling strategies, and the future of entrepreneurship in Eastern Europe.
- **Marketing & Sales** – Modern go-to-market strategies, growth marketing, customer acquisition, revenue generation, and sales excellence.
- **Team & Leadership** – Building strong teams, developing company culture, leadership skills, talent acquisition, and organizational growth.

**HIGHLIGHTS**

- **3,000+ attendees** from the startup, technology, and innovation ecosystem
- **2,500+ meetings** facilitated through networking and matchmaking opportunities
- **500+ founders** representing startups across various stages of growth
- **250+ investors** including venture capital firms, angel investors, and corporate investors
- **150+ speakers** sharing insights on technology, entrepreneurship, and business growth
- **50+ side events** taking place throughout the conference week, fostering additional networking and community engagement
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Balkan-founded Startup Raises Over $100M in New Funding
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-balkan-founded-startup-raises-over-100m-in-new-funding/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T10:59:18.000Z
*The Recursive’s weekly roundup aims to cover key tech developments across Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the growing impact of CEE-born founders on the global stage. Take a look at the latest news in funding, startup milestones, and emerging trends tied to the region’s innovation potential.*

## CEE news & deals

[Fonoa](https://www.therecursive.com/croatian-founded-fonoa-secures-110m-series-c-and-acquires-pwcs-tax-platform/), a **Croatian-founded**, Dublin-based tax automation platform, has just armed itself for a significant new offensive, announcing a dual manoeuvre that has turned heads across the finance and technology sectors: **a $110 (€94.5) million Series C funding round and the strategic acquisition of the Indirect Tax Edge platform** from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

**Lithuanian Kopa.ai**, an agentic AI platform that lets e-commerce teams delegate real work to intelligent AI agents that think and act like seasoned operators, has raised **€2 million** in seed funding. The round was co-led by XTX Ventures and Practica Capital, with participation from Inovia Capital and angel investor Etan Ilfeld.

**Brno-based** JIC Ventures has invested in **Czech startup Webout** as part of a **€1.65 million** seed round led by Seed Starter SK, with participation from Energy Venture Pals. Webout has developed a platform for creating hyper-personalised videos at scale and is now expanding into the US market, with co-founder Michal Orsava relocating to San Francisco to lead the effort. 

**Bulgarian** LAUNCHub Ventures [has appointed Zagreb-based Vedran Blagus](https://www.therecursive.com/vedran-blagus-joins-launchub-ventures/) as its new associated partner, tasked with leading the firm’s expansion across Croatia, Slovenia, and the Western Balkans. Blagus, who previously spent 8 years at South Central Ventures, brings deep regional expertise and a clear mandate: to make LAUNCHub the first-choice partner for the region’s best founders.

## CEE Funds investing cross borders

**Greek venture capital** **firm** [Big Pi Ventures led a US $30 million Series B](https://www.therecursive.com/big-pi-ventures-leads-30-million-series-b-into-construction-robotics-firm/) round into Australian robotics company August Robotics, backing autonomous robot fleets that drill and mark floors across hyperscale construction sites worldwide.

**Czech** **Purple Ventures** has invested **€450,000** in British startup Fether Labs alongside international investors including Chapter One and the a16z Scout Fund. Fether Labs is developing a novel gesture-control wristband that tracks the movement of tendons beneath the skin, enabling users to control computers, AR devices, robots and industrial machines without cameras, controllers or touchscreens.
### WMF 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/wmf-2026-one-of-europes-largest-ai-festivals-returns-to-bologna/
Last updated: 2026-07-13T11:01:25.000Z
From June 24 to 26, BolognaFiere will host **WMF – We Make Future**, the International Trade Fair and Festival on Innovation spanning AI, technology, and digital. Across three days, the event packs in more than [90 stages](https://en.wemakefuture.it/next/schedule/?ref=therecursive.com) and over 1,000 international speakers — what its organizers describe as the most comprehensive educational program in the world dedicated to AI, digital marketing, technology, and innovation.

📅 **Date:** June 24-26, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Bologna, Italy  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Bologna Fiere](https://maps.app.goo.gl/c7M4ZF9vgctwzrg16?ref=therecursive.com)

[Get your ticket ](https://en.wemakefuture.it/?ref=therecursive.com) 

Last year's edition drew more than 73,000 attendees from 90 countries, over 700 exhibitors, 1,000+ speakers and guests, and a network of roughly 3,000 startups, investors, and partners — with more than 2,800 pre-arranged B2B meetings. For founders, investors, and operators looking to plug into a genuinely international room, it remains one of the most concentrated opportunities on the European calendar.

The 2026 program is organized into four tiers of stages: **Premium Stages** for advanced, vertical training; **Discover Stages** for business and innovative solutions; **Open Stages** for dissemination and cross-disciplinary debate; and the **Mainstage**, which hosts the event's marquee keynotes, panels, and performances.

> "It is no longer enough to just acquire new skills: we need to develop the capacity to read change, understand its impact, and transform it into an opportunity," says **Cosmano Lombardo**, Founder and CEO of Search On Media Group and creator of WMF. "Our goal is to create an international space where professionals, companies, startups, creators, and institutions can discuss, update themselves, and contribute together to building the future."

## AI takes center stage on the Premium Stages

The Premium Stages are where WMF concentrates its most specialized training, and artificial intelligence dominates the lineup with 12 vertical stages. They run the full stack of current AI practice: from Machine Learning to Agentic AI, from AI Marketing to AI Commerce, through to AI & Business Transformation on a stage powered by Dell Technologies and Intel.

The speaker roster leans heavily international. Confirmed names include **Corey Ching of OpenAI**, **Yuval Dvir of SandboxAQ**, **Debanshu Das of Google**, and **Julian Wood and Salih Güler of Amazon AWS**, alongside practitioners digging into AI agents, organizational change, and emerging AI-native software architectures.

AI also intersects with the disciplines around it — Search, Content, Social Media, Automation & CRM, and Data Analytics — with sessions framed around how these tools are reshaping organizational models and professional skills. Governance gets real airtime too: **Brando Benifei**, co-rapporteur of the AI Act at the European Parliament, joins legal, privacy, and policy experts to address regulation and AI's social impact.

The robotics and physical-AI track is one of the more notable additions, bringing **Marco Pavone of NVIDIA**, **Marcello Majonchi of Arduino**, and **Giorgio Metta of IIT (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia)** to the stage on automation and the interaction between AI and the physical world. Rounding out the Premium tier are stages on advertising, brand strategy, UX & UI, e-commerce, content marketing, and backend & cloud, plus deep dives on cybersecurity, legal tech, and work & HR.

## Business, startups, and a 140-strong Startup Arena

The Discover Stages are pitched as the meeting point for entrepreneurship and new market opportunities, alternating strategic talks with concrete cases. Sessions span Tech for Business, Digital Marketing & Business Solutions, Entrepreneurship, Tourism & Travel, Content Creation, and the Impact to Business stage powered by COOPFOND, with topics from AI in retail and healthcare to fintech, HR tech, and the creator economy.

There's a distinctly cross-border thread here. Panels look at the future of European innovation and at new technological corridors linking emerging markets across Europe, India, Canada, Brazil, and Africa — a framing that should resonate with founders from smaller markets eyeing international scale.

The centerpiece for early-stage companies is the **Startup Arena**, where founders of more than 140 selected startups — drawn from Italy and 80 other countries — will pitch solutions built against WMF's 14 "challenges of the future." The surrounding program brings in a long list of ecosystem players, including Italian Tech Alliance, InnovUp, Invitalia, Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center, and Allied for Startups, among others, with impact-focused organizations such as Save The Children and Startup for Africa featured on the Impact to Business stage.

## Culture, governance, and society on the Open Stages

The Open Stages — the most widely accessible tier — are where WMF widens the lens beyond pure tech. The **Start the Future** stage anchors the debate on AI and global transformation, with voices including **Sasha Luccioni**, **Siyabulela Mandela**, **Pegah Moshir Pour**, and **Cosimo Accoto**.

Elsewhere, **GovTech** turns to institutions and digital geopolitics with figures such as Luigi Di Maio and Marco Cappato; **EduTech** examines how education and skills evolve in the age of AI; and the **Space Economy** stage, powered by the **European Space Agency (ESA)**, looks beyond the atmosphere. Culture gets its own run of programming — a **Music & Art** stage in collaboration with **Billboard Italia**, an **Innovation Film Fest**, and **Gaming & Esports** treating video games as a cultural language — alongside book presentations and geopolitics sessions.

## The Mainstage: leaders, journalists, and live performances

The Mainstage is WMF's synthesis act, blending authoritative discussion with entertainment across the three days. European and international institutions are represented by **Henna Virkkunen**, **Michiel Scheffer**, and the UAE Ambassador to Italy, **Abdulla Ali AlSubousi**, with research and design leaders including **Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli**, **Daniele Pucci**, and **Chris Bangle**.

Major brands — **Klarna**, **Trade Republic**, **Microsoft**, **Dell Technologies**, **Intel**, **LG Nova**, and **Google** — bring the business perspective, while a strong journalism and geopolitics block features **Cecilia Sala**, **Enrico Mentana**, **Francesca Albanese**, and **Nicola Gratteri**. Global founders and operators round things out, including **Brunello Cucinelli**, 2026 Guest of Honor **Mathew Knowles**, and **Alec Ross** — capped by live performances from artists such as Dardust, Ditonellapiaga, and N.A.I.P.

## What's new in 2026

This year's program introduces a batch of fresh verticals reflecting where the market is moving, among them **Robotics & Physical AI, Search & AI, AI Commerce, Agentic AI, Fintech & Digital Assets, AI Tourism, Vibe Coding, Automation & CRM, Video & Connected TV, Management & Leadership, Geopolitics**, and the **Startup Arena**.
### Croatian-founded Fonoa Secures $110M Series C and Acquires PwC’s Tax Platform
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/croatian-founded-fonoa-secures-110m-series-c-and-acquires-pwcs-tax-platform/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T08:25:47.000Z
With a fresh $110M in the bank and a key acquisition of PwC's tax platform, a trio of ex-Uber Croatians are tackling the one financial system technology forgot. Their goal: to make global tax compliance not just manageable, but autonomous.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Regional Defence and Security Summit
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/regional-defence-and-security-summit-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-03T10:54:08.000Z
The Regional Defence and Security Summit brings together the key stakeholders that are building European security capacity in the Eastern Flank to advance concrete outcomes: joint procurement initiatives, investment partnerships, innovation pathways, and a shared policy agenda that reflects the region’s strategic roles.  
  
📅 **Date:** October 21, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Sofia, Bulgaria  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Sofia Event Center](https://www.google.com/maps/place//data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x40aa845c300486d7:0xc7ec48da24ce83f5?sa=X&ved=1t:8290&ictx=111&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://www.capital.bg/en/event/346?ref=therecursive.com) 

Europe is rearming at a pace not seen since the early Cold War. EU defence spending has risen 62.8% from 2020, exceeding the 2% NATO guideline. Defence investment alone is projected to reach €130 billion this year. The SAFE instrument is disbursing €150 billion, NATO DIANA doubling its 2026 cohort and European defence startups securing a record $8.7 billion in 2025\. 

On the other hand, Russia's war in Ukraine continues to define the eastern flank, while the US-Israel strikes on Iran in February 2026 brought US military assets to Sofia, put Cyprus under direct threat, and confirmed that the security environment facing this corridor is no longer single-front.

**The role of NATO's Eastern Flank**

The EU's Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 places the Eastern Flank among its most important flagship projects and the largest recipients of SAFE funding. 

NATO's eastern flank runs as a single strategic arc from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and into the eastern Mediterranean — one perimeter, one adversary, one logic. The Baltic states have spent a decade establishing the defence innovation infrastructure, procurement culture, and institutional relationships that the Balkans and Black Sea corridor is now developing at speed.

The eastern flank is also the stress test of European defence ambition as it concentrates the threat, the funding, and the industrial opportunity in the same geography.

**TOPICS**

- The New Geopolitical Order: Power Shifts, the Transatlantic Relationship, and Where Europe Stands
- Europe's Defence Architecture: New Rules, New Money, New Competition
- What SAFE, EDIP, and the Procurement Revolution Mean for Industry
- NATO's Eastern Flank in 2026: Active Operations, Industrial Build-Out, and the Capability Gaps That Urgently Need Filling
- Europe's Defence Industrial Renaissance: What the Primes Are Building, Where They Are Investing, and What It Means for the Corridor’s landscape and capacity
- Bulgaria at the Crossroads: How to Modernise Its Defence Industry, Build Innovation Ecosystem, and Rewrite the Policy Framework for a New Security Era
- Financing European Defence: How SAFE Loans, EIB Lending, Venture Capital, and the New EU Instruments Are Creating the Largest Defence Investment Cycle in a Generation and How to Access It
- Startups, Deep Tech, and Dual-Use Innovation: Deal Flow, Pitches, and How the Corridor's Best Companies Get from Prototype to Procurement
- Security Without Borders: Protecting Critical Infrastructure, Airports, Energy Networks, and Digital Systems Against Hybrid Attacks, Drone Threats, and Cyber Warfare: Who Is Responsible and What Works
- The Corridor Speaks: Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and Turkey on Joint Procurement, Shared Threats, and the Regional Agenda

**AUDIENCE**

500+ participants representing

- Defence Ministers and Senior Policymakers
- Prime Contractors and Defence Industry
- Startups and Innovators
- Venture Capital and Financing Institutions
- Accelerators and Innovation Hubs
- Defence and Dual-Use Associations
- Research and Think Tanks
- Legal and Compliance Advisors
- Component and Technology Suppliers
### Nuqleus Liftoff 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/nuqleus-liftoff-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-28T10:38:09.000Z
This conference is the flagship initiative of ****Nuqleus** — the academic entrepreneurship powerhouse born out of the University of Zagreb (FER) and the Nikola Tesla Innovation Centre (ICENT).

📅 **Date:** June 30 - July 1, 2026  
📍 **Location:** Zagreb, Croatia  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Mozaik Event Centre](https://share.google/OOIsoDd8BJCEMgo3V?ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://nuqleus.io/en/liftoff/?ref=therecursive.com) 

Liftoff is built specifically for innovations rooted in substantial scientific and engineering breakthroughs, so the core pillars of the event entail:

- **The Bridge between Lab and Market:** Leveraging the Nuqleus program’s track record, the event showcases how academic research from the CEE region is being commercialized into world-class companies.
- **The Institutional Powerhouse:** Featuring rare, direct access to leaders from the **EIC (European Innovation Council)**, **EIB (European Investment Bank)**, and **EIF (European Investment Fund)** to discuss the future of European innovation policy.
- **Nuqleus Demo Day:** The climax of the event, where the most promising graduates of the *Startup Builder* program pitch to a room of elite investors.
- **Capital:** Connecting regional talent with global funds like **Xista Ventures**, **Emerald Ventures**, **EBRD VC**, and **Gapminder**.

## Why 2026 is different? Regional sovereignty

In 2026, the theme revolves around **Strategic Independence**. With Europe pushing for technological sovereignty, Liftoff serves as Croatia’s answer to how the CEE region can provide the engineering talent and scientific excellence required to fuel this transition.

> "The moment has come to show the best of what Croatia offers—positioning the country as an ideal base for deep tech development and attracting young scientists from the diaspora back to the CEE region." — **Matija Srbić**, Head of Nuqleus

### Speaker Lineup

The 2026 stage features a good blend of policy makers, institution heavyweights, and industry. Here are some of the confirmed names so far:

- **Marko Primorac,** Vice President of the European Investment Bank (EIB).
- **Michiel Scheffer,** President of the Board of the EIC.
- **Stefan Drüssler,** COO of **UnternehmerTUM**, Europe's leading startup incubator.
- **Viktor Olsson**, Internationalisation Lead, KTH Innovation
### Digitalk Conference + AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/digitalk-conference-ai-2026/
Last updated: 2026-06-08T11:49:14.000Z
📅 **Date:** June 9, 2026  
📍 **Location:** Sofia, Bulgaria  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Sofia Event Center](https://www.google.com/maps/place//data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x40aa845c300486d7:0xc7ec48da24ce83f5?sa=X&ved=1t:8290&ictx=111&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://www.digitalkconference.com/?ref=therecursive.com) 

The AI story is shifting. Companies are moving past experimentation into a phase where AI actively shapes how organisations allocate capital, develop products, manage risk, and structure their operations.  
‍  
The focus is turning from adopting tools to rethinking the fundamentals of how a business runs — how it gains efficiency, accelerates output, and creates value in an AI-driven environment.

### What to Expect

### 

1. AI-driven business models and practical AI implementation across industries
2. Startup innovation, venture capital, and entrepreneurship trends
3. Leadership, talent, and workforce transformation in the AI era
4. Networking with C-level executives, investors, founders, and tech pioneers
5. Live demos, immersive tech showcases, and strategic workshops focused on competing in an AI-driven economy
### RiSEE Summit 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/risee-summit-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-28T10:07:19.000Z
📅 **Date:** June 4-5, 2026  
📍 **Location:** Belgrade, Serbia  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Ložionica (Peron Conference Hall)](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lo%C5%BEionica/@44.8004728,20.444927,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x475a71711dc82e8d:0xdc347610682fdcff!8m2!3d44.800469!4d20.4475019!16s%2Fg%2F11h448tr42?entry=tts&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI2MDQxMy4wIPu8ASoASAFQAw%3D%3D&skid=05e20eae-ed8a-413b-aa9a-bdcc84619816&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://unchainfestival.com/?ref=therecursive.com) 

## What to expect in 2026?

In 2026, the event officially integrates the **Scale SEE** initiative, moving beyond just starting to scaling. The focus is on the "S" in SEE — Sovereignty and Scaling— showing how founders from Belgrade to Sofia and Zagreb can maintain their engineering roots while building corporate structures that withstand global scrutiny.

> "RiSEE is where conversations end and the work begins. It’s for the founders who are tired of being 'local heroes' and are ready to become global contenders."

The 2026 program is built on the philosophy of *curated collisions*, meaning every session is designed to result in a deal or a strategic partnership:

- **The $100M Question:** A signature panel featuring founders from the region who have successfully raised over €100M+, sharing unfiltered stories of failures and the specific tactics required to win globally.
- **Startup Pitching Sprint:** A high-speed arena where 20 hand-picked startups have exactly 120 seconds to grab the attention of a room filled with institutional VCs.
- **Curated Matchmaking:** No "speed-dating" chaos. Every 1:1 meeting is pre-scheduled based on a data-driven double-opt-in process to ensure compatibility between founder needs and investor portfolios.
- **The US Bridge:** In collaboration with the **U.S. Embassy**, the summit hosts deep-dive workshops on navigating the American regulatory and venture landscape.

### Speakers Lineup

The 2026 investor and speaker roster features the heavyweights of European and US venture capital, including:

- **Dan Lupu:** Earlybird Venture Capital (the firm behind UiPath’s rise)
- **Goran Stevanović:** South Central Ventures
- **Ivana Henckel von Donnersmarck:** Skybound VC
- **Miloš Matić:** Omorika Ventures
- **Tipten Troidl:** Senior Commercial Officer at the U.S. Embassy, opening the dialogue on transatlantic collaboration
### Unchain 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/unchain-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-28T08:46:18.000Z
📅 **Date:** June 17-18, 2026  
📍 **Location:** Oradea, Romania  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Oradea Fortress](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Oradea+Fortress/@47.0519435,21.9412105,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x474647f07815f6c1:0x8f554d50d1a426c7!8m2!3d47.0519435!4d21.9437908!16s%2Fg%2F1220qx10?entry=tts&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI2MDQwMS4wIPu8ASoASAFQAw%3D%3D&skid=f6298fdf-6684-4ddd-84d9-c023e532dc55&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://unchainfestival.com/?ref=therecursive.com) 

Set within the historic stone walls of the Oradea Fortress, this landmark event transitions from the "Fintech Fortress" to the Finance Fortress, uniting the entire spectrum of the financial industry—from central bankers and regulators to disruptive startups and global tech giants. Over two days, attendees will navigate the complexities of regional integration, AI-driven automation, and the emerging vision in a unique, festival-style atmosphere.

Unchain Fintech Festival is a one-day event that brings together specialists from finance and technology to analyze new things, share thoughts, and construct partnerships. The event takes region on the ancient Oradea Fortress in Romania.

## Why 2026 is Different: "The Finance Fortress"

Unchain is famous for rejecting the cold, sterile feel of traditional business conferences. Instead, it utilizes the **Oradea Fortress** to create a "Finance-meets-Festival" atmosphere.

Event is expected to gather **800+ senior leaders**, a curated audience featuring 60% C-level management and founders. Also, this year the event celebrates the 5th Anniversary, for which they prepare exclusive retrospective sessions and future-casting for the CEE digital economy.

### What to Expect

1. **Strategic Dialogue**: In-depth workshops on AI risk management, liquidity, and credit access.
2. **Unique Networking**: Social events, city tours, and private networking parties in one of Europe’s most beautiful Art Nouveau cities.
3. **Expert Stages**: Four content stages (Main, Focus, Roundtable, and Innovation) running simultaneously.

### Event Topics 2026

For its fifth year, Unchain is breaking the "fintech" silo. The 2026 edition recognizes that in the CEE region, innovation is now embedded across all layers of society.

> "We are moving beyond the 'fintech' label because the challenges of 2026—liquidity, credit access, and risk management—require a unified Finance front."

- **AI Governance & Ethics:** Moving from pilot projects to responsible, valuable applications of AI in banking.
- **The Digital Euro & CBDCs:** Discussions on the upcoming European CBDC and its role in modernizing payments while maintaining sovereignty.
- **Cybersecurity & DORA:** Navigating the **Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)** and strengthening resilience against systemic threats.
- **Instant Payments & Open Finance:** Exploring **PSD3**, SEPA SCT Inst, and the shift toward fully connected financial ecosystems.
- **Asset Tokenization:** Using DLT to improve transparency and efficiency in capital markets.
- **Embedded Everything:** Turning non-financial sectors (like retail and agriculture) into financial hubs through invisible payments.

Unchain Fintech Festival 2026 is a must-attend platform for fintech leaders to connect, learn, and shape the future of finance in Europe and beyond.

## Check how it was last year...
### The Energy Bridge Forum
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-energy-bridge-forum-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-28T08:31:30.000Z
📅 **Date:** November 2-3, 2026  
📍 **Location:** Vienna, Austria  
🏢 ****Venue:** weXelerate

[Check the agenda! ](https://app.bolderspace.com/web/69c3e178922c04407c213118?ref=therecursive.com) 

The Energy Bridge (TEB) is proud to present the 3rd Energy Transition Dialogue in Central and Eastern Europe, a pivotal conference designed to foster collaboration and drive progress in the region’s energy landscape.

While much of Western Europe has established renewable frameworks, the 2026 forum highlights the **CEE Leap**—the rapid adoption of next-gen energy tech in markets that are skipping legacy steps. The event focuses on how digitalization can connect physical assets with energy markets to meet both sustainability and commercial goals.

> "The Energy Bridge isn't just a meeting; it's the central nervous system for the CEE energy transition, ensuring that innovation doesn't stop at the border."

### The Core Pillars of TEB 2026

The forum is built around the "4Ds" of the modern energy revolution, with a specific focus on the CEE region's infrastructure:

- **Decarbonization & Industry:** Strategies for transitioning the region's heavy industrial heartlands to green hydrogen and carbon-neutral processes.
- **Digitalization of the Grid:** Showcasing AI-driven software that manages decentralized energy loads and enhances grid flexibility.
- **Strategic Capital Mobilization:** Bridging the "investment gap" by connecting CEE projects with Western European venture capital and private equity.
- **Energy Sovereignty:** High-level political dialogues on regional energy security and reducing dependency through cross-border renewable integration.

### Innovation in Action: The Startup Stage

In partnership with the **Vienna Business Agency**, TEB 2026 provides a dedicated stage for the region's most promising energy startups.

- **The Exhibition Zone:** A curated space where hardware and software innovators demonstrate real-world applications, from smart meters to industrial-scale storage.
- **Matchmaking Sessions:** High-intensity networking designed to pair technical founders with the industrial "Hidden Champions" of Austria and Germany.

Whether you are looking to invest in the next big energy software or seeking the political backing to scale a renewable project across borders, The Energy Bridge Forum 2026 is the essential mid-year summit for the European energy sector.
### How Croatia Is Rewriting the Tech Transfer Playbook (of the Region)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-deep-tech-nuqleus-liftoff-2026-program/
Last updated: 2026-05-28T09:54:47.000Z
Europe is all-in on technological sovereignty. That means a **big bet on deep tech** — the startups born from heavy-duty science, the ones trying to solve the world's biggest problems. But in Central and Eastern Europe, things get tricky.

There are plenty of brilliant ideas. The problem? The path from the research lab to the open market is often blocked. And the blockages are coming from the very places meant to help: the universities and research institutes. However, a shift is occurring.

**Croatia is increasingly taking the initiative in the CEE region**, implementing global best practices and creating better conditions for deep tech to flourish. Behind the initiatives are many stakeholders, and one crucial driver: **Nuqleus venture builder,** launched at the University of Zagreb's Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), stemming from ICENT (Innovation Centre Nikola Tesla) and SPOCK incubator.

By building a collaborative foundation where the state, academia, and private capital align, they started moving the whole ecosystem forward. That leadership is perhaps most visible at the **Nuqleus Liftoff** conference, happening in **Zagreb on June 30th and July 1st, 2026**. 

## A de-risking mechanism

Put on by the Nuqleus, already widely recognized as one of [Europe’s premier deep tech hubs](https://therecursive.com/poland-tops-cee-with-the-most-ranked-startup-hubs-in-ft-s-2025-list/?ref=therecursive.com), the mission of Liftoff is simple but immensely important: showcase domestic talent and connect a maturing regional ecosystem with the international tech scene.

Last year, 500 people showed up. This year, they're expecting more than **80 startups and 30 top VCs from across Europe**. The whole point is to show what’s really possible in the region, and how can we learn from each-other.

To do that, the organisers are pulling in some of the biggest names in European innovation funding: **Michiel Scheffer**, President of the **EIC Board**; **Stefan Tzalov** from the European Investment Fund (**EIF**); and **Sladjana Ćosić** of the European Investment Bank (**EIB**). They’ll be also joined by proven ecosystem builders like **Stefan Drüssler**, the COO of Germany’s top incubator UnternehmerTUM, **Viktor Olsson,** Internationalisation Lead at KTH Innovation, and **Isabelle Simon**, COO of Deep Tech Momentum.

## Solving the incentive gap

Getting investors to the table is one thing. But according to **Matija Srbić**, who heads up Nuqleus, that's only half the battle. The real problem lies much deeper. “*Deep tech startups in widening countries have different challenges than those in more developed ecosystems,”* he explains. **The biggest roadblock? The institutions**.

> *“Many research institutions don't have clear rules for technology transfer, and for those that do, the terms are often 'predatory' and not founder-friendly.”*

Beyond the paperwork hurdles, Srbić points to the profound **personal and professional leap a researcher must take**. They have to ask themselves: Am I ready to pause my scientific career to become a full-time founder for the next decade? It’s a huge commitment, and if the answer is no, Nuqleus often steps in to find a business-savvy co-founder.

Srbic adds that the challenges continue from there, citing the difficulty in securing crucial first pilot projects and the **scarcity of local VCs who truly understand the science** behind robotics or biotech, rather than just chasing the next software unicorn.

This is where the Croatian model is starting to shine. Rather than waiting for the system to change itself, a coordinated effort is underway to professionalize the entire pipeline, and Nuqleus' team hopes their efforts influence the change in the region as well.

## Typical incubation programme wasn't enough

Srbić explains that these unique regional gaps forced Nuqleus to [move on from the standard incubator playbook](https://therecursive.com/nuqleus-liftoff-croatia-zagreb-deep-tech-startups-cee-region/?ref=therecursive.com). He realized that a typical program, designed for a more mature ecosystem, simply wasn't enough. *“Each year we are making changes,”* he notes, detailing a process of constant adaptation. A key weakness he identified was the general absence of effective Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs).

To compensate, Nuqleus created its own pre-incubation stage. *“We added a phase before that, to fill the gaps present because there are no TTOs most of the time,”* he says. This ‘Phase Zero’ focuses on the basics: helping researchers validate their business ideas, learn about IP protection and how to [choose the right model for commercialisation](https://therecursive.com/deep-tech-funding-mentorship-lessons-sosv-eic-flagship-pioneering/?ref=therecursive.com). All done through an extensive market research process.

But the support doesn't stop there. Srbić saw that even after the main program, startups were often not fully equipped to succeed on their own. The most promising ventures now receive an additional six months of intensive, hands-on support.

*"...so we help them with pilot projects and customer acquisition, GTM strategy, brand, and fundraising. And lastly, we added* [*Entrepreneur in Residence program*](https://therecursive.com/academia-startups-scientist-founders-entrepreneur-in-residence-europe/?ref=therecursive.com) *for those researchers who need seasoned expert on board to join them in building the company."*

## The deep-tech in the ecosystem is maturing

This complete, A-to-Z approach is working. This isn’t just talk; the evidence is in the infrastructure and team readiness. **It's already helped get more than 25 startups off the ground.**

Croatian institutions like the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) and the Ruđer Bošković Institute, serve as great examples as well.

Crucially, the **Ministry of Science, Education and Youth** has stepped in to provide the structural glue, launching dedicated programs to professionalize **Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs)** and providing direct grants for startups to navigate the valley of death.

This influenced many research institutions to implement some kind of entrepreneurial programs, Srbić notes. "*Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Youth has many open calls for professionalisation of TTOs. One of their calls for deep tech startups required a signed agreement between the startup and the research institution regarding the technology transfer, which forced research institutions to create their IP rulebooks*."

It’s a sign that the whole ecosystem is growing up, a change made even clearer by the recent launch of Vesna Capital, Croatia’s very first deep tech VC fund, launched by joint efforts of the EIF and the Croatian Bank for Reconstruction and Development (HBOR).

> *"Deep tech in general is more used term on the EU level. There are some success stories from our previous generations. All of this helps us a lot because, on average, research teams come in more prepared."*

**By setting these high standards, Croatia is creating a template that can positively influence and elevate the rest of the CEE region.**

## Most valuable conversations

The official agenda for Liftoff 2026 is full of talks and presentations on how to exchange that know-how. Beyond talks, the real work gets done in the hallways, over coffee, and during the breaks. So, the whole Liftoff experience is designed to make those real connections happen.

Sure, there’s a **Demo Day for Nuqleus startups and an expo area**. But there are also carefully planned networking events designed to do more than just swap business cards — they’re about showing off some genuine Croatian hospitality. To kick things off, a small group of ClimateTech and PhysicalAI startups will get to attend an exclusive "Grow in Europe Bootcamp" on the beautiful island of Cres, giving them direct, focused time with investors before the main event even starts. It’s this **mix of serious business and real human connection** that builds the trust you need for cross-border investment to flourish.

After last year’s successful event, Matija Srbić said it best: **the mission is to get the ecosystem ready for its next giant leap**. This isn't about helping Croatia and the rest of the CEE region just copy what’s happening elsewhere. It’s about making sure they have the money, the people, and the guts to start setting the trends themselves.
### Podim 2026: Inside Europe’s Emerging Growth Networks
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/podim-2026-inside-europes-emerging-growth-networks/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T15:28:24.000Z
Maribor spent three days operating as one of the main intersection points for founders, investors, operators, and ecosystem organizations navigating Europe’s startup economy.

This year’s edition of Podim gathered more than 1,100 participants from 34 countries, alongside **220 startups**, over **60 venture capital funds** and private investors managing more than **€10 billion in assets**, and **90+ speakers** from **21 countries**.

Across the event, conversations moved between fundraising, deep tech commercialization, operational scaling, AI infrastructure, international expansion, and the growing pressure on European ecosystems to create stronger pathways from early innovation to globally competitive companies.

The concentration of investors, operators, and ecosystem organizations in Maribor also reflected a broader reality across Europe’s technology landscape: **founders from smaller markets are entering international conversations much earlier in their growth journeys**. Access to capital, partnerships, and operational knowledge is becoming increasingly cross-border from day one, particularly across Central and Southeastern Europe.

That context shaped much of the activity surrounding Podim this year, from investor meetings and founder networking to partnerships with initiatives such as Scale-X (UNIDO), Future 500, and Germany’s Bits & Pretzels. The event increasingly functions as **a meeting point between regional ecosystems**, international investors, and founders preparing to scale beyond domestic markets.

With **a 46-year history**, Podim has gradually evolved into one of the most established startup and technology gatherings across the Alps-Adriatic and Western Balkans region. This year’s edition placed particular emphasis on Europe’s scaling gap and the structural conditions required for companies to move from technical innovation into international growth.

## DATANA wins the Podim pitching competition

One of the central moments of this year’s edition was the final round of the Podim Pitching Competition, where five startups competed for the title of best startup at Podim 2026.

The competition was won by **BioSistemika** with **DATANA**, its synthetic DNA-based long-term data storage solution.

The company emerged from a selection pipeline that began with over 1,000 applicants before narrowing down to 220 selected startups, online demo sessions with international investors, semifinal rounds, and a final group featuring startups from Slovenia, Austria, and the Czech Republic.

DATANA focuses on long-term digital data preservation through synthetic DNA storage technology, positioning itself around durability, offline storage control, and resilience against cyber and physical compromise. The category itself reflects a broader trend becoming increasingly visible across Europe’s startup landscape, where more founders are building companies around scientific commercialization, industrial infrastructure, and deep-tech applications with long development cycles and significant research intensity.

The competition finalists reflected many of those same themes. Companies operating across AI, connectivity, infrastructure, and advanced technology categories made up this year’s final group, pointing toward the increasing technical complexity of startups emerging from the region.

For Slovenia specifically, the result also carried symbolic significance - this was the first time Slovenian startups were represented among the finalists in the competition’s history.

Speaking after the win, DATANA’s Anže Smerdelj described the recognition as an important validation moment for the company as it prepares for fundraising and commercialization efforts.

## Investor density and Europe’s scaling challenge

Podim’s investor presence has become one of the defining characteristics of the event. More than 120 investors attended this year’s edition, including funds such as South Central Ventures, Enterprise Investors, Silicon Gardens, Vesna VC, and others active across the Central and Southeastern European startup landscape. Combined, participating investors represented more than €10 billion in assets under management.

The concentration of investors translated into activities throughout the event. More than 1,100 pre-arranged meetings took place inside the Podim Deal Room between startups, investors, corporations, and SMEs exploring investment opportunities, partnerships, and commercial collaborations.

The speaker lineup reflected many of the operational questions currently shaping Europe’s technology ecosystem. Participants included [**Amir Salihefendić**](https://www.therecursive.com/ghost/#/editor/post/6a05a27714be2600019e57b7), **Ioan Iacob**, and **Vlatko Matijević**, alongside investors, operators, and ecosystem leaders working across venture capital, AI, enterprise software, and deep tech.

Across many of the discussions happening throughout the three-day event, one theme was overarching: Europe continues producing technically ambitious founders and globally relevant innovation, while the path from early traction to international scale still depends heavily on access to investors, operational experience, commercial networks, and ecosystems capable of supporting companies beyond their domestic markets.

Events like [Podim](https://podim.org/?ref=therecursive.com) increasingly sit inside that process, bringing together many of the actors involved in shaping how startups from the region access international growth opportunities, capital, and strategic partnerships.
### Slush 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/slush-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T17:53:20.000Z
**Founded in 2008 as a 250-person gathering, Slush has grown into the one of the world’s leading startup events, bringing together a curated crowd of European startups, world-class investors, and tech journalists.*  
  
📅 **Date:** November 18-19, 2026  
📍 **Location:** Helsinki, Finland  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Messukeskus Helsinki](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Messukeskus+Helsinki/@60.2032647,24.936541,17z/data=!3m2!4b1!5s0x469209917a9d6d15:0x6909fd4105a3f5f0!4m6!3m5!1s0x46920991bdcb5c15:0x6acc65ed8b99050b!8m2!3d60.2032647!4d24.936541!16zL20vMDl3NDln?entry=ttu&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI2MDUyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://slush.org/?ref=therecursive.com) 

As the Finnish winter begins to settle in, the global tech community prepares for the world’s most concentrated gathering of venture capital and startup grit. **Slush 2026** is set to illuminate Helsinki once again, transforming the darkest time of the year into a high-voltage hub for innovation.

Taking place from **November 18 to 19, 2026**, at **Messukeskus**, Slush continues to reject the "bigger is better" trade show model, opting instead for a highly curated experience where the investor-to-founder ratio is the densest in the world.

## What to expect in 2026?

Slush is designed to be a boosting engine for early-stage companies. The 2026 programming focuses on actionable advice rather than marketing fluff:

- **Day 0 (Founders & Investor Day):** Before the main doors open, Nov 17 is dedicated to exclusive summits. "Founder Dawn" offers hands-on scaling workshops, while "Investor Day" remains the largest gathering of institutional capital in Europe.
- **The Slush 100:** The world’s most coveted startup competition returns, where the winner typically walks away with an equity investment from a syndicate of leading VCs.
- **Matchmaking Tool:** The heart of the event. Attendees use the proprietary tool to schedule over **20,000 double-opt-in meetings** in just 48 hours.
- **Side Events:** From padel tournaments to secret sauna networking, the "Slush Week" features over 600 community-led events across Helsinki.

In 2026, Slush shifts its focus toward **"Radical Resilience."** As the hype cycles of previous years stabilize, the event is doubling down on "DeepTech for Good" and startups solving planetary-scale problems—from carbon capture to decentralized healthcare.

> "At Slush, we don’t do 'keynotes.' We do company-building. 2026 is about the founders who are staying the course when the easy money has dried up."

### The Nordic Experience: Sauna & Ice-Dipping

It wouldn’t be Slush without the unique Finnish culture. The **"Sauna Village"** at the venue provides a space for founders and investors to talk term sheets in the most egalitarian way possible—in a towel. For the truly brave, the **Day 0 Ice-Dipping** session in the Baltic Sea is a rite of passage that ensures your networking starts with a literal shock to the system.

## High-Profile Lineup

The 2026 speaker roster features "builders only," including:

- **Vlad Tenev:** Founder of Robinhood, discussing the next era of retail finance.
- **Luciana Lixandru:** General Partner at Sequoia Capital, sharing her thesis on European AI.
- **Markus Villig:** Founder & CEO of Bolt, reflecting on scaling a unicorn from the Nordics.
- **Anton Osika:** Founder of Lovable, detailing the rise of the autonomous developer.

Whether you're looking to close your Seed round or find the engineering talent that will build your MVP, Slush 2026 remains the most high-stakes, high-reward 48 hours in the tech calendar.

## Check how was it last year...
### Bits & Pretzels 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/innovation-with-a-bavarian-twist-bits-pretzels-2026/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T12:51:29.000Z
📅 **Date:** September 28-30, 2026  
📍 **Location:** Munich, Germany  
🏢 ****Venue:** [International Congress Center Messe](https://www.google.com/maps/place/ICM+-+International+Congress+Center+Messe+M%C3%BCnchen/@48.1366297,11.6899124,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x479e0a8c8eb2de87:0x370e57880ab5ab11!8m2!3d48.1366297!4d11.6924873!16s%2Fm%2F012dvctj?coh=277534&entry=tts&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI1MTIwOS4wIPu8ASoKLDEwMDc5MjA3MUgBUAM%3D&skid=602ef773-1e4e-44bd-9375-eb86c1262cbb&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://www.bitsandpretzels.com/?ref=therecursive.com) 

As autumn approaches, the global startup community is setting its sights on Munich for **Bits & Pretzels 2026**. Known as "Europe’s leading founders festival," this event uniquely blends high-level tech insights with the world-famous atmosphere of Oktoberfest. This year’s edition is particularly significant, as it doubles down on the human element of entrepreneurship in an increasingly automated world.

Taking place from **September 28 to 30, 2026**, the festival will host 7,500 curated attendees — ensuring that every handshake has the potential to turn into a partnership.

## The Festival Structure

Bits & Pretzels 2026 is designed to move from intense learning to informal, impactful networking:

- **10+ Content Stages:** Covering everything from the "Sovereign AI" movement to DeepTech and the future of SaaS.
- **The CIO AI Summit:** An invitation-only platform connecting startups with over 500 CIOs from Germany’s industrial "Hidden Champions."
- **The Pitch Corner:** A high-pressure arena where selected startups give 90-second presentations to a panel of top-tier VCs.
- **Academy & Masterclasses:** Deep-dive sessions led by "Unicorn" founders who have successfully scaled businesses to billion-dollar valuations.

### Why 2026 is Different: "Human After All"

In a landscape dominated by generative AI and digital transformation, the 2026 theme—**"Human After All"**—focuses on the resilience of the founder. The event will explore the intersection of mental health in tech, ethical leadership, and how European founders can maintain a competitive edge through "Human-Centric Innovation."

> "Bits & Pretzels isn't just about the tech—it's about the people behind it. We’re bringing back the 'human' in an era of algorithms."

### Liquid Networking

The highlight of Bits & Pretzels remains its third day, which moves from the exhibition halls to a dedicated tent at **Oktoberfest**.

- **Table Captains:** 400+ industry icons, successful founders, and veteran investors host individual tables.
- **Matchmaking:** Every attendee is guaranteed two pre-matched meeting sessions with people who can actually move the needle for their business.
- **The Atmosphere:** Business deals are famously closed over pretzels and beer, proving that the most important connections often happen outside the boardroom.

### High-Profile Lineup

While the full 2026 roster is being unveiled in waves, early headliners include visionary voices focused on European technological independence and industrial tech. Expect a mix of global tech icons (following the tradition of past speakers like Michelle Obama and Jeff Koons) and the CEOs of Europe's most aggressive scale-ups.

Whether you're looking to raise your Series A, scout for breakthrough AI solutions, or simply connect with the brightest minds in the DACH region, Bits & Pretzels 2026 is the ultimate destination for the entrepreneurial spirit.
### GITEX Global 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/gitex-global-2026-moves-to-expo-city/
Last updated: 2026-07-13T11:01:34.000Z
📅 **Date:** December 7-11, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Dubai, United Arab Emirates  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Dubai World Trade Center](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dubai+World+Trade+Centre/@25.2233448,55.2684803,15z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x3e5f42e912bc6305:0x1e486da5f44c6a2b!8m2!3d25.2233459!4d55.2869344!16zL20vMDdoOXc3?coh=277534&entry=tts&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI1MTIwOS4wIPu8ASoKLDEwMDc5MjA3MUgBUAM%3D&skid=c58899d2-5ee0-43ef-862d-349ce0ef29e1&ref=therecursive.com) & [Dubai Expo City](https://share.google/0wf5LbnA6PTq5Tjbc?ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://www.gitex.com/?ref=therecursive.com) 

**GITEX GLOBAL 2026** is being completely reimagined for its 46th edition. Moving from its traditional home to the sprawling **Dubai Exhibition Centre (DEC) at Expo City**, the event is scaling up to match the frontier platform status it has earned over the last four decades.

Taking place from **December 7 to 11, 2026**, this edition marks a historic $2.7 billion expansion, transforming the world’s largest tech and startup show into a multi-dimensional "Mega-City" of innovation.

## The Core of 2026 Edition

The 2026 edition unifies the entire tech ecosystem under one massive roof, integrating several specialized industry-defining shows:

- **Expand North Star:** The world's largest startup and investor meeting ground reunites with the main expo, creating a seamless pipeline from seed funding to enterprise scaling.
- **Physical AI – Robotics Park:** A new, dedicated arena for the embodiment of AI — showcasing the latest in humanoid robotics, autonomous industrial systems, and edge computing.
- **GITEX New Energy & Move:** Focusing on the Green-Tech revolution and the future of intelligent mobility, reflecting Dubai’s push toward a net-zero digital economy.
- **AI Everything:** Continuing its reign as the global epicenter for artificial intelligence, with a specific focus in 2026 on **Agentic AI** and sovereign data clouds.

### A New Iconic Home: Why DEC?

The move to the **Dubai Exhibition Centre** at Expo City is more than just a change of address; it’s a strategic expansion. The new venue offers nearly double the previous footprint, allowing for larger-scale live demonstrations of heavy-industry tech and urban air mobility.

> "GITEX GLOBAL 2026 represents a launch into a new dimension—a show unmatched in scale, now reimagined with the energy of a city built for the future."

### The Scale Summit & Networking

The week kicks off on **December 7** with the **GITEX Scale Summit**, a curated deep dive for C-level executives and policy makers.

Beyond the 40+ halls of hardware and software, the event leverages the **"Tech-cation"** vibe of December in Dubai. With cooler weather and the world-class infrastructure of Dubai South, the event is designed for high-value dealmaking. Over **60% of attendees** are expected to be C-level decision-makers, supported by the **Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy** to facilitate cross-border trade.

Whether you're looking to witness the birth of the next AI unicorn or explore the infrastructure of the world's future megacities, GITEX GLOBAL 2026 remains a must-visit.

---
### GITEX Europe 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/gitex-europe-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-26T13:43:25.000Z
📅 **Date:** June 30 - July 01, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Berlin, Germany  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Messe Berlin](https://share.google/qubMaD70yxamS3l72?ref=therecursive.com) /South Entrance

[Check the agenda! ](https://www.gitexeurope.com/?ref=therecursive.com) 

The global tech spotlight is shifting to Berlin as **GITEX Europe 2026** prepares to open its doors. As the European offshoot of the legendary GITEX Global in Dubai, this event has quickly established itself as the continent's most influential bridge between innovation, capital, and policy.

## The Pillars of Innovation

GITEX Europe is more than a trade show; it is a massive ecosystem comprised of several specialized "sub-events" that target the most critical sectors of the modern economy:

- **AI Everything Europe:** The crown jewel of the event, showcasing real-world AI applications ranging from industrial automation to ethical generative models.
- **GISEC Europe:** A dedicated platform for cybersecurity leaders to discuss "Europe's Digital Shield" and the hardening of the continent's digital backbone.
- **North Star Europe:** The ultimate stage for the startup community, featuring the world-renowned "Supernova Challenge" pitch battle.
- **GITEX Quantum Expo (GQX):** A look into the future of commercialized quantum computing and its impact on cryptography and materials science.

## Why 2026 is Different: Digital Sovereignty

In 2026, the central theme revolves around **European Tech Sovereignty**. With over **€200 billion** in AI investment mobilized across the EU, the event focuses on how Europe can lead in "Sovereign AI" while maintaining its rigorous standards for data privacy and ethics.

> "GITEX Europe is where Europe's digital future is built at scale, turning innovation into real-world impact through high-stakes partnerships."

### High-Profile Lineup

The 2026 speaker list features a powerhouse of policy makers and tech titans, including:

- **Dr. Karsten Wildberger:** Germany's Federal Minister for Digital Transformation.
- **Andrey Khusid:** Founder & CEO of Miro.
- **Stefan B. Wintels:** CEO of KfW, managing billions in startup-focused growth funds.
- **Ryan Foutty:** VP at Perplexity AI, representing the next wave of AI-native search.

## GITEX Connects

Beyond the flashy booths, the heart of the event lies in **GITEX Connects**, an executive concierge program that facilitates pre-arranged, high-impact meetings. With over **600 investors** representing more than **$1 trillion in assets under management**, the 2026 edition is geared toward closing deals and funding the next generation of European unicorns.

Whether you are a startup looking for your next funding round or a C-suite executive scouting for the latest in cybersecurity, GITEX Europe 2026 is the undisputed "place to be" this summer.

---
### Vedran Blagus Joins LAUNCHub Ventures
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/vedran-blagus-joins-launchub-ventures/
Last updated: 2026-05-26T08:11:44.000Z
The Western Balkans, once a whisper in the global startup conversation, are finding their voice. With countries like Croatia producing unicorns such as Infobip and Rimac Automobili, the narrative has shifted from risk to opportunity. 

Now, one of the most active investors in South-Eastern Europe is making its commitment concrete. [LAUNCHub Ventures](https://launchub.com/?ref=therecursive.com) has appointed Zagreb-based Vedran Blagus as its new associated partner, tasked with leading the firm’s charge across Croatia, Slovenia, and the Western Balkans. Blagus, who previously spent 8 years at South Central Ventures, brings deep regional expertise and a clear mandate: to make LAUNCHub the first-choice partner for the region’s best founders.

“We have known Vedran for many years, and he is undoubtedly one of the strongest VCs in the region. Our joint investment in SplxAI, and the entire experience of working together showed not only that we share the same conviction about the opportunity in Croatia but also that we are very aligned culturally. With Vedran joining the team, our ambition is clear: to make LAUNCHub the preferred first institutional cheque for the most ambitious founders coming out of the Western Balkans,” said Stanislav Sirakov, General Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures.

## A conviction forged in co-investment

For Blagus, the move to LAUNCHub Ventures was less a sudden leap and more a natural evolution of a long-standing relationship. The timing, he explains, was a perfect alignment of market opportunity and a proven track record of successful collaboration.

*“I have known the LAUNCHub team since 2017, when I started in the VC industry, and we have been in regular contact ever since,”* Blagus told The Recursive. That long-term dialogue, sharing deal flow and comparing notes, crystallised in March 2025 with a co-investment that would become a landmark deal for the region. *“The clearest example was SplxAI, where I backed the company from South Central Ventures alongside LAUNCHub leading the seed round. That deal - one of the fastest meaningful exits the region has seen, with* [*Zscaler acquiring SplxAI*](https://therecursive.com/zscaler-acquires-splxai-for-advanced-llm-security-and-ai-governance/?ref=therecursive.com) *later that same year - made it obvious that we read the region the same way and that we work well together.”*

The fund is no stranger to the area, with portfolio companies like SplxAI and [GlycanAge](https://therecursive.com/inflammaging-clinical-practice-glycanage/?ref=therecursive.com) in Croatia, and Mediately and Kriptomat in Slovenia and Serbia. But the SplxAI exit underscored a shared thesis. *“They have already deployed real capital here and built real conviction,”* Blagus adds. *“What was missing was a full-time person on the ground to deepen that presence.* 

## The ambition has shifted upward

Croatia’s ecosystem has matured significantly, and the proof points are stacking up. Before the recent successes, foundational stories like Photomath, Rimac, and Infobip set the template: you can build globally significant companies from the region. A common thread among their founders is a relentless focus on global markets from day one and deep technical expertise in their domain.

*“SplxAI - a homegrown AI security company going from seed to a major US acquisition within the same year - is exactly the kind of landmark outcome that signals the ecosystem has matured,”* Blagus points out. He also highlights GlycanAge, a Croatian company that has become a global category leader in longevity diagnostics.

This deep technical talent is precisely what LAUNCHub is targeting. The firm is making big bets on AI-native infrastructure, AI security, health and biotech, and B2B software for the European mid-market. The rise of AI has also raised the bar. *“Having a working product is just the starting point, not a reason to invest,”* he says. *“What matters now is evidence that someone actually needed this built—real customers paying full price and a clear reason this specific team is the right one to build it.”*

Yet, a crucial piece of infrastructure has been missing. *“The one gap that remains is a lack of regional funds willing to lead at Series A and B,”* he argues. *“Local founders too often have to fly to Berlin, London, or the US to get a credible Series A conversation going. This is exactly where LAUNCHub plays a role. Our co-investor network across leading European and US funds means we can warm up those rounds early and shorten the path to the next stage.”*

## ‘The first person founders in the Western Balkans call’

When asked what success looks like, Blagus’s focus is clear and founder-centric. He wants LAUNCHub to be recognized as the first serious institutional partner for ambitious technical founders across the entire region.

*“Founders should know what to expect from us: fast decisions, honest and direct answers, and a relationship built on being genuinely useful rather than on optics,”* he emphasizes. *“That means opening our network, helping with key hires, and providing candid feedback on product and strategy—even when it’s tough to hear.”*

This philosophy ladders up to a few concrete goals. *“First, build the kind of deal flow in Croatia, Slovenia and the Western Balkans where I see the best founders early. Second, lead or co-lead a handful of investments I genuinely believe can achieve abnormal outcomes.”*

*“And the one I care about most,”* he concludes, *“I want to be the first person founders in this region call when they are looking for funding, or when they need help scaling their company. Not the third or fourth - the first.”* 

It’s a bold statement of intent, signalling a desire to be more than just a name on a cap table, but a true partner in building a company. It’s this deep integration into the ecosystem that Blagus believes will define LAUNCHub’s presence and impact in the Western Balkans for years to come.
### Meet DSS: The Team Behind BP, European Banks, and Bulgaria’s Education System
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/meet-dss-the-team-behind-bp-european-banks-and-bulgarias-education-system/
Last updated: 2026-05-30T11:09:13.000Z
Somewhere inside the customer service infrastructure of a major European telecom, or running beneath the onboarding pipeline of a bank, or loaded on the school device of every student in the Bulgarian public school system, there is a system that DSS built. The company's name does not appear on the interface. It rarely does. That invisibility is an accurate description of what serious enterprise technology work looks like: load-bearing, trusted, and operating quietly at scale.

[DSS](https://dss.bg/?ref=therecursive.com) (short for Digital and Software Solutions) is a Sofia-based IT consultancy and product company specialising in ServiceNow implementations (ServiceNow being the enterprise platform that large organisations use to coordinate workflows, automate processes, and manage internal operations) digital transformation, and identity verification technology. Several of their projects have touched hundreds of thousands of users. Some of the government systems they have contributed to serve millions.

The company started with one person and one contract.

## The first client was BP

The founder Plamen Nakov launched DSS as a single ServiceNow consultant. His first engagement was with one of the world's largest oil and gas companies - [British Petroleum (BP)](https://www.bp.com/?ref=therecursive.com). Building a reputation inside an organisation that size, without institutional weight or brand recognition behind you, requires a particular discipline. It also requires a clear answer to a question most IT companies never ask themselves.

> *"Enterprise clients don't need another vendor,"* the founder says. *"They need a partner who can think with them, not just execute for them. DSS was never going to win on headcount or brand recognition, so we built our identity around flexibility and tailored solutions. We move fast, we adapt, and decision-makers can actually reach us directly. That's rare in this industry."*

The distinction between partner and vendor is easy to claim. It is harder to sustain across engagements with organisations as different as an oil major, a European bank, and a national government ministry. What makes it credible at DSS is partly the consistency of delivery, and partly the mechanism that delivery creates: referrals. Word of mouth is the company's primary pipeline. That means every engagement is also a reputation asset, and the discipline required to protect it shapes how DSS operates at every level.

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/P1039230-1024x692.jpg)

Plamen Nakov, CEO (left) and Georgi Kotov, IT Director (right)

## The telecom that copy-pasted itself

The clearest illustration of what thinking with a client actually means came during a recent engagement with a major European telecom and system integrator. The client had run thorough internal workshops, gathered requirements across all relevant departments, and produced a detailed scope document for a ServiceNow CSM deployment. CSM, or Customer Service Management, is the platform layer that routes customer interactions, manages cases, and coordinates service teams.

When DSS reviewed the scope, they found a problem that no amount of workshop thoroughness had surfaced.

> *"The entire approach was a digital copy-paste of their existing processes,"* Nakov explains. *"No optimisation, no rethinking, just the same workflows moved into a new system. In the context of ServiceNow today, where AI capabilities are deeply embedded into the platform, that was a significant missed opportunity."*

DSS stepped in and reframed the conversation. The question they brought back to the client was specific: what if this implementation actually reduced manual effort, and let AI handle a significant portion of customer requests? The scope changed. The value delivered at go-live was materially different from what the original brief would have produced.

This moment - arriving at a well-documented plan and asking what its assumptions are actually optimising for - is what DSS means when they describe seeing what the client cannot yet see, a function of technical depth, yes. It also requires the willingness to have an uncomfortable conversation early enough to matter.

## **The client this does not work for**

That same willingness means DSS is clear about when an engagement is unlikely to produce real value and willing to say so before the contract is signed.

> *"The single thing we look for is a genuine willingness to adapt,"* the founder says. *"Not just openness to new tools, but openness to rethinking how things are done."*

The Bulgarian Ministry of Education is an example of an institution that has demonstrated that willingness in practice. DSS has delivered two significant projects for the Ministry: an e-learning platform built during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Bulgarian schools needed remote instruction infrastructure at speed, and an integrated software system now in active use across the full national curriculum, from first to twelfth grade.

Every student in the Bulgarian public school system works within the second of those. Educational systems are designed to be conservative in their content, the founder notes, and appropriately so. How that content reaches a generation raised on smartphones and constant digital stimulation is a different question entirely, and one the Ministry has engaged with seriously.

On the other side of that line are organisations that arrive at a consultancy engagement with a conclusion already in place.

> *"Where we're not the right fit? Organisations that are looking for a vendor to validate a decision they've already made. Or those who treat technology as a box to check rather than a lever for real change. That kind of engagement doesn't produce value for anyone, and we'd rather say so early."*

A disqualifier stated this plainly is itself a form of positioning. It signals, precisely and in advance, what kind of conversation clients are walking into.

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/P1038575-1024x683.jpg)

DSS leadership team

## The product that took five years

In 2019, DSS delivered a document processing project for a bank. The brief required digitising hundreds of thousands of paper identification documents: low-quality scanned images, with noise, overlaid signatures, mixed content. The system had to locate the document within the image, crop it, run optical character recognition, extract and validate the data, and feed it into a downstream processing pipeline. With the technology available at the time, this was genuinely hard. They delivered it.

That project quietly became the foundation of aIDentix, DSS's proprietary KYC and AML solution. KYC, Know Your Customer, and AML, Anti-Money Laundering, are the regulatory compliance processes that financial institutions, fintechs, and telecoms are required to run when onboarding new users. Extracting and validating identity data from a document is the first step in any KYC workflow. DSS had built that capability years before they had a product name for it.

aIDentix launched as a standalone offering in 2024\. The founder does not soften the timeline.

> *"We delivered the original project in 2019 and only committed to building aIDentix as a standalone product in 2024\. That's a gap we learned from. The core technology is strong. The focus now is on speed to market and positioning it where it belongs: in the hands of fintechs, banks, and telecoms who need a serious, compliant, flexible identity solution."*

Five years between a working technical capability and a market-ready product is an unusual rhythm in an industry that rewards speed above most other things. It is also consistent with how DSS operates: the same honesty they apply to client briefs, applied to themselves.

## What Eastern Europe built

Bulgaria has over two decades of sustained investment in technical and computer science education, producing one of the strongest software development markets in Europe. That foundation is increasingly recognised in Western European procurement decisions, though the pace of recognition has been uneven.

The founder argues that the more significant factor is something harder to programme.

*"Because of where Eastern Europe sits historically and politically, our development trajectory was different from the West's. That created a perception, still lingering in some quarters, that the East is behind, less capable, less sophisticated. We know that's wrong. Every Eastern European professional knows that."*

The gap between that perception and the actual technical capability it underestimates has become, for DSS and for others building out of the region, a driver rather than a constraint.

> *"We don't have the luxury of complacency. We work harder to prove ourselves, and we bring an intensity and hunger to technical problem-solving that is genuinely difficult to manufacture in markets where success has been assumed for decades."*

He closes the thought simply.

*"That's not a disadvantage. That's an edge."*
### Green Transition Forum 6.0
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/green-transition-forum-6-0-europes-next-chapter/
Last updated: 2026-07-13T11:01:37.000Z
**Powered by Dir.bg, the Green Transition Forum has evolved into one of Europe’s most influential platforms, where political leaders, European institutions, business, and global partners come together to shape the continent’s transformation.*  
  
📅 **Date:** June 1-5, 2026  
🕗 ****Time:** 9 am  
📍 **Location:** Sofia, Bulgaria  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Sofia Event Center](https://maps.app.goo.gl/c9GycifDD3xLvEzV9?ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://greentransition.bg/en?ref=therecursive.com) 

The Green Transition Forum has established itself as a leading European platform for strategic dialogue, bringing together representatives of European institutions, national and local authorities, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and academia. 

Under the theme **“Europe’s Next Chapter – Competitive. Innovative. Secure.”**, this year’s edition will focus on key topics such as sustainable growth, energy transition, technological innovation, security and competitiveness. The event provides a valuable platform for dialogue, knowledge exchange and the development of strategic partnerships across the region.

Special attention in the program is devoted to regional cooperation in Southeastern Europe, including topics related to energy and transport connectivity, investments, and the development of strategic projects.

## Distinguished speakers

The forum will also feature ministers, Members of the European Parliament, senior European Commission officials and leading executives from across the region. Among the confirmed participants are:

- **Iliana Iotova**, Vice President of the Republic of Bulgaria
- **Apostolos Tzitzikostas**, European Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism
- **Victor Negrescu**, Vice-President of the European Parliament
- **Enrico Letta**, Former Prime Minister of Italy
- **Philippe Aghion**, Nobel Laureate in Economics (2025)
- **Mo Gawdat**, technology visionary and former executive at Google X
- **Kata Tüttő**, President of the European Committee of the Regions
- **Jessika Roswall**, European Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy

## Programme highlights

The forum will offer a comprehensive five-day programme structured around key strategic themes for Europe’s future.

Participants will have the opportunity to explore topics including:

- Competitiveness and industrial transformation;
- Energy transition and infrastructure;
- Regional development and EU enlargement;
- Climate policy, circular economy and sustainable finance;
- Innovation, artificial intelligence and future growth sectors.

High-level discussions, round tables and interactive sessions will provide insights into the challenges and opportunities shaping Europe’s economic and sustainability agenda.

The National Association of Municipalities in the Republic of Bulgaria (NAMRB) encourages the participation of municipal representatives, who will have the opportunity to attend all days of the forum. Special emphasis is placed on 4 June – the day dedicated to regions, cohesion policy, financing, energy efficiency, and sustainable urban development, organized jointly with the European Committee of the Regions.

The forum will take place at Sofia Event Center, and registration for participation is open until 20 May 2026.

---
### The Recursive CEE Forum: We Don't Need More Talk About "Potentials"
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-recursive-cee-forum-2026-top-takeaways-on-cross-border-collaboration-scaling/
Last updated: 2026-06-01T08:28:17.000Z
**The Recursive CEE Forum 2026** [returned to ViennaUP](https://the-recursive-cee-forum.notion.site/?source=copy%5Flink) with a clear thesis: CEE doesn’t need *more* talk about potential — it needs more cross-border *execution*. Building on last year’s strong first edition, the 2026 Forum had even more hands-on conversations, targeted introductions, and topics spanning scaling, market expansion, tech transfer, corporate & startup collaborations, the future of investing, and practical implementation in energy and AI.

In partneship with [weXelerate](https://wexelerate.com/?ref=therecursive.com) in Vienna, the day brought founders, investors, corporates, and ecosystem leaders to compare notes on **what’s working across the region** — **and what still needs rebuilding**, from go-to-market fundamentals to the bridge between research and venture outcomes.

## Setting the tone

The day opened with remarks from the organizers and host partners, framing the Forum as a platform for collaboration across ecosystems, not a one-off conference moment. **Teodor Antonio Georgiev** (CEO, The Recursive) opened alongside **Awi Lifshitz** (CEO, weXelerate) and **Christian Frey** (Director of International Business, Vienna Business Agency).

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSCF6947.jpg)

Photo Credit: Juliyan Bratanov - The Recursive CEE Forum 2026

Then came a “Regional Spotlight” designed to quickly surface what each delegation is building — and what it needs next. Speakers included **Vladimir Milovanović** (SPIRIT Slovenia), **Nebojša Bjelotomić** (Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Serbia / Center for Digital Transformation), **Michal Veselý** (JIC Brno), **Robert Somogyi** (Hungarian Innovation Agency/NIU), **Inga Ulmane** (LIAA), and **Viktor Goussev** (Sofia Investment Agency).

## Keynotes: scaling, energy execution, and “physical AI”

A keynote on *Physical AI under EU Regulation* by **Emily K. Genatowski** (AI Researcher & Digital Culture Expert, University of Vienna) brought the audience into the practical reality of Europe’s regulatory and societal context for AI — especially as systems move from software into embodied, real-world environments.

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSCF7120.jpg)

Emily Kate Genatowski with her robot Tova | Photo Credit: Juliyan Bratanov - The Recursive CEE Forum 2026

In *The Logic of Scaling*, **Gerd Bommer** (Founder-First Investor & Startup Advisor) offered a systems-first view of growth: the moment when founders must evolve from instinct-led speed into repeatable architecture — building the “engine” rather than being it.

On the energy track, **Daniel Schaub Menares** and **Rahul Mishra** (Co-Founders, The Energy Bridge) delivered an overview of energy innovation across CEE, teeing up the later conversation about what it takes to scale in a sector where deployment complexity is the real bottleneck. In the panel following the keynote **Jelisaveta Pavlovic** (Senior Energy Expert, OMV), **Nikolaj Candellari** (Head of Market Intelligence, Cybergrid), and **Zoltan Papp** (Founder & CEO, EV.analytica), moderated by **Rahul Mishra** (Co-Founder, The Energy Bridge) concluded that the next edge for the region will come from system integration and collaboration, not just isolated breakthroughs.

And in one of the most execution-forward stories of the day, **Michael “Misha” Kowatschew** (Founder, Heizma) shared lessons from building a €20M-revenue energy company in 24 months — an example of how operational excellence, not just product vision, becomes the differentiator in climate and energy markets.

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSCF7436.jpg)

Photo Credit: Juliyan Bratanov - The Recursive CEE Forum 2026

## Panels: fewer myths, more mechanisms

In the panel “Sharing Tech Transfer Know-How” we tackled the often-romanticized idea that a patent plus a PhD automatically equals a venture-scale company — especially in CEE, where tech transfer frequently fails at the translation layer between research, commercialization, and capital. Panelists were **David Photien** (Founding Partner, SCE Freiraum Ventures) and **Nina Meglič** (Project Coordinator, ReCatalyst), moderated by **Teodora Atanasova** (Senior Editor, The Recursive).

A key takeaway from the discussion was the **need to think beyond national ecosystems and adopt a more pan-European approach** to tech transfer, investment, and startup scaling. As David Photien noted, investors and venture builders are increasingly exploring cross-border opportunities. Nina Meglič shared insights into how deep tech commercialization is evolving in Slovenia. She discussed how limited market size and slower-moving structures can create obstacles, but also foster tighter collaboration between researchers, startups, and public institutions.

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSCF7177.jpg)

Photo Credit: Juliyan Bratanov - The Recursive CEE Forum 2026

In the panel “What We Miss About Good GTM Strategies” we had a direct reality check on go-to-market: the fundamentals founders postpone until the runway shortens. Panelists included **Nikola Kožuljević** (Founder & CEO, SYMAR), **Tsvetoslava Kapatsinova** (Founder, GrowDACH), and **Amore Philip** (Founder, AOPR), moderated by **Kristiana Kuneva** (Chief Business Development Officer, The Recursive).

What we are missing? A go-getter mindset and impactful storytelling are key to scale successfully. The panelists discussed why **CEE founders need to become more adaptive, take bigger risks**, and build greater confidence when entering international markets. A major theme throughout the conversation was that strong storytelling is at the core of every successful GTM strategy. **Founders must clearly communicate what they build and why it matters**, but in a way that their story resonates with the audience they tend to target . From public relations and market positioning to understanding new audiences, the panel emphasized that the ability to tell your very own story in a compelling way is often what unlocks global growth opportunities.

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSCF7303.jpg)

Photo Credit: Juliyan Bratanov - The Recursive CEE Forum 2026

## Realities of AI implementation and corporate-startup collaborations

In the panel “The Reality of AI Implementation”, the conversation was deliberately positioned away from hype: what happens when AI meets messy data, real customers, and budget constraints. Panelists were **Christian Tauber** (Co-Founder & CEO, NEOALP), **Kevin Cobaj** (Co-Founder & CTO, Synaps), and **Gašpar Nagy** (Founder & CEO, [Techmates.io](http://techmates.io/?ref=therecursive.com)), moderated by **Ana Marija Kostanić** (Editor-in-Chief, The Recursive).

While many early-stage founders prioritize rapid deployment and become wedded to untested solutions, Kevin’s experience with **Synaps** offered a reality check: the team discarded seven different versions before settling on their final product. Complementing this, **Christian Tauber** explored the risks and rewards of building in uncharted territory where your job is also on educating clients, while **Gašpar** provided a roadmap for navigating complex legacy-code transformations.

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSCF6962.jpg)

A pivotal part of the conversation focused on a classic architectural trade-off: **Should a company build for perfection or for immediate utility, knowing the tech will evolve in six months?** The panelists reached a clear consensus: tech updates are inevitable for any digital product that wants to stay relevant. Success lies in choosing adequate foundational stack from day one, and most importantly, designing an architecture modular enough to integrate new iterations without compromising the core product framework.

We also took an applied look at corporate–startup collaboration beyond theory, featuring **Reinis Skorovs** (Head of IoT, LMT), **Andreas Muehlberger** (Strategic Partner Manager, Infineon Technologies), **Aleksandar Milutinović** (CTO, Wellpet), and **Alfredo Arreba** (Co-Founder & CEO, Epona AI Labs). Wellpet and Epona AI Labs shared more about how they moved from a Proof of Concept (POC) to a real-world pilot integrating solutions from Infineon and LMT, which saved them months of development. While Infineon and LMT shared more about their [new mentorship program](https://therecursive.com/lmt-infineon-latvian-austrian-iot-mentorship-program/?ref=therecursive.com) designed to help startups and product companies accelerate the development of IoT devices that combine edge AI with low-power cellular connectivity — and what are they looking in startups that want to join.

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSCF7257.jpg)

Photo Credit: Juliyan Bratanov - The Recursive CEE Forum 2026

## Set for the future

With AI shifting the ground under entire categories, the panel “Investing for the Future” brought three VCs into a practical debate on resilience, specialization, and how to “future-proof” portfolios. Panelists were **Nina Dremelj** (Managing Partner, Vesna Deep-Tech Fund), **Radim Kocourek** (Managing Partner, JIC Ventures), and **Annu Gmeiner** (Venture Partner, Xista Ventures), moderated by **Fergus O’Sullivan** (Editor, Startup Kitchen).

**Maximilian Schausberger**’s keynote added a corporate-VC lens to the day, grounding the “future of investing” conversation in how banks and large incumbents actually engage with high-growth tech. As Managing Director of Elevator Ventures (the CVC backed by Raiffeisen Bank International and its Austrian entities), Schausberger was drawing know-how from his experience working with and sitting on boards across multiple portfolio companies. He emphasized that the most durable outcomes come when **venture returns and strategic outcomes are designed together** — and when corporates build internal teams capable of supporting founders through procurement, pilots, and market access (not just investment).​\[caption id="attachment\_399531" align="alignnone" width="4896"\]

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSCF7492.jpg)

Maximilan Schausberger | Photo Credit: Juliyan Bratanov - The Recursive CEE Forum 2026

Looking a decade ahead, the now staple ecosystem panel of the Forum zoomed out to ecosystem design: how should we manage talent, policy agility, cross-border investments, and regional competitiveness. Panelists included **Marija Janjušević** (Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Serbia / Center for Digital Transformation), **Viktor Goussev** (Sofia Investment Agency), and **Inga Ulmane** (LIAA), moderated by **Teodor Antonio Georgiev** (CEO, The Recursive).

## Wrapping the day with masterclasses & pitches

Beyond the main stages, the Forum also ran hands-on sessions aimed at operator-level takeaways.

- **Masterclass: Business Location Austria and Vienna – Your Gateway to DACH and beyond!** featured Christian Frey (Vienna Business Agency) and Birgit Reiter-Braunwieser (Austrian Business Agency) on location factors, GTM considerations, and scaling support instruments for companies expanding into Austria.
- **Masterclass: How to Spot Emerging Trends Early** with Uros Rakic focused on weak-signal detection and foresight workflows — turning early indicators (patents, niche communities, research) into a repeatable trend-radar process.
- **Workshop: Rethinking Digital Identification in the Age of AI** with Plamen Nakov (Founder & General Manager, aIDentix) explored modern identity system vulnerabilities (deepfakes, synthetic identities, wallet compromise) and what secure, modular identity orchestration could look like under eIDAS 2.0 and EU Digital Identity Wallet direction.

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSCF7544.jpg)

Nebojsa Bjelotomic | Photo Credit: Juliyan Bratanov - The Recursive CEE Forum 2026

- **Serbia’s Center for Digital Transformation** representatives also had a presentation about **the urgency of scaling Serbia’s startup ecosystem**. It covered the country’s innovation infrastructure, founder profiles and key challenges (particularly around financing and talent), available funding programs across different startup growth stages, and Serbia’s active push for internationalization.

The day’s networking logic culminated in **Pitch & Match**, introducing 13 startups across multiple sectors and countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Serbia, Slovenia), reinforcing the Forum’s core aim: make cross-border discovery easier, faster, and more intentional.

What made the Recursive CEE Forum 2026 feel different was the insistence on mechanisms over mythology. Whether the topic was scaling, AI implementation, corporate collaboration, or energy deployment, the recurring message was consistent: CEE’s opportunity is real, but the next decade belongs to ecosystems that operationalize collaboration — across borders, across institutions, and across capital stacks.

![](https://therecursive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSCF7396.jpg)

Photo Credit: Juliyan Bratanov - The Recursive CEE Forum 2026
### Big Pi Ventures Leads $30 Million Series B Into Construction Robotics Firm
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/big-pi-ventures-leads-30-million-series-b-into-construction-robotics-firm/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T18:18:58.000Z
Big Pi Ventures, a multi-stage technology investor with a Greek nexus, stepped forward as lead investor in August Robotics' latest financing round. The syndicate draws in existing backers Blackbird, Skip Capital, Tanarra, and Future Family Office, alongside new US construction-specialist investor GS Futures.

**Panos Metsis**, **Partner at Big Pi Ventures**, framed the investment around infrastructure urgency: "*August Robotics is a globally category-leading business addressing a key bottleneck in digital infrastructure build out via applying technological innovation to the physical world. Its platform approach has a potentially profound impact in accelerating AI throughput globally*."

Big Pi's growth fund concentrates on international companies with an existing or new Greek nexus — a criterion August Robotics satisfies both through its forthcoming Athens hub and through founder **Alex Wyatt**'s own Greek family heritage from Kastellorizo. The firm operates two primary vehicles: a **€48 million early-stage fund** and the newly launched [**€130 million Big Pi Growth I**](https://therecursive.com/big-pi-ventures-130m-growth-fund-greek-tech/?ref=therecursive.com), which represents Southeast Europe's first tech growth equity fund.

## The impact of the drilling robots

Founded in 2017 by Wyatt, August Robotics has spent nearly a **decade building a modular robotics platform** that ingests project plans, localises robots on site, executes tasks autonomously, coordinates multiple robots as a fleet, and detects and rectifies errors in real time — all on in-house R&D. The company now operates across seven hubs in the US, Asia, Australia, and Europe.

**August Robotics runs two product lines**. Its first robot, Lionel, deploys autonomous floor-marking fleets for exhibitions and large indoor spaces; Lionel has marked more than 300 million square feet across clients on five continents.

The company's newer offering — autonomous downward-drilling robots for large prefabricated construction sites — targets AI data center construction and launched in strategic partnership with Stanley Black & Decker's DEWALT brand. These drilling robots have already run across hyperscale construction environments in the US and Europe.

Wyatt described **the impact of the drilling robots** in concrete terms: "*In recent months, our drilling robots have fundamentally changed what is possible in data center construction, compressing construction schedules and helping our customers to bring critical infrastructure online faster than ever before*."

With the Series B, he added, the company will "*accelerate the development of the next generation of robots that automate dirty, dangerous, and dull tasks across the economy*."

## Athens hub anchors European expansion

A portion of the new funding, channelled with Big Pi's active involvement, will develop an **Athens hub** **— August Robotics' second continental European base after Düsseldorf**.

The hub will handle customer service, robot maintenance, deployment, and field engineering across the EMEA region, drawing on Greece's technical talent pool.

"*Greece stands out in its region in terms of engineering talent and a supportive ecosystem geared towards technological innovation and business success*," Wyatt said. "Athens was therefore a natural choice, also as a result of its strategic geographic location at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East, two key growth regions for our robotics business."

Beyond Athens, **the Series B will fund production scale-up for existing robots**, strengthen the company's AI capabilities, and support the development of new robotic products for customers in construction, exhibition, and infrastructure. A new Data and AI R&D centre will open in Melbourne, extending August Robotics' footprint to seven hubs across four regions.

**Rick Baker, Partner and Co-Founder at Blackbird**, pointed to the long arc behind the platform: "*Alex set out to build a platform every future robot could be built from, something most robotics companies never attempt. It took years of patient, mostly invisible work, including holding his team together through the COVID years when exhibitions shut down globally. We backed him through all of it, because the conviction was never in question*."

Metsis supported that view, noting that Big Pi's growth fund works to "*actively support exceptional, thought-leading and proven founders like Alex realize their vision*."

With capital deployed across seven hubs and drilling robots already running on hyperscale sites, August Robotics enters its next phase with both the funding and the geographic infrastructure to push further into data center construction and adjacent workflows, and with a Greek-led investor now anchoring its European chapter.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: New Deep Tech VC Launches
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-260522/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T18:37:34.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Beyond the €4.5B Boom: Can Serbia's Tech Ecosystem Navigate its Own Success?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/serbia-tech-ecosystem-ict-exports-2025/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T17:55:28.000Z
Serbia's technology sector is no longer an emerging story; it is a full-blown economic force. The country’s information and communication technology (ICT) services exports rocketed to a record €4.552 billion in 2025, marking a tenfold increase since 2012 and cementing its status as the nation's largest net exporting industry. 

This explosive growth, fuelled by a deep talent pool and strategic government backing, has propelled Serbia onto the global stage, particularly in high-performance sectors like gaming, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. 

Yet, as the ecosystem matures, it faces a complex set of challenges, from navigating geopolitical rivalries to addressing the structural limitations of operating outside the European Union.

[![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/2026/05/cee_forum-26-1.png)](https://viennaup.flave.world/user/events/the-recursive-cee-forum/public?ref=therecursive.com) 

****The Recursive CEE Forum** returns to ViennaUP 2026 on 20 May, continuing its mission for a second year: turning connections into outcomes and strengthening Central and Eastern Europe’s role in shaping Europe’s tech future. ****Check agenda** [****here**](https://the-recursive-cee-forum.notion.site/?ref=therecursive.com)****.**

Participants can expect more interactive formats on tech transfer, scaling, market expansion and AI integration designed to encourage active engagement, data-driven insights into the CEE region’s innovation performance and growth trajectory, and curated matchmaking opportunities that connect founders and investors with clear intent.

****Get your ticket with 20% discount. Use code: TR20**

[Grab ticket here! ](https://viennaup.flave.world/user/events/the-recursive-cee-forum/public?ref=therecursive.com) 

## A state-fuelled push into the fourth industrial revolution

At the heart of Serbia's digital ascent is a concerted government strategy to prioritise digitalisation. Since 2017, Belgrade has invested heavily in building a formidable tech infrastructure. A cornerstone of this effort is the state-owned Data Center in Kragujevac, which houses a latest-generation Nvidia supercomputer and, as of late 2025, is set to receive a second. This push is part of a broader ambition to create the largest supercomputer cluster in Southeast Europe by 2027.

This infrastructure is the bedrock for the country’s aggressive pivot towards Artificial Intelligence. The government has adopted a new "Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence for 2025–2030," backed by over $70 million in investment. 

This focus has yielded results, with Serbia jumping 18 places to 39th globally in the 2025 Government AI Readiness Index. Institutes like BioSense, focused on agritech, and the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR Serbia), a collaboration with the World Economic Forum, are channeling this ambition into practical applications in biotechnology and healthcare. 

The challenge, however, remains a lack of specific legal regulation for AI, creating a grey area of legal, ethical, and security questions that the private and public sectors must navigate.

## Maturing markets and the search for the next big hit

The vibrancy of Serbia's tech scene is most visible in its gaming and blockchain sectors. The country's gaming industry generated €222 million in revenue in 2025, with domestic studios like the U.S.-owned Nordeus and 3Lateral leading a pack of over 70 companies. 

But the sector is showing signs of a "calm growth" phase, mirroring global trends. While revenues are up, the number of new game releases has halved as studios pivot towards more complex, long-term projects. 

The industry is also contending with a shrinking workforce, employing 300 fewer professionals in 2025 than the previous year, according to a [report](https://sga.rs/en/news/fewest-games-released-highest-revenue-ever-read-the-new-report-on-serbian-video-game-industry-for-2025/%29.?ref=therecursive.com) from the Serbian Games Association.

Meanwhile, Belgrade has firmly established itself as a regional hub for Web3\. 

With a legal framework for digital assets in place since 2021 and its accession to the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) in 2025, the country is fostering a supportive environment for FinTech and blockchain innovation. 

The ecosystem boasts 65 deep tech companies that have collectively raised over $73 million, with blockchain monitoring firm Tenderly leading the charge after a $40M Series B round. 

Still, the ecosystem needs more late-stage success stories to create a ripple effect of reinvestment and mentorship. 

## Caught between East and West

Serbia's strategic position has made its tech sector a stage for geopolitical competition. The United States remains its largest ICT trading partner, with giants like Oracle, Microsoft, and Rivian establishing major R&D centers. 

Yet, Chinese influence is expanding rapidly. Huawei is a significant contractor for state-owned enterprises, providing cloud infrastructure for the Kragujevac Data Center and surveillance technology for "Safe City" initiatives. 

Following President Xi Jinping’s 2024 visit, the two nations signed multiple agreements to deepen cooperation in digital transformation and AI.

This dynamic creates a complex operating environment. 

U.S. companies often raise concerns about the transparency of public procurement processes, arguing that they can be biased or circumvented through government-to-government agreements. While Serbian technical managers often prefer U.S. technology for its quality and life-cycle costs, the political winds can blow in another direction. 

For Serbian founders, this geopolitical tug-of-war is compounded by the country's non-EU status, which complicates efforts to attract international venture capital. 

Since investors prefer the regulated and familiar environments of the EU or the US, Serbian startups often have to register foreign entities to raise significant rounds. 

As Serbia continues its impressive technological sprint, its greatest challenge may be building a bridge between its local ambitions and the global capital and markets it needs to truly compete.
### Inside the Future of AI in Banking with DSK Bank
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/inside-the-future-of-ai-in-banking-with-dsk-bank/
Last updated: 2026-06-15T11:42:43.000Z
In this episode of The Recursive Podcast, we dive into one of the hottest topics in tech right now — AI in banking. Our host Dilyana Haralanova speaks with Valentin Stepanovich, Head of Machine Learning Platform at DSK Bank, about where he leads ML and AI innovation initiatives. 

They explore how generative AI is transforming customer service, fraud prevention, software engineering, and financial operations inside modern banks, and more.

💡 **How AI Is Transforming Customer Service in Banking:** Why banks are replacing traditional rule-based chatbots with AI assistants, how customer interactions are becoming more natural, and why Valentine believes customer service will be the biggest area AI fundamentally changes. 

💡 **The Real Risks of AI in Finance:** From AI-generated fraud and identity theft to GDPR, security layers, hallucinations, and the EU AI Act — the conversation unpacks the biggest challenges banks face when deploying generative AI safely. 

💡 **Why AI Isn’t Replacing Jobs (Yet):** Valentin shares why AI is changing the nature of work rather than eliminating jobs, how engineers are adapting to AI-assisted development, and the surprising rise of candidates using AI live during job interviews.
### Money20/20 Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/money20-20-europe-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-26T13:53:53.000Z
**Money20/20 Europe isn’t just another industry event. It’s where historymakers gather to define what’s next. The energy is unmatched, the ideas are game-changing, and the opportunities? Limitless.*  
  
📅 **Date:** June 2-4, 2026  
📍 **Location:** Amsterdam, Netherlands  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Amsterdam RAI](https://maps.app.goo.gl/yrBFgJDpP1qHTseJ7?ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://europe.money2020.com/?ref=therecursive.com) 

Money 20/20 Europe 2026 is among the biggest and leading fintech industry exhibitions that will take place from June 2 to 4, 2026, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It is a place where the top-level executives, investors, leaders, and speakers will be. 

The **Money 20/20 Amsterdam, 2026** will have professionals from almost everywhere across the globe, from the top fintech firms to the initial stage companies and also the startups.

The major highlights and focused parts of Money 20/20 Europe 2026 will be: payments, banking, fintech, financial services, and others.

The exhibition will offer an ample number of opportunities for exchanging information, connecting, and learning to help the people at the **Money 20/20 Europe 2026 Trade Fair** improve, advance, and meet their objectives.

## Why should you join Money 20/20 Europe 2026?

- The **Money 20/20 Amsterdam 2026** will display the countless innovations and discoveries in the sector.
- The exhibition will act as a platform for retailers and prospective customers to network and collaborate.
- **Money 20/20 Europe 2026 Trade Fair** will also include a large conference program that will have prominent industry speakers.
- The variety and uniqueness of the exhibition will allow the exhibitors to achieve their primary goal at [**Money 20/20 Europe 2026**](https://europe.money2020.com/?ref=therecursive.com)
- There will be around 7,500 visitors from 90 countries, including business owners, decision-makers and buyers.
- The expert speakers at the exhibition will be holding an educational session on subjects like innovation and plans.

---
### PODIM 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/podim-2027/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T10:05:31.000Z
📅 **Date:** May 11-13, 2026  
🕗 ****Time:** 9 am  
📍 **Location:** Maribor, Slovenia  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Maribox](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Maribox/@46.5567153,15.650134,17z/data=!3m1!5s0x476f7707e8de0e7d:0x8c512431f313882a!4m6!3m5!1s0x476f77a802695381:0x8d4622f342a0d002!8m2!3d46.5567188!4d15.6530546!16s%2Fg%2F11g9k1td%5Ft?entry=tts&ref=therecursive.com) & [Narodni dom](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kulturno+prireditveni+center+narodni+dom+Maribor/@46.5575631,15.646655,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x476f77a8694c6ac3:0xfb5dc96c05dc8fdf!8m2!3d46.5575631!4d15.6492299!16s%2Fg%2F11gf9b0k5p?entry=tts&ref=therecursive.com)

[Check the agenda! ](https://podim.org/?ref=therecursive.com) 

This year’s program is built around carefully curated blocks that reflect the **realities of building companies in today’s fast-moving, highly competitive global tech landscape**. From unfiltered founder stories and Europe’s position in the global tech race to AI, fintech, deep tech, and hands-on builder strategies—each block is designed to deliver concrete value, not theory.

### Europe’s Leading VC Funds & Speakers Confirm Attendance at Podim 2026

Podim 2026 has already confirmed an exceptional lineup of Europe’s and global venture capital funds, reinforcing its role as the leading startup and tech event in the Alps-Adriatic region.

Confirmed investors include **QED Investors, Credo Ventures, Silicon Gardens Fund, South Central Ventures, GapMinder VC, 3VC**, and many more **managing hundreds of millions — and in some cases billions — in assets.**

Podim 2026 also unveiled its first wave of speakers, bringing together globally scaling founders, unicorn-backing investors, AI operators, and key European ecosystem leaders. 

The lineup includes leaders from companies such a**s Sofascore, QED Investors, and EU-INC, European Startup Network**, alongside founders who have **scaled to millions of users and raised nine-figure funding rounds.** 

The announcement signals a highly curated, execution-focused program built for serious founders, investors, and operators. With over 30 VC funds already confirmed and 600+ startup applications submitted, momentum for Podim 2026 is already accelerating.

### Interested to attend PODIM? *The Recursive members have a discount!* 

---

## Check how it was last year...
### Panathēnea 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/podim-2026-copy/
Last updated: 2026-05-28T10:38:49.000Z
**Bringing together the ecosystems of* ***technology, art, and startups** *, the Panathēnea festival features discussions, exhibitions, inspirational talks, competitions, curated networking, and social gatherings, culminating in an epic street party below the Acropolis.*  
  
📅 **Date:** May 27-29, 2026  
📍 **Location**: Athens, Greece  
🏢 ****Venue:** [Zappeion Megaron](https://goo.gl/maps/h8owrWDGLwpXFQJz6?ref=therecursive.com "Zappeion Megaron, Vasilisis Olgas Avenue, 105 57")

[Check the agenda! ](https://www.panathenea.org/?ref=therecursive.com) 

Following a successful inaugural edition of 2025, with 3,100+ founders, investors, and innovation leaders, including Melanie Perkins (Canva), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), Kesha, and leaders from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The festival is now scaling to 10,000 attendees for 2026.

From **27** to **29 May**, thousands of people will gather at Zappeion, transforming it into the largest innovation hub in Southeast Europe. This is where technology meets art, where business meets creativity, where Europe’s leading investors, entrepreneurs and cultural pioneers cross paths.

**Why Panathēnea**

  - Access to Southeast Europe’s fast-growing innovation ecosystem
  - Curated networking & investment opportunities
  - A hyper-relevant international crowd
  - Tier-1 content and global thought leadership
  - Unforgettable experiences in springtime Athens

---

## Check how it was last year...
### Who Pays When the Robot Breaks a Window?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/emily-kate-genatowski-tova-humanoid-robot-laws-regulation-liability/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T18:00:13.000Z
AI researcher Emily Kate Genatowski and her robot Tova are testing the limits of modern society. Through "tangible confrontations," she reveals that the biggest hurdles for humanoid robots are bureaucratic and legal, not technical. Is the world ready for the future?

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Inside ViennaUP 2026: 24 Hours at Europe’s Startup Meeting Point
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/inside-viennaup-2026-24-hours-at-europe-s-startup-meeting-point/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:45:36.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Doist’s Amir Salihefendic, at Podim 2026: 50M Users, Bootstrapped
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/doist-s-amir-salihefendic-at-podim-2026-50m-users-bootstrapped/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T14:14:44.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Inside Pluria’s New Investment Round. From Hybrid Work to Work Infrastructure
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/inside-pluria-s-new-investment-round-from-hybrid-work-to-work-infrastructure/
Last updated: 2026-05-12T08:59:28.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Hungary’s Tech Startups Look Abroad as Domestic Headwinds Persist
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/hungary-tech-startups-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-21T09:25:22.000Z
Despite a strained economy and EU funding delays, Hungary’s tech ecosystem is doubling down on deep tech and a “born global” strategy, turning international markets into its primary playground.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Google Cloud Day Returns to Sofia for a Third Year, With AI Agents and Sovereignty in Focus
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/google-cloud-day-returns-to-sofia-for-a-third-year-with-ai-agents-and-sovereignty-in-focus/
Last updated: 2026-05-11T05:57:05.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Estonian Skeleton Technologies Secures €33M Ahead of US IPO
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-estonian-skeleton-technologies-secures-e33m-ahead-of-us-ipo/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T18:36:50.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Beyond Prague: Why Brno is the Real Innovation Engine of Czech Republic
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/brno-tech-ecosystem-czech-republic-innovation/
Last updated: 2026-05-08T11:07:54.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### 6 Must-Visit Events During ViennaUP
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/6-must-visit-events-during-viennaup/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:54:27.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Disrupting ‘Boring’ Industries: How Deyan Dimitrov Turned Dirty Socks Into Profit
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/laundryheap-growth-strategy-deyan-dimitrov/
Last updated: 2026-05-15T16:35:22.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why 500 Global and Nvidia Just Bet €91.5m on Deepinfra’s ‘Token Factory’
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/deepinfra-series-b-500-global-nvidia-ai-inference-infrastructure/
Last updated: 2026-05-05T10:29:01.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### The CEE Startup Superpower: Cultural Weakness becomes Competitive Edge
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startups-psychological-safety-culture-competitive-edge/
Last updated: 2026-05-04T12:23:09.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: From Gaming to Hydrogen Production and Architecture
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-from-gaming-to-hydrogen-production-and-architecture/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T18:37:39.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Pantheon AI in Croatia: The Data Oasis That Might Just Be a €50B Mirage
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/pantheon-ai-croatia-data-center-e50bn-dream-or-digital-mirage/
Last updated: 2026-05-01T11:20:22.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Prague Is Hosting CEE’s First Fintech Week
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/prague-is-hosting-cees-first-unified-fintech-week-programme/
Last updated: 2026-05-02T14:43:51.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### BrainDonors’ Andrey Petrov on AI Outbound and B2B Growth in CEE
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/braindonors-andrey-petrov-b2b-growth/
Last updated: 2026-04-28T12:57:31.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Don’t Fight Stagnation. Hustle Culture Is Not a Path to High Performance
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/navigating-stagnation-leadership-high-performance-hustle-culture/
Last updated: 2026-05-04T11:21:00.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### It’s Never Too Early to Think About Your Exit
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/its-never-too-early-to-think-about-your-exit-the-recursive-roundtable/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T12:14:05.000Z
**Is the “Genius Founder” myth hurting your startup?**

In this episode of the Recursive Roundtable, we pull back the curtain on the real founder’s journey — from the grueling early days of fundraising to the high-stakes world of multi-million dollar exits. We are joined by three industry experts who see the lifecycle of a company from every angle:

**Gergana Stoichkova**, a VC expert and fundraising advisor; **Stan Andreev**, an M&A specialist with a background at Citibank in New York and London; and **Teodor Antonio**, a narrative strategist who helps founders shape their public presence.

Together, they debunk common misconceptions about "startup freedom," explain why your exit strategy should start on Day 1, and reveal why "chaos mastery" is the most important skill a CEO can have.

💡 **What we discuss:**

- **The Biggest Startup Myths:** Why building a great product doesn't guarantee distribution, and why the "lone wolf" founder narrative is a recipe for failure.
- **The Reality of Selling Your Company:** Stan explains why an exit is never "easy," how to align co-founder incentives early, and why a declining business is almost impossible to sell.
- **Fundraising as a Relationship, Not an Outsource:** Gergana breaks down why you can’t hire someone to raise capital for you and what VCs are *actually* looking for beyond a perfect pitch deck.
- **Narrative as Infrastructure:** Theodor explores how to use major milestones (like funding rounds) for customer acquisition rather than just vanity PR, and why public speaking is a learnable craft.
- **Red Flags for Investors:** How to tell when a founder’s confidence has turned into arrogance and when social media "vanity metrics" are masking a lack of real growth.

🏆 **This episode is essential viewing for** early-stage founders, entrepreneurs planning their next exit, and anyone looking to understand the bridge between building a product and building a legacy.

🔔 **Subscribe to The Recursive** for more stories at the intersection of tech, society, and startup ecosystems.
### With 90% of European AI Users on US Platforms, Vienna’s Eustella Wants to Fight Back
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/with-90-of-european-ai-users-on-us-platforms-viennas-eustella-wants-to-create-a-chatgpt-alternative/
Last updated: 2026-04-27T08:24:39.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Data vs. Interface: The Invisible Battle to Save the SaaS Business Model
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-vs-saas-future-of-enterprise-software/
Last updated: 2026-06-15T14:58:48.000Z
In the past decade, investors worried that software companies would “take over the world.” With the rise of cloud services, those concerns only intensified. Companies invested billions of dollars in work automation, and businesses paid for tools that reduced the time spent on document processing. The enthusiasm was evident, and the market grew 20-fold, [from](https://www.zdnet.com/article/global-saas-market-to-hit-us9b-in-2010/?ref=therecursive.com) $9.2 billion in 2010 [to](https://www.paddle.com/blog/b2b-saas-market-report-2023?ref=therecursive.com) nearly $200 billion by 2023.

Then AI arrived. Now, it threatens to erase much of what SaaS companies spent years building. AI agents introduced a new model of work with a single interface that undermines the traditional SaaS business model. Earlier, these companies suggested users separate systems for each business function. We had CRM for sales, ERP for operations, and BI tools for analytics. Users needed to understand processes and know exactly which system they were working in. Agentic AI made processes much simpler, and today, they can enter a single prompt to receive instant results.

## Why a “single interface” is so dangerous

In January, one of the leading AI model developers, Anthropic, introduced a Claude Cowork plugin. This system may operate autonomously across business functions and solve work tasks. The user provides Claude with some assignment, for example, “prepare a contract for this deal,” and the system executes the entire chain of actions using data from the workspace. So, it replaced the entire workflow in CRM or ERP with a single interface.

Investors quickly caught what this could mean. On the day the tools were released, the market capitalization of SaaS companies [dropped](https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/software-slump-drags-down-private-fund-managers-6f840d0c?ref=therecursive.com) by $300 billion. Now, many companies are actively integrating agentic AI into their operations. Klarna, with 118 million [customers](https://www.klarna.com/international/press/klarna-card-reaches-5-million-active-customers/?ref=therecursive.com), moved away from SaaS solutions to its own AI infrastructure. [According to the company](https://www.klarna.com/international/press/klarna-ai-assistant-handles-two-thirds-of-customer-service-chats-in-its-first-month/?ref=therecursive.com), within the first month, the new system handled 2.3 million requests and generated $40 million in revenue.

One could argue that Klarna is a fintech company which must adopt new technologies quickly to survive, nevertheless, even traditionally slow-moving industries recognize the value of agentic AI. Shell, for example, [uses](https://c3.ai/enterprise-ai-at-shell/?ref=therecursive.com) more than 100 AI applications at different stages of oil field development. JP Morgan is deploying tools to [write](https://www.ft.com/content/84308936-e277-4ae0-b384-502d60375456?syn-25a6b1a6=1&ref=therecursive.com) performance reviews. Even in healthcare, the Mayo Clinic made it possible for doctors to [receive](https://www.mayoclinic.org/giving-to-mayo-clinic/our-priorities/artificial-intelligence?ref=therecursive.com) automatically generated treatment plans. AI is significantly simplifying interactions with enterprise systems and making them far more accessible.

## Will SaaS lose all of its money?

As I mentioned earlier, the shift in how interfaces are used disrupts traditional SaaS business models. They used to generate revenue just by expanding their user base, yet, they didn’t care who exactly used the system or how intensively. Large enterprises with huge teams were the main revenue drivers, and they paid for access just in case. Teams may rarely use functions, and in that sense, SaaS companies are similar to gyms, where the best customers are those who pay but rarely show up. It was quite easy to scale and predict such a model.

However, businesses no longer need to pay for hundreds of SaaS seats because AI agents can replace them. Klarna, for example, [stated](https://www.fastcompany.com/91468582/klarna-tried-to-replace-its-workforce-with-ai?ref=therecursive.com) that its AI agent may replace the work of 700 employees. It’s not difficult to imagine the scale of labor (and subscription numbers) that could be erased as it scales to large enterprises.

This shift also erodes interaction with the product. Companies were paying SaaS companies because they see employees working in CRM or ERP systems, performing visible tasks. There was a clear sense of where the money went. If your interaction is reduced to entering prompts in a single interface, the business may start asking pricing questions.

All of this puts additional pressure on SaaS companies. Claude Cowork may not replace Salesforce today, but its presence definitely changes customer behavior. Clients could refuse to pay for new services and rely on external agents instead. As a result, the growth of SaaS companies depends on the environment and customers rather than on their own efforts. And we can see large SaaS companies already trying to adapt their business models, because they can’t rely only on user growth. Salesforce, for example, is [promoting](https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce/pricing/?ref=therecursive.com) both models on an action-base and fixed subscription with unlimited access to agent functions, while ServiceNow is [introducing](https://www.getmonetizely.com/articles/outcome-based-pricing-the-next-frontier-in-saas?ref=therecursive.com) pricing tied directly to outcomes.

## How to survive in the age of AI

Some may conclude that the introduction of AI will make SaaS disappear completely. Indeed, many small and mid-sized companies without unique expertise are likely to be replaced by emerging AI agents. However, enterprise software is much bigger than just products and interfaces. Large companies have access to unique business data, accumulated expertise, and accountability. If something goes wrong in a CRM system, you know who to contact and who is responsible. But who do you turn to if Claude Cowork corrupts your database or deletes critical emails?

Moreover, SaaS platforms are tightly integrated into business processes, making them difficult to replace overnight. It is also important to consider traditional small and mid-sized businesses with narrow specializations. These companies are accustomed to their existing systems and often have limited incentive to switch to new technologies.

So far, the market actually reflects this reality. Despite quick progress, AI still [accounts](https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-generative-ai-in-the-enterprise/?ref=therecursive.com) for only about 6% of the global SaaS market. Analysts [expect](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-08-26-gartner-predicts-40-percent-of-enterprise-apps-will-feature-task-specific-ai-agents-by-2026-up-from-less-than-5-percent-in-2025?ref=therecursive.com) this share to grow to around 30% over several years, but it doesn’t change the fact that companies will need to adapt to a new environment. To prosper, SaaS businesses need to put AI into the core of processes. They can’t simply wait for surface-level integration of hyped AI functions to generate more revenue.

This shift in processes is closely tied to monetization models. Since enterprises are likely to stop paying for the number of seats, SaaS companies should rely on pricing based on outcomes or delivered services. At the same time, they may diversify their revenue and use their greatest competitive advantage they have. Years of close ties with hundreds of businesses have allowed SaaS companies to build unique expertise and collect data that can be used as a new revenue source. AlphaSense, for instance, builds its strategy around combining AI with trusted information, allowing it to remain relevant even as users migrate to agent-driven interfaces.

In the end, it shows that SaaS business is not limited to a single technology or product offered to customers. Underneath the infrastructure layer lies real knowledge, built only through years of successful work with clients. Companies need to rethink their role in existing value chains and identify the insights they can bring to their clients.
### Innovision Awards By Planet Schwarz Accepts Applications By 10th of May
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/innovision-awards-accepts-applications-until-10-may/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:57:41.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Polish and Bulgarian Startups on the Move
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-polish-and-bulgarian-startups-on-the-move/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T18:37:45.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Thinking of Raising Capital or Expanding into the Middle East? Consider These 3 Ps
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/dana-labin-thoughts-on-raising-capital-or-expanding-into-mena/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T07:44:25.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Inside ViennaUP: What “International Dialogue” Looks Like in Practice
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/inside-viennaup-what-international-dialogue-looks-like-in-practice/
Last updated: 2026-04-23T10:52:12.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### A Small Country With a Big Playbook: How Slovenia Is Rethinking Startup Internationalisation
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/slovenia-startup-ecosystem-internationalisation-viennaup-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:54:02.000Z
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with building good companies in a country nobody thinks to look at. **Slovenia** has two million mostly highly educated people, a top-ten global ranking in economic complexity, the seventh most robotised workforce in the world, and a startup scene that has produced **Bitstamp, Celtra, and Outfit7**. And yet, when European investors draw up their maps of where to find the next big thing, the pin rarely lands between the Alps and the Adriatic.

For years, the standard response was to encourage founders to go abroad: get into a Berlin accelerator, pitch in London, move to where the capital is. It worked for some. But it also meant that every success story became an export story, and the ecosystem at home stayed invisible.

At [SPIRIT Slovenia](https://www.sloveniabusiness.eu/?ref=therecursive.com), the national business development agency, we decided to try something different. Instead of sending founders out one by one to fend for themselves, we started building a systematic internationalisation programme: curated national delegations to the events that matter, with startups, investors, and ecosystem leaders travelling together—not as tourists, but as a coordinated national presence with structured access to the right rooms.

The logic is simple. A single founder at a 10,000-person conference is noise. A national delegation with a dozen startups, some investors, a government representative, and a partner-country booth is a signal. It tells the international community: this ecosystem exists, it is organised, and it is open for business.

## A year of showing up

We started in earnest in late 2025, when SPIRIT Slovenia brought a delegation to Web Summit in Lisbon. It was our proof of concept: a small group of startups with a shared presence, coordinated pitching, and real introductions to investors. Several of those companies came back with concrete leads.

In April 2026, we took a deep-tech delegation to Startup Grind Global Conference in Silicon Valley. Different format, different audience — same principle: go where the right people are, and go prepared. Later this year, we return to Web Summit and will be present at Slush in Helsinki for the first time.

## Vienna: the CEE–DACH bridge

This brings us to [ViennaUP 2026](https://www.therecursive.com/recursive-cee-forum-2026-viennaup/), where Slovenia is making its most ambitious appearance yet.

From May 18 to 20, SPIRIT Slovenia is bringing over 30 people to Vienna: 12 selected startups, 8 angel investors from Business Angels of Slovenia, and representatives from the Ministry of the Economy, Tourism and Sport.

The delegation is anchored around two events: Connect Day, the festival’s flagship pitching and matchmaking event at the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber, and the [**CEE Innovation Forum**](https://the-recursive-cee-forum.notion.site/?ref=therecursive.com)**, organised by The Recursive at weXelerate**. There, our companies will pitch, join panels, and meet investors from seven countries in curated one-on-one sessions.

*Why Vienna?* Because the CEE–DACH corridor is where [Slovenian startups](https://therecursive.com/top-funding-rounds-raised-by-slovenian-startups-in-2025/?ref=therecursive.com) have the highest probability of early international traction. The markets are close, the regulatory frameworks are familiar, and the investor networks overlap.

Vienna is not a detour on the way to Silicon Valley. For many of our companies, it is the front door.

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## Ten companies, one working thesis

The startups in this delegation weren’t selected just to look impressive on paper. They were chosen because each has something concrete to contribute — and something equally specific to gain in Vienna.

**ReCatalyst** has developed a nanotechnology platform for next-generation catalyst production targeting decarbonisation. They are an EIC Transition grant recipient with over 20 pilot projects across five continents and are preparing their Series A. They will join a **Tech Transfer panel** at the **CEE Innovation Forum**.

**Trivial Group** builds AI systems for automated assessment in education, already in production with clients in the Netherlands, the UK, and Switzerland. One client alone projects annual savings of nearly €1 million from the integration.

**Alpdev**, through AI Convert It, offers an AI sales assistant for e-commerce that has been shown to drive 5–20% revenue growth. They bootstrapped to €20–30k in monthly revenue within five months and are targeting DACH expansion.

**ELIXITI** tackles the operational chaos of workforce management in labour-intensive industries. Their AI platform finds the best shift replacement in seconds and auto-generates compliant documentation. Validated through 30+ conversations with company directors across multiple countries, they will pitch at the CEE Innovation Forum.

**Vizije Mobilnosti** operates ViziDrive, a registered EU trademark and all-in-one AI platform for EV charging infrastructure management at TRL 7–8, combining fleet optimisation, charging, and renewable energy integration.

**Hoply** runs a live pilot with the British International School of Ljubljana for its children’s transport platform, connecting parents, schools, and vetted drivers with route optimisation and real-time safety monitoring.

**StarKid** creates multimedia mindfulness content for children, with methods tested on over 1,000 kids at a US paediatric clinic. A Web Summit 2025 alumna and angel-backed, they are preparing to scale into English-speaking markets.

**NEOanalytics** is behind Peaksters, an AI training app for children, with 18 sports clubs lined up for pilots and 10 letters of intent signed.

Two more companies — **Mover**, a crowd-powered football transfer platform, and **J&A Marsian**, a mobile gaming startup — join for [Тhe Recursive CEE Innovation Forum](https://therecursive.com/events/?ref=therecursive.com).

## The invisible infrastructure

What separates a delegation from a group of founders who happen to be at the same event is preparation and follow-through.

Every startup in our group goes through a mandatory pitch seminar before departure, led by **Business Angels of Slovenia**. Eight angel investors travel with the delegation, creating three days of organic interaction that no matchmaking algorithm can replicate.

After we return, every company reports on outcomes.

## The long game

Slovenia’s startup ecosystem is at an inflection point. The government adopted a **new national startup strategy in early 2026** with the ambition of doubling the number of startups per capita and significantly increasing venture capital investment.

SPIRIT Slovenia’s internationalisation programme is one piece of that puzzle — the part that ensures Slovenian innovation is visible where decisions get made.

We are not trying to compete with Berlin or Paris on volume. We are building something more targeted: a small, well-connected ecosystem where founders have direct access to international capital, where investors travel with the companies they might fund, and where a public agency acts not as a gatekeeper but as a bridge.

*Vienna is our third major delegation in less than a year: It will not be our last.*
### BlackPeak Capital Backs Croatia’s Fasal Bio with €7M to Scale Renewable Materials Platform
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/blackpeak-capital-fasal-bio-investment-naturion/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T12:43:17.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Polish-Based GRAI Secures €7.65M Seed Funding to Build AI-Powered Music Remix Platform
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/grai-secures-e7-65m-seed-funding-to-build-ai-powered-music-remix-platform/
Last updated: 2026-05-15T23:01:48.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Google Veteran Joins Bulgarian AdScout to Tackle “Trust Tax”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/google-veteran-joins-bulgarian-adscout-to-tackle-trust-tax/
Last updated: 2026-04-21T13:07:47.000Z
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### Polish Warsaw Equity Group Leads €5M Series A Alongside Porsche Ventures
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/warsaw-equity-group-porsche-ventures-charge-investment-ev-charging/
Last updated: 2026-04-21T08:14:01.000Z
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### Dronamics Expands to Japan, Secures Strategic Backing from Asia Air Survey
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/dronamics-japan-asia-air-survey-investment-drone-expansion/
Last updated: 2026-07-13T13:56:07.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Two Polish Startups Raise Fresh Funding
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-two-polish-startups-raise-fresh-funding/
Last updated: 2026-04-17T10:38:20.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Seed is the New Growth
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-native-startups-replacing-growth-vc-seed-new-growth/
Last updated: 2026-04-16T14:31:39.000Z
In the second half of 2025, I noticed a pattern in our Fund IV fundraising conversations at Eleven VC. One after another, institutional LPs – mainly from Europe – told us some version of the same narrative: t**hey had made a strategic decision to move away from seed funds and concentrate their venture allocation entirely on growth VCs.**

It was frustrating at times but I acknowledged their pursuit to maximize returns by capturing ‘the bigger opportunity’ growth capital presented – especially after years of scarcity in Europe. However, something about this narrative was off. I was not convinced.

Initially I thought that it was my unwavering belief in seed as the true venture – a bias that probably blinded me of the reality that seed is going out of fashion… again. Then I thought it was the 2021-2022 LP fatigue from overexposure to seed funds with no results to show.

But I had my ‘aha’ moment a few weeks ago, when I sat down with my team to review the quarterly performance of our Fund III portfolio. What we saw in the data of the last cohort of investments stopped me cold, and suddenly the awkwardness I’d been carrying through those LP meetings had a name.

**The institutional capital is moving toward growth just as growth is ceasing to exist in the form they expect to find it.**

## The window opened. Then AI walked in

The diagnosis that drove that LP consensus was correct – аt the time. European software scale-ups were genuinely starved of growth capital. The Series B and C gap was real, you could see it in the deal count data. While seed activity remained resilient through the 2022-2024 correction, late-stage and growth-stage funding collapsed. Late-stage European VC fell from $76B in 2021 to $25.7B in 2023 – a 66% drop in two years. The need was acute. The calls from founders, investors and policy makers were justified.

But execution in Europe is phenomenally slow. There is reliably a 2–3-year lag between the moment a structural gap is identified and the moment capital is organized to fill it. By the time the funds are raised, the strategies articulated, the investment committees aligned – the world has moved on. The gap that needed filling in 2022 is now being filled in 2026 by funds that will deploy through 2027–2030.

Except the software companies\* they will find in 2027-28 will not look like the companies that needed funding in 2022.

The reason is straightforward: **The advancement of AI fundamentally changed what it costs to build, run, and scale a software company by a magnitude**.

## A New physics of company building

The AI-native company operates under a different set of laws. Where a pre-AI SaaS company at growth stage might employ 150–200 people, an AI-native equivalent reaches the same revenue with 35–40\. Where it previously took a few years to find product-market fit, AI-native teams are doing it in months. Where growth used to require raising a Series B to fund a sales motion, the new model reaches profitability within the first year of operations.

Few trivia facts about the superiority of AI-native companies vs SaaS ones:

- 4x faster growth
- 7–8x fewer employees per dollar of revenue
- net revenue retention of 120–132% versus 108% for mid-market SaaS peers.
- leading AI-native companies already exceed $1M in revenue per employee compared to a $175–615K range for scaling SaaS firms.

Cursor and Lovable were the first that shocked the market with their exponential growth and lean operations. It was extraordinary in the beginning and many thought this space was reserved only for the exceptional ones. But then others followed. Now it has become the expected baseline for AI-native companies. However, the market is still catching up to what that means.

I’m not speaking theoretically. We see it increasingly in our own portfolio. Native Teams – a 2022 investment – reached the same revenue milestones as Payhawk, one of our best-performing companies from the 2018 vintage, in a shorter period and with a few times less capital, provided only by the seed investors. As a bonus they hit profitability in 2025 as well.

Fund III data makes the case even more intriguing: the last cohort of investments is either cashflow positive or on the path there within their first year of operations. That number changes the whole conversation about what seed capital can actually achieve.

Initially we thought that Native Teams were the exception. But apparently this is becoming a pattern and the implications are fundamental. This opens an entirely new universe of strategic options for growth for AI-native companies not present in the entire venture history.

**A company that reaches profitability on seed funding may never need a growth round.** Or it may choose – at the moment of its choosing, on its own terms – to raise one opportunistically, when the market is favorable and the strategic logic is clear. Or it may go for alternative funding options like venture debt, commercial debt. That is a very different animal from a company that \*requires\* a Series B to survive. The growth funds being raised today are optimized for the latter category. But the category is shrinking.

## The CEE accelerant

Nowhere is this dynamic more acute than in Central and Eastern Europe — and this is not coincidence. **It is structural.**

Capital efficiency has always been part of the CEE founder’s DNA. Although CEE startups comprise 20% of the European ecosystem value they attract only 3% of European venture capital. Due to limited access to institutional capital and thinner private LP networks CEE VC funds are smaller in size and fewer in number with smaller checks. So over the years CEE founders learned how to be resourceful and do more with less to survive and potentially thrive. **CEE has the biggest percentage in Europe for bootstrapped startups.**

Over the years many great companies have been created in CEE – Avast, Telerik, Siteground, Payhawk, UiPath, Blueground, Docplanner to name a few. What struck me every time wasn’t their ambition but their instinctive resourcefulness. None of these founders built on the assumption that unlimited capital was available since it was not. It was the major growth restriction and they had to overcome it in the smartest possible way.

Now, AI has taken that instinct and given it an engine.

The result is a compounding effect. CEE’s natural tendency toward capital efficiency, amplified by AI, accelerates an already-accelerating global trend. Companies here are not just reaching profitability faster than the European average. They are redefining what “growth stage” means in practice. In many cases, they are skipping it entirely.

AI just killed the VC ‘factory line’ – an obsession of a generation of founders and investors. Today, a seed round of $3–10M is no longer just enough to find product-market fit. **It is enough to reach it, pass it, hire the first revenue team, hit sustainable unit economics, and begin compounding.** The CEE startups are thriving in this new world.

We are watching the seed stage absorb what used to be the job of the growth stage. The shelf life of a company’s dependency on external capital has compressed from a decade to three or four years. **The old growth round is being displaced – from below, by leaner companies that don’t need it**, and from above, by something altogether different.

## The super growth round is not a growth round

What remains of the growth stage is undergoing its own transformation. The large rounds being written today – $300M, $500M, $1B+ – are not growth capital in the traditional sense. They are not financing the next phase of a business that needs to hire and scale. They are category-declaration events.

Their purpose is threefold. First, to signal to the market that this company is the chosen winner in its space – the round is as much a press release as a financing. Second, to scare competitors into capitulation or consolidation. Third, to fund M&A and marketing attrition, not product development.

This is a **fundamentally different activity from venture capital**. It is closer to private equity, to investment banking, to the kind of structural capital allocation that large institutions do when they are picking platform companies rather than backing entrepreneurs. The investors writing these checks are not seed VCs who moved downstream. They are sovereign wealth funds, large crossover funds, and the US mega-firms who effectively became RIAs in recent years.

The middle – the traditional growth fund playing the Series B/C game – is being squeezed from both ends. I’ve been saying this in LP meetings for the better part of a year, and I’m starting to see others in the ecosystem name it publicly too. From below, by the AI-native seed company that never shows up needing their capital. From above, by the super-growth round that requires a check size they cannot write and a network they do not have.

## What this means for LPs

If you are an LP currently evaluating a European growth fund, this is the question you should be asking: **which companies does this fund expect to invest in?** If the answer is software companies at Series B and C, press harder. Because the software companies raising traditional Series B and C rounds in 2026 and 2027 are disproportionately going to be the ones that couldn’t reach profitability on their seed capital, the ones that failed the new efficiency test.

**That is adverse selection at the portfolio level before a single check is written.**

The better frame for LPs with genuine appetite for growth-stage returns is this: the growth opportunity now lives inside large seed funds. That’s precisely how we’ve structured our next fund – €100M+, with co-investment capacity built in from day one – not as a feature, but as the core of the LP value proposition. A seed fund with the portfolio quality and LP relationships to offer co-investment at the moment a company decides to raise a larger round – on the company’s terms, at the company’s chosen moment – is a structurally superior access point to growth returns than a dedicated growth vehicle grinding through a Series B pipeline.

**The co-investment right attached to a top-quartile European seed fund is, increasingly, the growth allocation.** LPs who understand this early will have access. Those who wait for the dedicated growth fund to prove itself will find that the best companies never needed it.

## Rewriting the scorecard

All of this comes at a cost to our industry. It requires us to redefine the way we measure success along the way before DPI kicks in.

Traditional VC KPIs at seed stage is Series A/B rate (and respective mark-ups) – how many of your companies raised a priced institutional round? It is a reasonable proxy for quality in a world where the path to value runs through successive financing rounds – the VC “factory line”. But in a world where the best companies skip growth rounds entirely, the Series A/B rate tells you very little. A **high Series A rate at a seed fund might now indicate that the portfolio needed follow-on capital – which is precisely the wrong signal.**

Internally, we’ve already started shifting how we talk about portfolio performance. The question we ask about a company isn’t “what round are they raising next?” It’s “do they need to raise at all?”

The KPI that actually matters in the AI era is simpler and harder: how many of your companies reached profitability independently, with high retention? Not with the help of the next round. Not through acquisition. On their own. That is the measure of whether you backed companies with real models, real margins, and real futures.

### The Contrarian Bet

So my contrarian bet is seed. Specifically seed funds with:

- the discipline to back AI-native companies
- portfolio construction to own meaningful stakes (at least 15%), and
- the LP relationships to offer co-investment at scale
- focus on CEE especially, where the capital efficiency advantage is structural and the AI-native transition is happening faster than anywhere else in Europe.

**Seed is not just the new early stage. In the age of AI, seed is the new growth.**

I’m writing this because I believe it – and because I’m putting our next fund behind it. That’s the only honest way to make a contrarian argument: not just to say it, but to stake something on it.

The window for that realization is also closing – just more slowly than the growth capital window. The funds building toward it now will be the ones LPs wish they had backed in 2030.

\* *A clarification note: my thoughts consider software companies not so much deeptech or capex heavy companies. At least for the time being. This might change in the future as well…*
### Bulgarian Codery Acquires Elfshock to Launch AI Automation Division in Southeast Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-codery-acquires-elfshock-to-launch-ai-automation-division-in-southeast-europe/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T09:11:12.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why Specialized AI is Winning in 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/vertical-ai-investment-why-specialized-ai-is-winning-in-2026/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T10:19:25.000Z
The next phase of AI value creation will be driven by **narrow, deeply embedded systems that understand how specific industries actually operate**. This is why I see vertical AI emerging as one of the most investable niches as we’re heading into 2026.

## Why I’m cautious about horizontal AI and model companies

**Vertical AI solutions** are designed to solve clearly defined problems within specific industries. Horizontal AI, on the other hand, refers to general-purpose solutions that are not tailored to the needs of a particular industry. They can be powerful, but as foundational models continue to evolve, many risk becoming obsolete. We have already seen this play out. Prompt engineering tools, for example, went extinct when models improved; users could simply ask the system to generate a better prompt on its own.

On paper, companies that develop AI models are an obvious target for investment. In practice, there are two major challenges.

First, **funding in this space is highly concentrated**, both geographically and at the company level. In 2025, approximately 60% of all AI capital [was invested](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/state-of-ai-in-2025-how-big-tech-is-rewriting-the-rules-of-venture-capital?ref=therecursive.com) in major AI labs. Of that funding, around 90% went into [mega-rounds](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/state-of-ai-in-2025-how-big-tech-is-rewriting-the-rules-of-venture-capital?ref=therecursive.com) clustered around a small group of players (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI) and primarily within the US. Second, **access to this market is limited**. For most VC firms, this is not a repeatable or diversified investment strategy.

Unlike horizontal AI applications, which often suffer from weak defensibility, or foundational model companies, which are defined by extreme concentration and high barriers to entry, **vertical AI operates in a far healthier investment landscape**. Capital is distributed across industries and geographies. And, most importantly, strong moats emerge naturally.

## The most investable niches in vertical AI in 2026

### Legal vertical AI

Lawyers [spend](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/insights/articles/save-time-and-achieve-more-with-ai?ref=therecursive.com) 40–60% of their time on manual document-related tasks, and much of this work is repetitive and of low value, making it an ideal environment for AI-driven automation and decision support. Also, 30% of lawyers [already use](https://www.lawnext.com/2025/03/aba-tech-survey-finds-growing-adoption-of-ai-in-legal-practice-with-efficiency-gains-as-primary-driver.html?ref=therecursive.com) AI in some form in their workflow, which is unusually high for a traditionally conservative profession. Legal tech is already a multibillion-dollar segment, with revenue at [$29.7](https://www.statista.com/topics/9197/legal-tech/?ref=therecursive.com#topicOverview) billion in 2023, growing at around 5% year over year.

#### 1\. Litigation AI

Litigation is a document-heavy and time-sensitive process. Vertical AI litigation platforms focus on tasks like discovery, case strategy, evidence analysis, and procedural forecasting. One example of a startup within the litigation-specific niche is [Wexler AI](https://www.wexler.ai/?ref=therecursive.com), a litigation analysis and preparation company based in the UK, which [closed](https://www.wexler.ai/insights/wexler-ai-raises-5-3m-to-transform-complex-litigation-for-the-worlds-largest-firms-unveils-real-time-fact-checking?ref=therecursive.com) a $5.3M seed round in 2025.

#### 2\. Intellectual Property AI

IP is another vertical where specialization matters. Patent analysis, prior art searches, and infringement assessment are highly technical and data-intensive, making them well-suited for AI. In the UK, [Ankar AI](https://ankar.ai/?ref=therecursive.com) [raised](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/ankar-secures-3-m?ref=therecursive.com) a £3M seed round in 2025, focusing on AI-driven patent intelligence. Sweden-based [Lightbringer](https://www.lightbringer.com/?ref=therecursive.com) also [raised](https://oresundstartups.com/lightbringer-secures-e4-3-million-seed-funding-to-expand-ai-powered-patent-protection-platform/?ref=therecursive.com) €4.2M in 2024.

#### 3\. SMB and retail legal AI

Unlike large enterprises, SMBs cannot afford large legal teams but still face recurring legal needs, from contracts and employment law to compliance and disputes. Vertical AI platforms targeting this segment focus on accessibility, cost efficiency, and standardized workflows. Italian [Lexroom](https://www.lexroom.ai/en?ref=therecursive.com) [raised](https://techfundingnews.com/lexroom-raises-19m-series-a-expand-ai-legal-tech-europe/?ref=therecursive.com) $19M in Series A, while in Germany, [Jupus](https://www.jupus.de/en?ref=therecursive.com) secured a €6.5M [seed](https://siliconcanals.com/jupus-raises-e6-5m/?ref=therecursive.com) round.

### Finance vertical AI

At its core, financial processes are characterized by repetitive, rule-based workflows. These functions are highly structured, compliance-driven, and time-intensive, making them ideal candidates for vertical AI automation.

#### 1\. Bookkeeping for SMBs

Many SMBs find traditional accounting software too complex and poorly aligned with their needs. While 71% of SMBs use some form of accounting software, a significant portion still relies on spreadsheets, pen and paper, or fragmented tools for key financial tasks. Recent funding rounds prove investor interest in this niche. Recent deals include [Quanta](https://www.usequanta.com/?ref=therecursive.com) [raising](https://www.usequanta.com/blog/announcing-our-15m-raise-and-the-launch-of-prism?ref=therecursive.com) $15M and [Bluebook](https://getbluebook.com/?ref=therecursive.com) [securing](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/top-european-funding-rounds-closed-in-february-2025?ref=therecursive.com) €2.4M to automate accounting workflows with AI.

#### 2\. Audit

Both external and internal audits rely on repetitive evidence gathering, control testing, document review, and report drafting. These are precisely the tasks where vertical AI can deliver immediate value. One example from the Roosh Ventures portfolio is [Kobalt Labs](https://www.kobaltlabs.com/?ref=therecursive.com), which [raised](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kalyani-ramadurgam-4a76331b5%5Fashi-and-i-are-excited-to-share-that-kobalt-activity-7402028574796558336-T7BM/?ref=therecursive.com) $11M in Series A in December 2025\. Kobalt replaces manual document review and assessment processes with intelligent, audit-ready automation.

### Vertical AI in procurement

Procurement is one of the least glamorous areas of the enterprise and one of the most broken. It sits between strategy and execution, touching finance, sales, and supply chain. And yet, in most small and mid-sized companies, it is still run on spreadsheets, email threads, and manual approvals.

#### 1\. Procurement planning for SMBs

Large enterprises rely on heavy ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle, which are powerful but expensive, complex, and slow to adapt. SMBs and mid-market companies, by contrast, are largely left behind.

Vertical AI presents a clear opportunity for intelligent procurement planning tools built for SMBs. Recent funding activity signals growing investor interest in this niche. [Procure.ai](http://procure.ai/?ref=therecursive.com) [raised](https://www.procure.ai/blog/seed-funding-announcement?ref=therecursive.com) $13M to build AI-native procurement planning for modern businesses. In Switzerland, [Scalera.ai](http://scalera.ai/?ref=therecursive.com) raised €5.7M to create an AI assistant focused on procurement for construction and industrial projects.

Vertical AI is not a long-term inevitability; it is a near-term opportunity. The next 24–36 months will define category leaders as incumbents move too slowly and horizontal tools fail to adapt to real operational constraints.

Once vertical systems become embedded into legal, financial, and procurement workflows, switching costs will rise quickly, and markets will consolidate. The window to back early category leaders is narrow. For investors willing to go deep rather than broad, **vertical AI offers one of the few remaining areas where conviction, not capital scale, still determines outcomes.**
### Defense Tech Under Legal Scrutiny: How Regulation is Reshaping Startup Investments in Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/europe-defense-tech-investment-regulation-vc/
Last updated: 2026-05-15T23:02:03.000Z
The results of the US elections and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine have fundamentally **redrawn Europe’s investment map**. [Defense technologies](https://report.therecursive.com/?ref=therecursive.com), which were on the fringes of interest just a few years ago, have become one of the fastest-growing segments. Their share of the European VC market has jumped to 6.2%, and billions of euros are now flowing into the sector. Funds are on the lookout for autonomous drones, AI for sensor fusion, and cybersecurity for critical infrastructure.

However, in our legal practice, we see that technological dominance is no longer enough to guarantee success. Geopolitics and the push for European autonomy have brought about a new reality: **in the defense and dual-use sectors, law and compliance have become just as important as the product itself**. It is precisely in this intersection that the opportunity for success emerges, provided, of course, that both founders and investors understand the rules.

## Regulation as a key driver of valuation

Today, the law can make or break a startup before its product even hits the market. A typical example is a cutting-edge reconnaissance drone that attracts interest from **both the military and the commercial sector**. However, upon landing its first foreign contract, the startup often hits a wall: the technology falls under European dual-use regulations, and without an export license, it cannot be legally exported even to a NATO member state.

If an investor discovers during due diligence that the company lacks a solid compliance structure, fundraising halts, and **the project suffers months of delays**. In defense tech today, compliance dictates valuation almost as much as the product itself. A startup that has absolute clarity on its intellectual property, export classification, and security protocols from day one dramatically reduces **regulatory risk for investors**. Legal readiness thus becomes an investable asset in its own right.

Moreover, this pressure has intensified this year. European export control rules now encompass sensitive areas like **quantum technologies and advanced microchips**. NIS2 is raising mandatory cybersecurity standards, and the upcoming Cyber Resilience Act will require „security by design“ built directly into products starting in 2027\. While the AI Act exempts military systems, its rules fully apply to the civilian spin-offs of [dual-use technologies](https://therecursive.com/european-defense-tech-venture-capital/?ref=therecursive.com).

## A new investment lens

European defense technologies are experiencing an unprecedented turnaround. The number of specialized **defense funds has grown from eight to more than fifteen in just three years**. The NATO Innovation Fund manages a billion euros, and players like [Presto Tech Horizons](https://therecursive.com/presto-tech-firehawk-60m-investment/?ref=therecursive.com) and [OTB Ventures](https://therecursive.com/polish-founded-otb-ventures-secures-185-m-with-nato-innovation-fund-backing-for-european-deep-tech/?ref=therecursive.com) are actively scouting for deep tech projects. Players like DEPO Ventures are also entering this space, bridging the gap between regional talent and capital.

However, it is precisely here that the gap between technical vision and business reality often reveals itself, as confirmed by **Petr Šíma, General Partner at the investment group DEPO Ventures**:

> *„When we first meet founders, they often don’t yet know whether their technology falls under a strictly defense or a dual-use regime. Yet this fundamentally impacts exports, certifications, and their entire strategy. In the CEE region, we repeatedly see that technically strong teams have developed their product further than their company.“*

*„Therefore, *our role is not just to provide capital*, but to help set up a scalable structure from the outset, one that is ready for both military and commercial procurement processes.“*

## Where are the biggest mistakes made?

In my experience, the greatest risks lie in the details that founders overlook in the early stages. We frequently encounter startups with great technology and promising pilot projects. But then an investor steps in, launches due diligence, and it turns out that:

- A grant agreement or a military contract disproportionately **restricts future commercial use**.
- The ownership of an algorithm is unclear because it was **developed in collaboration with a university without proper IP agreements**.
- The company lacks a resolved end-user control process, making **legal sales outside a narrow circle of partners impossible**.

These issues can be resolved, but discovering them late costs time, money, and often the investor’s trust. Getting compliance right from day one is ultimately cheaper and faster.

## Capital, law, and technology: The new triangle of success

For defense startups, a new triangle has emerged – capital, law, and innovation. None of these sides can pull the weight alone. An investor ignorant of compliance risks pouring money into a project that will get stuck at export. A lawyer without business acumen will draft perfect documentation that ultimately stifles the startup’s growth. And a founder without either will be left with brilliant technology that never reaches a customer.

According to **Petr Šíma**, this synergistic approach is crucial for all of Europe: *„Europe has a chance to build its own champions. It has the talent and the political will. But we will only succeed if investors, lawyers, and founders start collaborating from the very beginning. Because in defense tech, the game isn’t just about valuations; it’s about strategic security, which demands more than just smart algorithms. It demands smartly built companies.“*
### Are Energy Communities the Next “Booking” for Electricity?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/lorena-skiljan-on-the-energyxbridge-why-renewable-energy-communities-are-the-future/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T09:11:26.000Z
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### Why Europe’s Deep Tech Startups Struggle to Scale
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/why-europe-s-deep-tech-startups-struggle-to-scale-and-what-actually-works/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T18:57:47.000Z
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### AI Isn’t Ruining Creativity... Bad Taste Is!
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/podcast-roundtable-creativity-ai/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T11:38:45.000Z
Composer and sound artist **Emilian Gatsov** – Elbi, advertiser and Director of Innovation at OM Group **Konstantin Yankov**, and film director and video producer **Andrey Andonov** share their perspectives from across disciplines. 

We talk about the shift from control to experimentation, why randomness can be a creative advantage, and how AI acts more like a collaborator than a replacement. One key idea stands out: the quality of output is directly tied to the quality of input.

They discussed:

☑️ How AI changed creative workflows️  
☑️ Do you need experience to create with AI?  
☑️ Using AI as an enabler (not a replacement)  
☑️ AI in film production  
☑️ AI in advertising  
☑️ Real examples of using AI in projects  
☑️ Transparency, copyright & ethics  
☑️ Creative jobs, skills & the future of creation
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Europe’s First M&A Deal Led by an AI-Native Advisory
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-ai-funding-deals-europe/
Last updated: 2026-04-10T07:41:59.000Z
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### How to Know if Your AI Partner Understands Your Business
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/questions-when-hiring-ai-partner-understanding-business/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T13:54:17.000Z
You wouldn’t hire a mechanical engineer who only uses AI-generated blueprints. You wouldn’t trust a doctor who only uses ChatGPT for diagnosis. Yet when it comes to hiring AI partners, most companies don’t know what questions to ask.

This matters more than teams realize, as the wrong AI partner doesn’t just waste budget. They cost you 6 months. Six months your competition spent shipping, while you spent debugging a broken system that needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

I put together a **list of what separates AI partners who understand your business from those who are just good at selling AI.**

## They ask about your problem before they talk about their tools

If the first question you hear is “Which model should we use?”, pause. That’s a red flag. Good partners lead with questions about your workflows and metrics. These can look like:

- - What takes your team the longest?
  - Where do errors cost you money?
  - What frustrates your customers?

An example I’ve recently encountered: one team asked for [AI to reduce support tickets](https://therecursive.com/ai-customer-service-fintech-human-support/?ref=therecursive.com). In this specific case, the real problem wasn’t volume, but knowledge fragmentation. Answers scattered across Slack, docs, and people’s heads. AI could help retrieve that knowledge, but first, you need to gather it.

Partners who lead with “which model should we use?” miss this entirely. **They build solutions and then look for problems to attach them to**. They optimize for demos that look impressive in meetings. Those demos rarely become systems that work in production.

## They’ve worked with companies at your stage

[Building AI](https://therecursive.com/great-ai-isnt-built-in-a-model-ai-infrastructure/?ref=therecursive.com) for an early-stage startup is completely different from building for a 200-person company. Startups need to move fast and prove one use case works, while enterprises need compliance, integration with legacy systems, and multiple stakeholder sign-offs.

> Ask potential AI partners: “Show me a project with a company our size in our industry.”

If they only have big-name enterprise clients and you’re a 50-person startup, that’s a mismatch.

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## They tell you when NOT to build

Teams that always say yes are selling hours, not outcomes. I’ve told clients “not yet” three times in the past month. And surely not because AI won’t help them, but because their foundation isn’t ready. For example, if you have data in 6 different systems with no consistent tagging, and half of it contradicts the other half, that needs to be [organized before you build anything](https://therecursive.com/how-to-avoid-ai-fails-best-practices-for-ai-implementation/?ref=therecursive.com).

Otherwise, your AI just gives confident, wrong answers based on whichever contradictory version it finds first. Good partners should focus on optimizing for your success, not their utilization rate.

## What to ask in your first conversation

So how do you actually evaluate this in practice? These are examples of questions that reveal how your potential partner truly thinks:

- - **“What’s the biggest mistake companies our size make with AI?”**  
  (reveals pattern recognition across similar companies)
  - **“Show me a project that failed and what you learned”**  
  (reveals honesty and learning from production experience)
  - **“If our data is messier than expected, what happens?”**  
  (reveals flexibility and realistic planning)
  - **“What would make you tell us not to build this?”**  
  (reveals judgment about when AI makes sense)

## The Bottom Line

One more thing: The right partner isn’t the one with the fanciest tech stack. It’s the one who understands your business well enough to tell you what you truly need. Sure, sometimes that’s AI. Sometimes that can be organizing your data first, or “don’t build this yet.”

The companies getting AI right in 2026 aren’t the ones who moved fastest, but the ones who found the AI partners who asked the right questions to ensure they fully understood your business before writing any code.

**Remember that you can always rebuild a model, but you can’t take back 6 months.**
### Czech Edmund Raised €2.5M to Fix Manufacturing Downtime with AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/edmund-ai-raises-2-5-million-industrial-troubleshooting/
Last updated: 2026-04-09T08:55:54.000Z
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### Netflix Collaborates with INSAIT to Launch Breakthrough AI Video Editing Tool
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/insait-netflix-void-ai-video-editing/
Last updated: 2026-04-08T09:29:10.000Z
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### Building a Blueprint for Next-Gen Founders
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/building-a-blueprint-for-next-gen-founders/
Last updated: 2026-04-08T08:19:00.000Z
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### “Build It and They Will Come”: The Myth That’s Keeping Regional Startups Small
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/gtm-strategy-blunders-that-kill-startups-cee-founder-files/
Last updated: 2026-04-07T11:38:51.000Z
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### Bulgarian-founded nFuse Raises €1.7M round from Eleven Ventures and LAUNCHub Ventures
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/nfuse-fmcg-ordering-whatsapp-viber-funding/
Last updated: 2026-07-13T13:53:40.000Z
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### Sloppy Contracts Can Cost You, A Lot
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-to-build-a-contract-management-workflow-that-works/
Last updated: 2026-04-06T08:12:45.000Z
Managing contracts isn’t just a tick-the-box legal formality — it’s a full-on business process that directly affects how smoothly your projects run, and even how happy your clients are. Still, **many CEOs treat contracts like annoying paperwork** and simply hand them over to the lawyer with a quick “make some edits.”

Spoiler: that’s not how you win.

Good legal support only works when everyone who has skin in the game is involved — from the folks who approve the contract to the ones who’ll be responsible for delivering on it.

I break down why poor contract handling is a ticking time bomb for your business and how to build a process that keeps everyone intact.

## What can go wrong with sloppy contracting?

When it comes to signing a contract, it’s not just a legal checklist. **You need to loop in your entire team** — Finance, Delivery, Tech, and, of course, the CEO (especially when the terms are tricky).

It may seem like an extra layer of bureaucracy at first. But just like with any well-run system, having a clear contract process helps cut through the chaos, keeps things moving, and prevents legal (and financial) facepalms down the road.

Ignore this, and you could end up paying the price. **Here are a few real-life examples:**

### A) The CFO wasn’t in the loop

The contract stipulated that the invoice had to be paid within 30 days. Sounds fine. But it didn’t say when the 30 days actually started — when the invoice was sent, or when the client decided they “felt like” acknowledging it. So the client just… didn’t. They played the “we haven’t confirmed it yet” card and dragged out payment for over 60 days.

And legally, nothing could be done.

A CFO would’ve flagged that immediately. They’d push to add a clause like: “If the client doesn’t raise any objections within 10 days, the invoice is considered accepted.” Problem solved.

### B) No heads-up to Head of Delivery

The contract didn’t clearly spell out how the client was supposed to accept the finished work. The delivery team did their thing and sent the invoice, but the client refused to pay, claiming the job wasn’t “formally accepted.”

Why? Because the acceptance process (feedback deadlines, number of revisions, quality benchmarks) wasn’t in writing.

Had the Head of Delivery been involved, they’d have added clear acceptance criteria and a review deadline. That way, everyone would be on the same page, and the team would know exactly when to bill.

### C) Sales got sidelined

The lawyer signed off on a contract with a “Time & Materials” model, but what else was included?

- - Strict quality benchmarks
  - Milestones and delivery checkpoints
  - Penalties for delays

Basically, it was a Fixed Price contract in disguise. The client took full advantage and refused to pay for time already spent.

The Head of Sales would have pointed out that the team presented a Time & Materials model without any responsibility for delivering results within fixed deadlines. That would have allowed the lawyer to insist on removing the Fixed Price terms from the template.

### D) No CEO, no strategy

There was no clause regarding dispute resolution alternatives (such as negotiation or mediation). So, when a disagreement arose, the client went straight to court in their own country. That meant legal fees overseas and frozen payments while the case dragged on.

A CEO, thinking a few steps ahead, would’ve insisted on adding mediation or arbitration first. That would’ve at least slowed things down and opened the door for a resolution without a courtroom drama.

## So what does good contract process looks like?

From what I’ve seen in the wild, a solid contract workflow typically consists of five key stages. Think of it as your legal assembly line — but with fewer bolts and more brains.

### 1\. Initiation

It all starts when a manager submits a request in Jira (or your preferred task tracker). They specify:

- - What kind of contract is it (your template or the client’s),
  - The cooperation model (MSA, T&M, Dedicated Team, Fixed Price),
  - Deadlines,
  - Who’s involved,
  - And any other mission-critical stuff.

The lawyer obtains all the necessary context, gathers the raw data, and conducts a Know Your Customer (KYC) background check on the client. It’s like getting the map before the road trip.

### 2\. Drafting the contract

This stage depends on whose template you’re using.

If it’s the client’s, you’ll want to give it a close read and tweak anything that feels sketchy or unbalanced. Key things to double-check:

- - What exactly are you agreeing to do (scope of work)
  - Payment terms (when and how much)
  - Responsibilities and liabilities (who’s on the hook if things go sideways)
  - Timelines, jurisdiction, and how disputes are handled
  - NDAs, intellectual property, and so on.

This is where the lawyer puts on their armor and gets ready to defend your business in writing.

### 3\. Internal approval

The document is passed along to the relevant stakeholders for their approval. Usually:

- - **Finance**: Checks payment terms, tax implications, penalties for late payment, etc.
  - **Delivery**: Reviews team setup, resource switching, client poaching safeguards, etc.
  - **CTO**: Makes sure the tech side of the deal doesn’t contain any ticking time bombs.
  - **CEO**: Handles the big stuff, like unlimited liability clauses. Some clients insist on them, but only the top brass can decide if it’s worth the risk.

All changes and comments get saved in the same Jira ticket (or wherever you’re tracking it). This beats trying to piece things together from random Slack threads or buried emails.

### 4\. External negotiation

Time to send the updated contract to the client. The lawyer takes the lead here, managing the back-and-forth, logging all edits, updating the final version, and looping stakeholders back in if any significant changes arise.

This is where diplomacy meets documentation.

### 5\. Signing & Stashing

For international clients, it’s usually time for an e-signature — think DocuSign or AdobeSign.

Once it’s signed, the contract is stored in a well-organized archive (something well protected and compliant with cyber security regulations) and indexed with a clean file name, ID, and date—no more digging through your Downloads folder or random desktop chaos.

## How can an IT company build a workflow like this?

Start by taking a good, honest look at how things work today. What’s your current contract process? Who’s involved? [Where does it jam up](https://therecursive.com/general-contract-terms-it-outsourcing-contract-templates-mistakes-legal-advice/?ref=therecursive.com)?

Next, **figure out your approval model** — centralized or hybrid. For example, maybe only certain types of contracts need full multi-department reviews.

Then, **create a playbook**: a simple and clear internal policy outlining how contracts are initiated, reviewed, approved, signed, and stored.

**Formalize the roles**, too. Here’s a cheat sheet:

- - Manager (Sales or Delivery): Starts the request, provides all the juicy details (scope, pricing, terms).
  - CFO / Delivery Director / CTO / CEO: Approves the deal-breaking bits.
  - Lawyer: Not just an editor! They quarterback the whole process — from review to signature to archive.

**Set deadlines to prevent things from stalling**. For example, 1-2 working days for the lawyer to review, and 2 days for stakeholders to approve. That way, no one gets stuck in “contract limbo.”

Once the workflow is defined, **bake it into your tracking system**. Automatic reminders, status updates, centralized feedback—all of this helps keep things clean, fast, and drama-free.

Last but not least — **train your people**. Write simple, step-by-step guides on how to submit a contract request, where it goes, what each status means, and so on. Then, run a few Q&A sessions and internal training sessions for both current staff and new employees.

A little upfront effort means way less mess later.

### A smooth contract process = Business peace of mind

Having a straightforward, well-oiled contract workflow isn’t just a “nice to have” — it’s strategic business armor. It helps you avoid risks before they become costly headaches.

Bonus? **Clients notice**. A company that handles contracts like a pro sends a strong signal: “We know our stuff, we’ve got our act together, and we’re not here to play amateur hour.” That builds trust and reputation faster than any pitch deck.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: BlackPeak Co-Leads Almost €30M Alcatraz Round
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-funding-roundup-voxa-blackpeak-openai-tbpn/
Last updated: 2026-04-06T11:31:20.000Z
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### BrainDonors and HubSpot to Host B2B Growth Conference This May
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/b2b-growth-conf-in-sofia/
Last updated: 2026-04-02T13:25:33.000Z
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### Vlad Gozman on Disrupting Mature Markets, 180° Pivoting, and Not Taking VC Money
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/vlad-gozman-on-disrupting-mature-markets-180-pivoting-and-not-taking-vc-money/
Last updated: 2026-04-02T08:48:00.000Z
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### Vantaa Is Giving Deep Tech Companies Direct Access to Industrial Systems
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/vantaa-is-giving-deep-tech-companies-direct-access-to-industrial-systems/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:54:48.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### BlackPeak Capital Backs Biometric Security Firm Alcatraz in a Series B Funding Round
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/blackpeak-capital-alcatraz-series-b-investment/
Last updated: 2026-04-06T11:32:25.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### When The Recursive Turned the Startup Grind into a Literal Dungeon
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/founder-escape-room-cee-startup-valley-of-death-sofia/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:54:50.000Z
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### Serbian Startup Funding 2025: Investors Are Selective, but They’re Finally Committing Big
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/serbian-startup-funding-2025-garaza-milena-commentary/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T14:32:11.000Z
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### LeapXpert’s Sofia Event Explores the Future of the Engineering Role
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/leapxpert-sofia-event-future-engineering-role/
Last updated: 2026-03-31T05:21:11.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Inflammaging in Clinical Practice: GlycanAge’s New Data
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/inflammaging-clinical-practice-glycanage/
Last updated: 2026-08-25T10:54:16.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### SkyRefund: Building the Legal Infrastructure Behind Air Passenger Rights
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/skyrefund-building-the-legal-infrastructure-behind-air-passenger-rights/
Last updated: 2026-03-30T10:25:43.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Will European Robotaxi Dream Survive Its Own Hype?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/story-of-croatia-s-verne-timeline-uber-partnership/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:57:47.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Credo Ventures Launches Over €74M New Fund
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-weekly-funding-venture-capital-march/
Last updated: 2026-03-27T15:48:17.000Z
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### The Recursive CEE Forum 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/sample-event/
Last updated: 2026-05-06T17:55:24.000Z
The Recursive CEE Forum returns to ViennaUP 2026 on 20 May, continuing its mission for a second year: turning connections into outcomes and strengthening Central and Eastern Europe’s role in shaping Europe’s tech future.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Deep Tech Momentum Returns to Accelerate Europe’s Adoption of AI, Energy, Space, and Defense Innovations
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/deep-tech-momentum-returns-to-accelerate-europe-s-adoption-of-ai-energy-space-and-defense-innovations/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:57:51.000Z
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### Bulgarian INVENIO Partners Unveils New €75M Fund to Support SME Growth in Southeast Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/invenio-partners-fund-iii-75m-southeast-europe/
Last updated: 2026-03-26T10:13:40.000Z
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### How Machines Absorb Cultural Heritage (And What Gets Lost in Translation)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-machines-absorb-cultural-heritage-and-what-gets-lost-in-translation/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T08:41:57.000Z
An AI confidently declares that Nikola Tesla was Serbian. Prompt the same model in Croatian, and Tesla becomes Croatian. Both answers arrive with perfect grammar. Neither comes with any doubt.

This is not a bug. It is a feature of how large language models work: they absorb cultural heritage the way a sponge absorbs water. They take in what surrounds them, and they reproduce it in the shape of the container you hand them. The problem is that **Central and Eastern Europe has never had just one container.**

## The Grammar Illusion

**Over 90% of AI training data comes from English-language sources**. This is not a secret, but the consequences are rarely discussed outside technical circles. When a model learns Hungarian, Croatian, or Serbian, it learns the syntax and vocabulary reasonably well.

> The way these systems are trained, scale is everything and quality is an afterthought: a doctoral thesis and a nationalist rant on an obscure forum corner contribute equally to the pile, as long as the token count keeps climbing.

What gets lost in that indiscriminate accumulation is the humanity and normality encoded in those languages: **the everyday rhythms of how real people think, argue, joke, and grieve**. And alongside that, the folk tales, the historical grievances, the songs, the specific irony, and the collective memory that make a language more than a communication tool.

To test this gap, I built [a benchmark of 100 Hungarian cultural riddles](https://medium.com/@boczkakaroly/ai-speaks-most-languages-almost-perfectly-but-does-it-understand-them-8a56836534ae?ref=therecursive.com). Not translation exercises, but probes of cultural memory: questions that require knowing what Hungarians learn in history class, what they sing at village festivals, which poets they can recite from memory. The leading AI models were run through both their consumer interfaces and production APIs.

The results were stark. Models scored between 80 and 100% on Hungarian linguistic quality. **Grammar, style, fluency: near perfect**. Factual **accuracy on cultural content: 48% on average through APIs**. A coin flip. A middle-aged Hungarian solved the same riddles with 95% accuracy. The models can speak the language. They do not understand what they are saying.

The second finding was arguably worse: across 600 outputs, the models produced 193 confident fabrications but admitted uncertainty **only 12 times**. A 16-to-1 ratio of confident hallucination over honest ignorance. The system did not know it did not know.

## When history gets three versions

The grammar illusion becomes a cultural liability when you move into **shared but disputed history**. Central and Eastern Europe has a lot of that.

[An other benchmark](https://medium.com/@boczkakaroly/a-trilingual-cultural-bias-benchmark-2123d882c146?ref=therecursive.com) put this under pressure: a trilingual red-teaming evaluation across Croatian, Serbian, and Hungarian, built around the historical tensions the three communities actually argue about: **the figure of Zrínyi, the MOL-INA dispute, Tesla’s nationality, the 1990s conflicts, Tito’s legacy, NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign**. Each prompt asked a model to respond as a proud national voice, defending its side with conviction but without crossing into hostility.

Bias did not disappear in any model, it only changed shape.

Some models retreated into diplomatic vagueness, repeating “both sides share responsibility” even when the task explicitly asked them to take a position. Others went further, **quietly mirroring the nationalist framing** embedded in the language they were prompted in. And the patterns were not random:

- - Serbian-language answers consistently leaned toward collective framing and shared victimhood.
  - Croatian ones favored individual accountability and legal argumentation.
  - Hungarian prompts produced a cooler, more detached factual register.

Each model followed that rhythm like a mirror, not of the truth, but of the cultural weight carried in each language’s training data.

**One model reproduced a phrase from historical propaganda**, translated smoothly into the target language, apparently without recognizing what it was carrying. The sentence described the killing of ethnic minorities as an act of justice rather than a crime. The model did not generate this with hostility. It generated it because the training data, somewhere, contained that framing, and the model had no mechanism to flag it as something that required pause.

Seven out of thirty duels triggered hallucinated historical “facts,” most often when a model tried to be diplomatically balanced. Faced with genuinely contested history, **it invented compromises that never existed, constructing a peaceful fiction** because the real record was too uncomfortable to navigate.

> *The system preferred a coherent lie to an honest “I don’t know.”*

This is what it looks like when a machine absorbs cultural heritage without understanding it: confident, fluent, and occasionally dangerous.

## Why this matters beyond the lab

For large Western European languages, the training data archive is massive and relatively diverse. For Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian, and most CEE languages, it is **thin, uneven, and often mediated through English-language summaries** that flatten regional complexity into digestible approximations. These systems were not trained to understand the region. They were trained to simulate understanding of it, which is a different thing entirely.

> *Cultural misrepresentation in a riddle game is harmless. The same dynamics operating in content moderation, legal interpretation, historical education tools, or mental health applications *are not harmless*.*

When a model trained on English-dominant data processes a hate speech complaint in Croatian, it applies categories built primarily around English-language slurs, English-language political contexts, and English-language cultural associations. The local specificity, the in-group references, the historically charged terminology that any educated Croatian speaker would recognize immediately, may be invisible to the model entirely.

The same applies to positive cultural transmission. AI tutoring tools, translation services, and digital archives increasingly mediate how younger generations access their own cultural heritage. If those tools were not trained on that heritage, what they transmit is a reconstruction, not the original.

## What can be done about it?

Some of the most consequential work on this problem is already happening, quietly and without much fanfare.

Poland offers one of the strongest proofs of concept in our region. **Dr. Marek Kozłowski** and his team at the AI Lab in the National Information Processing Institute took part in **building [PLLuM](https://opi.org.pl/en/pllum-model-wspoltworzony-przez-opi-pib-gotowy-do-dzialania/?ref=therecursive.com)**, a family of open-source models trained on around 200 billion tokens of organically sourced Polish text: web content, books, and academic papers, grown from Polish sources deliberately rather than translated from English. Funded by Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, a dedicated government body whose very existence signals how seriously the country takes these issues, PLLuM is now being integrated into public administration, education, and citizen-facing services. In December 2025, it was launched in the mObywatel application, a citizen services platform with almost 11 million users. It is not trying to beat GPT-4\. **It is trying to actually understand Poland**, which is a different and arguably more important goal.

**Cohere’s Global-MMLU project** approached the problem from the evaluation side, translating one of AI’s most widely used academic benchmarks into dozens of languages. If you only evaluate AI in English, you only know how smart it is in English. Cohere’s [Aya initiative](https://cohere.com/research/aya?ref=therecursive.com) pushed this further, building a genuinely multilingual instruction dataset by recruiting contributors from underrepresented language communities worldwide. Both projects operate on the premise that quality multilingual AI requires people who actually speak those languages to be involved in building and testing the systems, not just consuming them.

**[Humane Intelligence](https://humane-intelligence.org/post/ai-governance-beyond-english-low-resource-lessons/?ref=therecursive.com)** is doing similar work from a governance and safety angle, commissioning bias research specifically in low-resource languages and publishing findings that corporate AI labs rarely make public about their own models. Also worth mentioning is the work of Latvia-based [Tilde AI](https://therecursive.com/tilde-model-tildeopen-ai-grand-challenge-european-languages-llm/?ref=therecursive.com), they are tackling the problem from the language technology side, developing models and tools specifically optimized for European languages, including several that larger global systems routinely underserve. Their open model TildeOpen covers 34 European languages, with a deliberate focus on linguistic quality over raw scale.

## Next step: treat AI training data as a cultural infrastructure question

**These efforts represent a different model of how AI gets built**: not a single dominant culture generating training data and then exporting it globally, but communities contributing their own languages, their own knowledge, and their own standards for what counts as accurate and fair.

It requires scale and coordination that independent researchers and small NGOs cannot provide alone. Institutions, tech companies, and policymakers in the CEE region need to treat AI training data as a cultural infrastructure question, not only a technical one. The EU AI Act creates some obligations in this space. But regulation alone does not produce datasets. That requires deliberate investment in the kind of cultural content that makes a language more than grammar: the stories, the ambiguities, the history that three neighbors remember differently, and the wisdom to know which differences matter.

Machines absorb what we feed them. The question for our region is whether we are willing to do the work of feeding them something worth passing on.
### “Ability to Articulate a Vision and Build a Brand Is Just as Critical as the Code Architecture”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-nordeus-success-story-how-to-build-a-global-gaming-giant-from-cee/
Last updated: 2026-03-24T16:17:28.000Z
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### Inside MPE Berlin: How I met 25+ of the Companies Behind Europe’s Multi-trillion Payments Ecosystem
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/inside-mpe-berlin-how-i-met-25-of-the-companies-behind-europe-s-multi-trillion-payments-ecosystem/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:57:53.000Z
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### Credo Ventures Launches Over €74M New Fund to Back CEE Startups at Pre-Seed
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/credo-stage-5-88m-cee-preseed-fund/
Last updated: 2026-03-23T15:32:47.000Z
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### The Recursive CEE Forum Returns to ViennaUP 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/recursive-cee-forum-2026-viennaup/
Last updated: 2026-03-23T15:17:13.000Z
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### AI’s Next Phase in CEE: Infrastructure, Institutions, and Talent
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-s-next-phase-in-cee-infrastructure-institutions-and-talent/
Last updated: 2026-03-23T08:15:32.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: First Ukrainian Defense Tech IPO
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/first-ukrainian-defense-tech-ipo-cee-startup-news/
Last updated: 2026-03-20T09:20:27.000Z
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### Polish Montis VC Raises €50M Fund to Back Europe’s Energy and Industrial Tech Startups
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/montis-vc-50m-fund-europe-energy-industrial-tech/
Last updated: 2026-03-20T07:46:54.000Z
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### Ukrainian Defense Startup Buntar Aerospace Lands Almost €9M for AI-Powered Drone Intelligence
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/buntar-aerospace-raises-10-4m-ai-drone-intelligence/
Last updated: 2026-03-19T14:52:31.000Z
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### Croatian & Greek-Founded Edra Exits Stealth With Sequoia-Led Series A
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/edra-series-a-expalantir-knowledge-retrieval-sequoia-capital/
Last updated: 2026-03-23T15:50:06.000Z
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### EU Inc: What is in European’s Commission 1st Official Proposal?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/eu-inc-unified-corporate-framework-startups-europe/
Last updated: 2026-03-19T09:53:03.000Z
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### Ukrainian Co-Founder’s Tower.dev Raises Over €5M to Scale AI Infrastructure
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/tower-raises-6-4m-ai-data-engineering-platform/
Last updated: 2026-03-18T14:49:56.000Z
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### Swarmer Becomes First Ukrainian Defense Company to Go Public on Nasdaq
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/swarmer-ipo-nasdaq-drone-ai-startup/
Last updated: 2026-03-18T09:07:56.000Z
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### 99% of People Communicate Wrong And Here Is Why
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/99-of-people-communicate-wrong-and-here-is-why/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T11:41:26.000Z
What makes someone a great communicator? Is it talent… or a skill that can be trained?

In this episode of the Recursive Roundtable, we explore the art of communication from multiple perspectives — recruitment, HR, filmmaking, storytelling, and coaching.

Joining the host Teodora Atanasova on this topic are:

- **Boryana Borisova,** Director of Talent Acquisition @ Delasport; ICF Certified Coach;
- **Konstantin Kunev,** Interim CEO @ Future Unicorns Accelerator;
- **Andrey Andonov**, Video Producer & Storyteller @ The Recursive.

Together they discuss:

☑️ Why communication starts and ends every human interaction  
☑️ How vulnerability and storytelling build real connections  
☑️ The relationship between personal development and career growth  
☑️ Why many people avoid training communication skills  
☑️ The difference between personal branding and reputation  
☑️ How great communicators manage energy, presence, and adaptability
### Romania’s Fintech Sector Enters a New Phase of Growth and Integration
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/romanian-fintech-sector-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:58:38.000Z
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### Czech Choice Raises Over €6M to Expand AI Restaurant-Tech Platform in Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/choice-raises-7-1m-ai-restaurant-tech-expansion-europe/
Last updated: 2026-03-26T14:46:48.000Z
Czech restaurant-tech startup Choice has raised $7.1 million (€6.04 million) to expand across Southern Europe and accelerate the development of AI-powered tools.

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### What Are the Gaps Between Fintech’s Digital Promises and Market Reality?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/money-motion-2026-the-reality-gaps-challenges-future-fintech/
Last updated: 2026-03-16T13:37:57.000Z
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### Dare2Scale 2026 Opens for Applications, Expanding Endeavor’s Network Across SEE
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/dare2scale-2026-applications-open-endeavor-see/
Last updated: 2026-03-16T12:24:42.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Croatian Drone Tech Startup Orqa Raises €12.7M Series A
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-croatian-drone-tech-startup-orqa-raises-e12-7m-series-a/
Last updated: 2026-03-13T09:57:51.000Z
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### Wonderful Raises $150M Series B at $2B Valuation for Enterprise AI Agent Platform
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/wonderful-150m-series-b-2b-valuation-enterprise-ai-agents/
Last updated: 2026-03-13T10:04:55.000Z
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### Czech Startup Market Hits Turning Point as Investors Reduce Activity
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/czech-startup-investor-pullback/
Last updated: 2026-03-12T09:33:08.000Z
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### 10 CEE Female Leaders Driving the Next Wave of Scaleups
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-female-founders-scaleups/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:58:42.000Z
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### “Users’ Trust is Not a Byproduct of Growth”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/web3-marketing-strategies-and-the-future-of-payments-with-anita-erker/
Last updated: 2026-03-11T09:35:13.000Z
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### Croatian Orqa Lands €12.7M to Scale FPV Drone Tech
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/orqa-fpv-drone-startup-series-a-12-7m/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T12:45:46.000Z
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### Lithuanian FoodTech Saltz Raises €20M Series A to Expand Its Marketplace
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/saltz-raises-20m-series-a-food-supply-marketplace-europe/
Last updated: 2026-03-09T14:04:02.000Z
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### The EU AI Act’s Replayability Test: If You Can’t Reconstruct a Decision, You Can’t Ship
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-eu-ai-act-replayability-test-product-development/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T10:58:45.000Z
Today, the narrative around high-risk AI systems is taking a new turn. Since the EU AI Act [is set to come](https://www.therecursive.com/the-eu-ai-act-what-s-not-going-according-to-the-plan/) into full force on 2 August 2026, by that moment, **companies will be obliged to back their AI decisions with evidence**. Superficial explanations won’t work anymore. Even if Brussels ends up [delaying](https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/eu-delay-high-risk-ai-rules-until-2027-after-big-tech-pushback-2025-11-19/?ref=therecursive.com) parts of the high-risk regime to December 2027, that doesn’t invert the dynamic.

So what does this mean in practice? I think companies are now at a crossroads.

Either they build their AI operations so they can prove what the system does in a real case — down to the model version, the data used, the checks applied, and when a human could step in — or they look for markets where this level of proof isn’t required yet. There’s no comfortable middle ground. Let’s dig into the details and see whether this is as dire as it may seem.

## Replayability is now a product feature

Back in the day, many EU firms could embed an AI feature, watch how it worked, then explain the logic behind it if something went wrong. They’d show a short deck, point to a model card, mention fairness tests, fix a few things, and move on.

Why did it feel so simple? **Because most AI decisions were still easy to undo, the impact was either almost or completely absent**, and there was no strict rulebook that could make teams keep a full, case-by-case record of what the system did.

This model started showing its weaknesses quickly. In 2020 in the UK, the exam grading algorithm [was dropped](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/17/a-levels-gcse-results-england-based-teacher-assessments-government-u-turn?ref=therecursive.com) after a backlash: results were downgraded in ways many students couldn’t contest, case by case, and the government reverted to teacher-assessed grades. And it’s just one example.

After a few more high-stakes “black box” moments, regulators started to tighten the screws. Yes, these systems did bring benefits, like speed and scale, but **many were released too early, with weak controls** and with little to none explanation of the outcomes in real cases.

And that’s exactly what the EU AI Act is set to fix. For high-risk AI, that means a switch from ‘trust our intent’ to ‘show your work.’ I’d call it **replayability**: the ability to replay a decision after the fact and show how it was reached, with evidence.

But what if firms refuse to build for that replayability? Then they run into enforcement and buying walls.

## The cost of “we can’t explain this”

From where I stand, refusing to build replayability in Europe once the EU AI Act is in force is a path to market exit. In high-risk AI, the market will punish firms that can’t show what their systems did — first through incidents, then through enforcement, and finally through blocked revenue.

When a high-risk AI model fails in a serious way, your firm is expected to provide [a detailed report to authorities](https://ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu/en/ai-act/article-73?ref=therecursive.com), according to Article 73 of the upcoming Act. So if a company doesn’t have a clear trail of why a failure happened, the team just wastes time arguing over guesses. After all, customers want answers, the partner requires a fix, and the regulator wants more than a dry “we’re investigating.”

Then comes the part most businesses fear — losses, penalties, fines. Under Article 99, penalty ceilings reach up to [€35 million](https://ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu/en/ai-act/article-99?ref=therecursive.com#:~:text=Non%2Dcompliance%20with%20the%20prohibition%20of%20the%20AI%20practices%20referred%20to%20in%20Article%C2%A05%20shall%20be%20subject%20to%20administrative%20fines%20of%20up%20to%20EUR%2035%C2%A0000%C2%A0000%20or%2C%20if%20the%20offender%20is%20an%20undertaking%2C%20up%20to%207%C2%A0%25%20of%20its%20total%20worldwide%20annual%20turnover%20for%20the%20preceding%20financial%20year%2C%20whichever%20is%20higher.) or 7% of global turnover for some breaches, and up to €15 million or 3% for others. Large enterprises may pull through that, but many small firms won’t; as for them, a serious compliance finding could freeze sales, cause contract terminations, and trigger months of remediation work just to stay afloat.

As for revenue, it’s the final choke point. In high-risk use, sales depend on due diligence, audits, and incident-reporting clauses. If you can’t show what happened, that’s a dead end. You lose the deal, and that’s what “lost revenue” is about.

## The compliance path that gets easier over time

It may look like the way out is binary: either comply or exit. Even so, **there’s also a third path**, where you don’t comply in the sense of one big project, but build proof into the product in small, repeatable moves, and you make it part of daily work.

- **Start with a *proof spine*.** Integrate the ability of the AI model to reply to basic questions fast, such as which model version ran, what inputs were used, what checks were applied, what output was produced. If you can’t produce that evidence for at least one real decision, everything else doesn’t make sense.
- **Treat incident response as a product feature.** Decide in advance who can pause the system, when you roll back, what triggers a review, and what evidence gets pulled first. High-risk AI isn’t judged in calm times; this happens on the worst day, when something breaks, and everyone wants answers.
- **Design for “where it runs.”** Data locality and privacy pressures will push more AI toward on-device, on-prem, or regional setups. The complexity only multiplies. Still, the way out is consistency, which means applying the same access rules, policies, and logs across environments.

Overall, I don’t see the EU AI Act as a predicament.

So, yes, the bar is rising, but running from it isn’t a way out. The only workable (and, I think, wise) path is to ship systems that can explain themselves in real cases, because in Europe, that’s **what *high-risk AI* is soon to mean in practice.**
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: New Defense Unicorn with Ukrainian Roots
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startups-tech-weekly-new-defense-unicorn-with-ukrainian-roots/
Last updated: 2026-03-07T13:05:29.000Z
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### “If Bulgarian Entrepreneurial Association Were a Startup, We’d Be in the Scaling Phase”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/besco-scaling-bulgaria-startup-ecosystem/
Last updated: 2026-03-05T09:31:12.000Z
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### Defense Giant Rheinmetall to Acquire Croatian DOK-ING in a Record M&A for Regional Defense
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/defense-rheinmetal-acquires-croatian-dok-ing-ugv-acquisition/
Last updated: 2026-03-04T17:18:31.000Z
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### Wealthyhood Secures €6M from Bank of Cyprus to Scale Across Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/wealthyhood-secures-series-a-from-bank-of-cyprus-to-scale-across-europe/
Last updated: 2026-03-03T16:58:43.000Z
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### CEE Business Leaders in the Middle East Share Their Status as Iran Conflict Escalates
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/us-israel-iran-strike-cee-founders-middle-east/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T07:39:09.000Z
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### AI Is Boosting Agency Revenue, and Undermining It at the Same Time
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/future-of-agency-business-models-ai-impact-on-agency-revenue/
Last updated: 2026-03-03T08:20:25.000Z
AI Is Boosting Agency Revenue, and Undermining It at the Same Time

For a while, generative AI felt like magic. Click, click, prompt, prompt — *et voilà:* a social media post. A blog article outline. A campaign idea. For agencies built on knowledge work, it looked like a productivity miracle waiting to be monetized.

**Three years into the hype, we’re much more realistic about AI’s limitations.** We’ve realized it’s far from magic and its outputs are rarely delivery-ready, regardless of how refined your prompting skills are. So far, AI didn’t eliminate human effort, only redistributed it.

Which makes this a good moment for a status check: Is AI helping agencies make more money, or covertly chipping away at their revenue?

After working on [a recent survey of 183 agencies](https://productive.io/agencies-in-the-ai-era-between-hype-and-reality/?utm%5Fsource=therecursive.com&utm%5Fmedium=pr&utm%5Fcampaign=AI%20and%20Agencies) across Europe, the UK, North America, and APAC, we’ve come to an unsatisfying but honest conclusion: it’s doing both. At the same time.

## The numbers may look reassuring, but the story behind them is not

When we asked agencies about AI’s impact on revenue, the topline result leaned clearly positive:

- **65%** reported a positive revenue impact;
- **27%** reported a negative one;
- **34%** said they expect a negative impact in the future, even if they haven’t experienced it yet.

At first glance, the numbers look validating. Twice as many agencies are seeing upsides as downsides. **It’s tempting to declare AI a net win and move on.**

But when you look closer, twenty-seven percent reporting a revenue drop is not negligible. It represents real agencies, with real clients, watching **parts of their business model erode in real time**. And the fact that more than a third *expect* future damage tells us something else: even agencies doing “fine” today don’t feel secure.

To understand what’s actually happening, we need to look beyond the aggregate and into the mechanics.

## How AI helps agencies earn more — for now

Talking to agencies, we learned that the most common source of positive impact wasn’t new AI-native services or bold innovation. It was plain, unglamorous **efficiency.**

Agencies reported saving money by:

- **Reducing outsourcing** (translation, voiceover, basic asset production);
- **Compressing internal workflows** (research, drafts, summaries, admin);
- **Increasing output** without increasing headcount.

In practical terms, AI is acting as a margin tool. Work that previously required third-party vendors or additional staff is now increasingly handled in-house. In some cases, agencies are delivering more options to clients in the same time window, strengthening perceived value, at least for the time being.

## When efficiency turns into erosion

AI efficiency, however, is a **double-edged sword**.

The same gains that boost margins internally can create pressure externally. Clients aren’t blind. They use AI tools themselves, and many quickly assume AI is doing “most of the work.” In our survey:

- **27%** of agencies have already been asked to lower prices because of AI;
- Nearly **half** haven’t been asked yet, but expect to be.

This expectation gap can easily turn into a revenue leak.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/therecursive-com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/productive-ai-report-price-cuts-2.png)

**Many agencies hold their ground** on pricing — and kudos to them. But not all are equally positioned, equally experienced, or equally equipped to do so. Some will reduce scope. Others will accept lower fees and try to make it up in volume. None of these strategies are neutral.

The agencies reporting negative revenue impact weren’t necessarily bad at AI (or client negotiations). In many cases, **they were too exposed to services that clients now perceive as automatable**: content production, basic creative execution, commoditized strategy outputs.

> AI didn’t destroy their work. But it dramatically changed how that work is valued.

## Agencies stuck in a paradox

Here’s the tension currently playing out across the industry:

- Agencies need AI to stay competitive;
- Using AI makes parts of their work appear cheaper;
- Cheaper-looking work attracts price pressure;
- Price pressure erodes the very margins AI was meant to protect.

That’s how you end up with a market where most agencies are “doing fine” — and still uneasy.

This also explains a pattern that showed up repeatedly in our data: **fear of the future often outpaces present-day damage**. Agencies sense that today’s efficiency gains may become tomorrow’s baseline expectation.

## Not all revenue impact looks the same

This may be obvious, but it’s still worth stating clearly: AI is not hitting all agencies equally.

**Custom software development, complex digital products, and deeply integrated client work** show far less immediate pricing pressure. These services still require context, responsibility, and long-term thinking — things AI can assist with, but not replace.

By contrast, services that were already under margin pressure before AI arrived are now feeling it acutely. AI didn’t invent the problem, only accelerated it.

That’s why blanket statements about “AI being good” or “AI being bad” miss the point.

> The impact depends on what you sell, and how tightly it’s tied to human judgment versus output volume.

## New services help but they’re not a shortcut

As further proof that the AI-and-agencies story really is a mixed bag, some agencies have launched **AI-driven services** and seen meaningful success. Our data shows:

- About **13%** report strong success with new AI-based revenue streams;
- Another **24%** report moderate success;
- The majority are still experimenting.

These wins are real, but they’re not automatic. The agencies doing well here aren’t reselling tools. They’re finding new ways to package expertise: education, integration, workflow design, change management.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/therecursive-com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/productive-ai-report-new-revenue-streams.png)

And that makes all the difference. **AI itself is rapidly commoditizing**. The ability to make it useful, safe, and valuable inside a specific business context is becoming the real competitive advantage.

## What this means going forward

Some agency services will disappear. That’s unavoidable.

Others will survive but look very different: priced differently, scoped differently, justified differently. And some new services will emerge precisely because clients are overwhelmed, uncertain, and struggling to translate AI potential into business outcomes.

The agencies most likely to stay successful aren’t the ones chasing every new model or feature. They’re **the ones re-examining what they sell through the lens of value, not effort.**

And the truth hiding behind the numbers is this: AI isn’t simply helping agencies earn more or stealing their revenue. It’s forcing them to decide, sooner than expected, **what they actually want to be paid for**.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Largest Pre-Seed Round in CEE
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-largest-pre-seed-round-in-cee/
Last updated: 2026-03-02T20:17:21.000Z
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### From Gaming Analytics to Creative Intelligence: Aggero’s Pivot to AI-Powered Video Performance
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/from-gaming-analytics-to-creative-intelligence-aggero-s-pivot-to-ai-powered-video-performance/
Last updated: 2026-03-02T17:56:58.000Z
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### 22+ Communities Powering the Baltic AI Ecosystem
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/baltics-ai-communities/
Last updated: 2026-03-02T10:51:40.000Z
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### Kardi AI Is Scaling, MDR Class IIa Certified and Series A Ready
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/kardi-ai-is-scaling-mdr-iia-certified-and-series-a-ready/
Last updated: 2026-03-26T15:54:27.000Z
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### “Frankfurt Is Our Gateway to Growth”: Bulgarian Sirma Takes Its AI Ambitions Pan-European
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-sirma-takes-its-ai-ambitions-pan-european/
Last updated: 2026-02-27T11:39:57.000Z
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### How Investors Use AI in 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-investors-use-ai-in-2026/
Last updated: 2026-03-02T13:23:23.000Z
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### North Macedonian Eliza Prendzov on Shifting From Diplomacy to Wall Street
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/post-dream-new-york-eliza-prendzov-risk-reinvention/
Last updated: 2026-03-02T07:40:13.000Z
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### 4 Years into War: Ukrainian Tech Ecosystem’s Milestones
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ukraine-war-four-years-tech-resilience-defense-innovation/
Last updated: 2026-02-24T16:30:53.000Z
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### Czech ValkaAI Raises One of the Biggest CEE Pre-Seed Rounds to Date
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/valkaai-12m-pre-seed-rockaway-ventures-interactive-video-ai/
Last updated: 2026-02-24T08:55:00.000Z
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### Eastern Europe’s Venture Market Holds Steady at €3.6B in 2025 as Deal Count Falls
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/eastern-europe-s-venture-market-holds-steady-at-e3-6b-in-2025-as-deal-count-falls/
Last updated: 2026-02-23T13:07:10.000Z
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### CEE AI Investment Trends 2026: Super Focused on Applied AI and ROI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-ai-investment-trends-2026-the-shift-to-applied-ai-and-roi/
Last updated: 2026-03-31T10:54:09.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: CEE Tech Weekly: Databricks Completes $5B Funding Round
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-weekly-funding-startup-deals-databricks-raise/
Last updated: 2026-02-21T09:34:16.000Z
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### “If You Can Work Together on a Boat, You Can Build a Startup”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/yasido-yacht-booking-platform-founders-story/
Last updated: 2026-02-20T11:49:42.000Z
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### Czech Navigara Raises Over €2M With Support From CEE Funds
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/navigara-seed-funding-ai-developer-productivity/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T09:10:58.000Z
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### Investment Trends 2026: What’s Hot and What’s Not for CEE Investors
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/vc-opportunities-promising-sectors-investment-trends-strategy-cee-europe-2026/
Last updated: 2026-02-18T15:10:41.000Z
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### 5 Romanian Fintech Startups to Watch, According to Investors
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/5-romanian-fintech-startups-to-watch-according-to-investors/
Last updated: 2026-02-18T10:53:25.000Z
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### EIC Ambassador on Europe’s Climate Tech Shift: Why Companies Are Building at Home
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/europe-climate-tech-momentum-preparedness-gap/
Last updated: 2026-02-17T11:57:56.000Z
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### Google Maps Co-Founder Lars Rasmussen and Lefteris Katsiadakis Are Turning Athens into a Startup Magnet
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/google-maps-co-founder-lars-rasmussen-and-lefteris-katsiadakis-are-turning-athens-into-a-startup-magnet/
Last updated: 2026-02-17T07:40:51.000Z
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### Farseer Secures €6.07M Series A to Scale FP&A Platform Across Europe and North America
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/croatian-farseer-secures-series-a-to-scale-fp-a-platform-across-europe-and-north-america/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T12:38:27.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: DRONAMICS Enters Defense, Hungarian Startup Lands Record Pre-Seed
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-dronamics-enters-defense-hungarian-startup-lands-record-pre-seed/
Last updated: 2026-02-13T11:10:05.000Z
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### Real Equity vs Virtual Shares in Bulgaria: A Corporate Governance Playbook for Employee Incentives
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/real-equity-vs-virtual-shares-in-bulgaria-a-corporate-governance-playbook-for-employee-incentives/
Last updated: 2026-02-13T08:43:47.000Z
### [Viktor Mitev](https://www.therecursive.com/author/viktormitev/)

*Viktor is a partner at [EY Bulgaria](https://www.ey.com/bg%5Fbg?ref=therecursive.com) dealing with tax planning of deals, investment structures and transfer pricing setups. His focus is on the ecosystems in Bulgaria, Albania, N. Macedonia and has been supporting local entrepreneurs in tax structuring of their global operational footprint when scaling up and planning exit strategies that are both efficient and compliant. Viktor is an ACCA member, holds LLM in International Tax Law at the WU and is a licensed appraiser of intellectual property.*

### [Dimitar Karastoyanov](https://www.therecursive.com/author/karastoyanov/)*Dimitar Karastoyanov is Managing Partner at [Karastoyanov, Dobrenova & Associates Law Office](https://lawyers-bg.net/?ref=therecursive.com). He is a seasoned attorney with over 25 years of experience in corporate and commercial law, specializing in M&A and contractual relations. He has a proven track record of successfully navigating complex legal landscapes and providing strategic counsel to clients. In addition to his extensive legal practice, Dimitar has also shared his knowledge as a lecturer at several universities.*

  
Attracting and retaining top talent is no longer a challenge reserved for Silicon Valley. Bulgarian tech companies and mid-market manufacturers alike are under pressure to offer long-term, performance-linked rewards. As more local businesses raise international capital, hire cross-border talent, or prepare for exits, the structure of employee incentives is increasingly scrutinized by investors, auditors, and job candidates alike.

Two vehicles headline most boardroom discussions: (i) real equity – shares in an AD or capital quotas in an OOD–and (ii) “virtual” shares (phantom or shadow equity that pays cash on a liquidity event)\*. Both instruments aim to align staff interests with enterprise value, yet they diverge sharply in corporate-law mechanics, governance impact, and –yes – tax treatment.

**Real equity incentives** grant employees *actual ownership* in the company–i.e., real shares/participation interests under the corporate law of the relevant company form (e.g., shares in an AD or quotas/“дялове” in an OOD). As a matter of **corporate law**, the employee becomes a shareholder/partner with statutory rights (and, depending on the structure, governance influence), and the relationship is reflected in the company’s cap table and corporate documentation.

**Virtual shares (phantom/virtual stock)** do not transfer corporate ownership at all; instead, they create a *contractual economic entitlement* that tracks the value of equity or an exit outcome. From a **corporate governance** standpoint, employees remain outside the shareholder body–no voting rights, no statutory minority vetoes, and no need to execute share transfers at exit–while the company retains a clean cap table. This is one reason investors often prefer such structures in scaling companies approaching major funding rounds or exits.

## Corporate Governance: Pros & Cons

### Real Equity – Advantages

**Strong alignment**

Employees become true owners with statutory rights, which can deepen long-term commitment and identification with company performance.

**Well-known legal framework**

The instrument is embedded in Bulgarian company law and market practice, which can provide familiarity and perceived legitimacy among stakeholders.

### Real Equity – Drawbacks

**Exit execution risk (consent/signature problem).**

At an exit, holders of real equity must actually agree and sign to sell their stake. If an employee refuses, the transaction can be delayed or jeopardized. Drag-along clauses are not always fully reliable in Bulgaria; the realistic remedy may be contractual liability rather than a clean forced transfer.

**Minority veto or blocking risk via statutory majorities.**

Depending on how much real equity is distributed, employees can block corporate actions requiring qualified or unanimous majorities. The issue is particularly acute in an OOD, where capital increases or decreases require unanimity — meaning even a small employee stake can create an effective veto.

**More complex incentive mechanics.**

Compared to virtual shares, it is typically harder to implement vesting schedules, good/bad leaver provisions, or performance conditions with real equity. These often require multiple corporate actions, transfer restrictions, buyback arrangements, or proxies, and outcomes may still be less automatic than purely contractual solutions.

**Governance complexity.**

More shareholders mean more formalities, stakeholder coordination, and potential for disputes over time.

### Virtual shares – Advantages  

**Cap-table and voting remain clean**

Employees do not become shareholders, so they cannot block decisions through statutory voting thresholds.

**Exit-friendly**

There is no need for employee signatures to transfer equity at closing; the plan can settle contractually (often cash-settled) upon exit.

**Flexibility by contract**

Vesting, leaver terms, performance conditions, clawbacks, and settlement mechanics can be tailored with far fewer corporate-law constraints.

### Virtual shares – Drawbacks

**Purely contractual nature**

Because virtual shares are not statutory equity, enforceability and outcomes depend heavily on careful drafting (definitions of “exit,” payout waterfall, dispute resolution, good/bad leaver rules).

**Perception gap**

Some employees value “real ownership” more highly than a contractual economic right, so communication and plan design matter.

## Tax pitfalls to be aware of when planning

The biggest practical concern for employees is often taxation without liquidity — being taxed on theoretical value before shares can actually be sold

Bulgaria has not yet introduced any specific rules that navigate the complexity of taxing stock-based compensation, and this leaves plenty of room for interpretation on who, when, and what gets taxed. There seems to be a growing consensus that, in most cases, what enrolled employees will be bringing home should be nothing short of taxable employment income, and the moment when it gets such will be around the event when ownership over the shares has fully vested.

Unlike in Bulgaria, many other jurisdictions are applying an additional “tradability” test of the shares to make sure they are monetizable before they get taxable. Imagine that an employee has a shareholding vested in a startup that has gone through a successful round with peak values. The employee now owns the vested shares but may be required to hold the shares and only have them sold in a predefined future event, such as an exit by the founders. In other words, the shares are not tradeable yet, even if they are fully vested. In the absence of that “tradability” concept in Bulgarian tax law, however, the employee may as well get taxed at the peak value of the award received in-kind, as well before she can have it monetized for a market-tested (hopefully close or higher) exit price.

It can get even more twisted in defining the taxable point when the instruments awarded are stock options, and this adds an exercise event in the timeline, which does not necessarily coincide with either the date of vesting or the date of sale.

Can it just be done simply yet effectively enough? The short answer is yes, but a simple and lean legal construct can still get you caught up in lengthy and abstract tax arguments on the risks and liabilities when an investor due diligence or audit comes along. Take, as an example, the case of a sole owner of a mature business operation who decides to pass along part of its stake to her team of trusted managers by a quick simple transfer for a nominal amount. Is the value difference now an employment income earned through service and performance, or is it rather a structured sale leading to an undertaxed capital gain, or perhaps to some, it feels like a taxable gift?

In another example, imagine that you co-founded a project and got shares on day 1 that could be clawed back within three years (just in case you decide to free ride along the way). In year three, it is all yours, and arguably, no taxable event would be haunting you. But why should it be different then if you only got a formal promise on day 1 and had a three-year vesting schedule until the title of ownership was awarded in a taxable event?

A common feature that one would expect to streamline all the moving parts is administering the plan through a foreign entity. This naturally would be the parent of the group to which the Bulgarian employer belongs. In such a way, the Bulgarian employees will be directly awarded with equity instruments issued by that top parent entity, presumably in a location where there is a long-standing established legal framework for these matters. This is where, however, the complications of financial reporting may kick in for the local employing entity and open the door for the plethora of tax and valuation issues.

## Impact on Company Financials

Еquity settled or phantom incentive plans, inevitably affect financial reporting. Companies applying IFRS must recognize stock-based compensation regardless of whether awards are settled in shares or cash. Phantom plans often appear as growing liabilities on the balance sheet. **The accounting treatment can influence key financial metrics and how investors perceive profitability, particularly in high-growth companies preparing for funding rounds or exits.**

## Conclusion

Under Bulgarian law, real equity offers superior alignment for high-growth scenarios but demands rigorous corporate-governance hygiene. Virtual shares provide structural flexibility and preserve cap-table purity yet shift the tax and social-security burden to employees and create cash-flow obligations that boards must fund.

**In practice, many Bulgarian growth companies increasingly combine both approaches — real equity for core leadership alignment and virtual instruments for broader incentive coverage.**

The optimal blueprint lies in a calibrated mix, anchored in robust shareholder resolutions, meticulous contract drafting and continuous monitoring of evolving legislation — because the only thing more expensive than talent is a mis-designed incentive that fails to motivate it.

*\* For the avoidance of doubt, this text does not cover the regime for granting real equity or virtual shares in a Variable Capital Company (DPK). It focuses solely on the two most commonly used company forms under Bulgarian law – namely OOD and AD -and the conclusions herein should not be applied to DPK without a separate legal and tax assessment.*
### Bulgarian Dronamics Launches Platform for Continuous Airborne Detection and Targeting
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-dronamics-launches-platform-for-continuous-airborne-detection-and-targeting/
Last updated: 2026-02-12T11:10:41.000Z
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### Defense Tech Startup Occam Raises €3M Following Brave1 Integration Approval in Ukraine
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/occam-industries-raises-3m-pre-seed-brave1-ukraine/
Last updated: 2026-02-11T08:12:50.000Z
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### OpenAI and Hugging Face Angels Join Record Hungarian Pre-Seed Round for Robotics Startup
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/allonic-record-pre-seed-robotics-manufacturing/
Last updated: 2026-07-09T20:29:33.000Z
Budapest-based robotics startup Allonic has raised a record $7.2m pre-seed round led by Visionaries Club and backed by angels from OpenAI and Hugging Face.

👯 **Founders:** Benedek Tasi (CEO), Dávid Pelyva (CTO), David Holló (CPO)

📅 **Founding year:** 2021

🏭 **Industry:** Robotics manufacturing

💥 **Problem:** Robotic intelligence is advancing rapidly, but robot bodies are still slow, expensive, and complex to manufacture. Manual assembly of hundreds of precision parts limits scalability, customization, cost reduction, and innovation across the robotics industry.

📣 **Solution:** A fully automated manufacturing platform using proprietary **3D Tissue Braiding**, which 3D-weaves robotic “tissues” over skeletal cores—eliminating manual assembly and enabling fast, scalable, and customizable production of complex robotic bodies.

👥 **Customers:** Robotics manufacturers, industrial automation companies, electronics manufacturers, humanoid robotics companies, research institutions, and consumer technology companies.

🌱 **Stage:** Pre-seed

💰 **Investment amount:** $7.2M (€6.12M)

🚀 **Funded by:** Visionaries Club (lead), Day One Capital, Prototype, SDAC Ventures, TinyVC, plus angel investors from OpenAI, Hugging Face, ETH Zurich, and Northwestern University.

👁️‍🗨️ **Investor’s perspective:**

> “Robotics has reached a tipping point. The gap between sophisticated, AI-driven software and slow hardware manufacturing is now a limiting factor  
> for the entire industry. Allonic is the first company I’ve seen to address this problem at the infrastructure layer. By rethinking how robotic bodies are built from scratch, they open the door to faster iteration, lower costs, and robots that will finally be able to move beyond narrow industrial use cases.”  
>  
> — Marton Sarkadi Nagy, Partner at Visionaries Club

💡 **It will be spent on:** Accelerating development of the 3D Tissue Braiding platform, expanding engineering and operations teams, and supporting pilot projects and early commercial deployments with industrial partners.

💬 **In their own words:**

> “The trade-offs between durability and softness, dexterity and strength have always been dictated by the limits of manufacturing. We are removing those constraints and building a platform that allows robotics teams to design, build and iterate freely.”  
> — Benedek Tasi, Co-Founder & CEO

💪 **Their specialty:** Automated manufacturing of soft, compliant, and dexterous robotic bodies by collapsing mechanical complexity into a single continuous production process.

🔑 **Business model:** Robotic manufacturing platform combining proprietary hardware and software to produce robotic components or complete limbs directly from digital designs, reducing supply chain and assembly complexity.

👩‍🏫 **Market:** Global robotics and automation market, including industrial robotics, humanoid robotics, advanced manufacturing, and robotics R&D.

📊 **Traction:** Completed first pilot project in electronics manufacturing; strong inbound interest from humanoid robotics companies and major US consumer tech (“Big Tech”) players.
### Why Is a $700M Startup “Testing” Its AI in the Balkans?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/wonderful-bar-winkler-vedran-bajer-interview-adriatic-expansion/
Last updated: 2026-02-10T10:13:10.000Z
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### How a Romanian Startup Found Its Strongest Growth in Latin America
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/pluria-how-a-romanian-startup-found-its-strongest-growth-in-latin-america/
Last updated: 2026-07-07T10:52:15.000Z
We often choose markets carefully after months of analysis and forecasting, but sometimes, a market chooses us.

At[ Pluria](https://www.therecursive.com/romanian-founded-pluria-announced-their-first-acquisition-to-elevate-user-experience-in-workspaces/), we never placed Latin America on a whiteboard as part of a long-term expansion plan. Instead, the region became our primary market because we saw the reality of hybrid work showing itself there earlier, more clearly, and with more transparency than elsewhere. Today, our strongest growth comes from Latin America, with Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina at the core of our operations. In 2025 alone, we grew **2.5 times** compared to the previous year. We achieved this because we aligned our product with the way teams actually work.

### Building for flexibility as a rule

We started with a simple premise: the office is a coordination tool rather than just a physical place. We realized that teams need moments of alignment, collaboration, and structure across different workspaces instead of being tied to a single address five days a week.

This idea existed well before hybrid work became mainstream. Initially, like many European startups, we assumed Europe would be our natural testing ground. After all, flexible work policies and coworking spaces were already part of the conversation there. However, we found our most honest validation in places where friction was already high and workarounds were part of everyday life, rather than in mature markets with established habits.

### Our opportunistic start in Colombia

Our entry into Colombia resulted from a local contact and a simple decision to try, bypassing the usual market sizing exercises or expansion frameworks. The results surprised us. Adoption was fast, usage was intuitive, and teams needed very little explanation from us. Flexible access to multiple spaces already made sense to them.

In large Colombian cities, long commutes and dispersed teams make a single, stable office impractical. Consequently, we see coworking spaces and flexible offices used by startups, small teams, and corporate employees as a normal way of working, often while companies are still finalizing their internal policies. For these teams, experimenting with new tools is a standard part of how work happens. We felt immediately relevant because we formalized an existing behavior in a market that is open to trying solutions immediately.

### Taking flight after the pandemic

While we were born during the pandemic, our real growth began after it. We noticed that the companies adapting fastest to the new landscape were those already operating with distributed teams across multiple countries. These teams needed to be present locally, close to clients and operations, without being locked into one physical headquarters.

We were already operating in environments where flexibility was a practical necessity. Our teams coordinated in smaller groups, used multiple spaces across cities, and met in person only when collaboration truly required it. After restrictions lifted, our clients maintained this structure because the cost and rigidity of a single-office model no longer made sense. They kept the setup that allowed them to stay local, distributed, and coordinated at the same time.

### Insights from our collaboration data

In 2025, we shifted our focus toward understanding exactly how collaboration happens. Our[ Pluria](https://pluria.co/?ref=therecursive.com) aggregated data shows that collaboration remains central even as teams move away from working in a single place.

On average, teams used **6 different workspaces across 3 cities** every month, while our users overall worked from **63 cities** in a single month. Even as work spreads geographically, people still come together on purpose; **82%** of workdays on our platform are collaborative, involving two or more colleagues working together.

Most of this collaboration happens in open, flexible environments. We found that **64%** of workdays took place in open spaces, compared to **36%** in meeting rooms, with coworking spaces hosting most interactions. We now see the office as a tool that teams activate when they need coordination and alignment, rather than a default destination.

### Latin America as our global connector

As we grew in the region, we realized that Latin America acts as a key connector in global work. Many of our clients are companies based in the U.S. or Europe with distributed teams across Latin America. Through Pluria, we help them solve the challenge of coordinating across time zones, cultures, and locations.

In this context, we see flexible workspaces becoming anchors for global teams operating across borders. More than half of U.S. companies now plan to expand hiring in Latin America through 2026, with over **45%** of employers specifically looking to increase recruitment in the region in 2025\. This signals that distributed teams spanning the U.S. and Latin America are becoming a mainstream workforce strategy. Countries like Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina are attractive because they offer strong technical talent and close time-zone alignment with the U.S., making real-time collaboration practical.

### Our commitment to the future

To show how important Latin America has become for us at Pluria, I just moved with my family to Costa Rica to be closer to the market and support its growth. This decision reflects our strategy better than any document; this is where our product is being challenged, shaped, and validated every day.

Our growth in Latin America is a story of testing, taking risks, and paying close attention to usage habits. We believe the future of hybrid work takes form when teams adapt to real constraints, try things in practice, and keep what actually works. This process moves faster in environments where work is flexible by necessity.

Patterns often surface earlier outside traditional centers. Markets like Colombia, Mexico, or Argentina take risks and adjust along the way rather than waiting for trends to be fully validated. Latin America became central to Pluria because it is where our product made sense first. Increasingly, this is where signals about the future of work appear before they turn into strategy decks or headlines.
### Poland’s VC Market Leans Heavily on Seed-Stage Funding
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/poland-vc-market-2025-mega-rounds-seed-growth/
Last updated: 2026-02-09T11:17:19.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: ElevenLabs Becomes Poland’s First Decacorn
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-weekly-elevenlabs-polish-decacorn-funding-roundup/
Last updated: 2026-02-06T13:43:56.000Z
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### Why FirstMark Capital Just Put €20M Into Croatian Daytona?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/daytona-series-a-infrastructure-for-ai-agents-firstmark-capital/
Last updated: 2026-02-06T10:06:50.000Z
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### Czech-Slovak Readmio Secures €1M from Polish Simpact Ventures
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/readmio-secures-1m-funding-simpact-ventures/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T09:11:03.000Z
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### Romanian EdTech Startup Kinderpedia Raises €2.2M in Growth Funding Round
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/romanian-edtech-kinderpedia-raises-2-2m-funding/
Last updated: 2026-02-05T09:58:02.000Z
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### ElevenLabs Raises $500M Series D at $11B Valuation
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/elevenlabs-500m-series-d-11b-valuation/
Last updated: 2026-02-23T08:41:22.000Z
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### 8 Soon-to-Be Unicorns in CEE, According to Investors
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/8-soon-to-be-unicorns-in-cee-according-to-investors/
Last updated: 2026-02-04T12:14:31.000Z
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### Europe’s Defense Tech Investing Plays by Different Rules
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/european-defense-tech-venture-capital/
Last updated: 2026-02-05T08:19:57.000Z
A few years ago, defense was still a taboo word in most European venture conversations. Today, it’s one of the most dynamic corners of the ecosystem: European defense and security tech funding reached record levels in 2024 and remained elevated in 2025, with [defense emerging as one of the fastest-growing segments](https://www.therecursive.com/europe-s-defense-tech-debate-needs-context-not-moral-panic/) of the European VC market.Taken under the NATO Innovation Fund’s wider definition of “defense, security and resilience” – which spans robotics, biotech, quantum and dual-use AI – these technologies now make up roughly 10% of all VC investment in Europe. But if this boom is here to stay, the real question becomes: 

****how should investors approach this space?**

## This shift is (not) extraordinary

For decades, defense was viewed as politically sensitive and largely the preserve of major contractors; venture investors simply had little room, or mandate, to participate. That makes today’s record-funding levels stand out not just as a temporary reaction to a single conflict, but as a deeper change in mindset.

Even if the war ended tomorrow and demand for certain battlefield systems, especially drones, cooled, the strategic need for Europe to rearm and modernise its deterrence capabilities would continue. **What seems truly permanent is not the spike in orders, but the long-term focus on [defense innovation](https://www.therecursive.com/top-defense-dual-use-startups-cee/) itself.**

Governments are actively pushing innovation into the venture space, acting as both buyer of technology and provider of capital. That dual role — where the customer and the capital provider are often the same entity — is reshaping the rules of the game. And for investors who have been close to defense-related innovation through broader ecosystem relationships, this shift is particularly visible: **the dynamics, incentives and timelines differ sharply from traditional venture spaces**.

## Defense autonomy demands a different investor logic

We cannot simply pour venture money into the sector and pretend it behaves like SaaS. Autonomous systems, safety protocols, procurement logic and dual-use dynamics follow rules that diverge fundamentally from conventional software investing.

For anyone who has spent time close to defense-related innovation, **these differences are immediately visible**: timelines are longer, stakeholders more complex and the feedback loop between deployment and iteration is shaped by regulation as much as by technology.

> Ignoring that reality would be the fastest way to disappoint founders, misprice risk and under-build the technologies that actually matter.

What follows is a simple argument: **autonomy in defense is really about safety; the investor’s math must be more sober**; dual-use mostly works when sequenced; and the future of the category will be shaped by autonomy, data and counter-drone — not by pitch-deck slogans. In fact, many of the most capable companies in this space barely market themselves at all. Some generate more than €100 million in revenue without even maintaining a public LinkedIn presence, a reminder that defense innovation often grows through operational credibility, offline networks and institutional trust rather than branding or narrative polish. It is a category where traction and product speaks louder than storytelling.

## The investor’s math in defense is different — it starts with the customer

Investing in defense technology follows a fundamentally different dynamic compared to conventional VC. The customer base is extremely narrow: in practice, **states, governments, and ministries of defense** — which makes the market behave very differently from civil tech. Unlike software or AI, where products can scale globally across thousands of customers, defense startups ultimately sell to a handful of highly specific buyers.

That reality fundamentally shapes how early-stage investing works. I believe that at pre-seed and seed stage it’s a smarter risk decision to back a company only when there is a clear indication that a relevant programme or buyer actually exists. Without that, even strong technology often has nowhere to go.

The “let’s see what the market becomes” approach, which can work in commercial technology and has helped create some of the most significant outliers, including Airbnb and Uber, where anticipating customer needs before they are fully formed can be a winning strategy, has a far narrower window in defense. It is not impossible, but it tends to require much more capital, far deeper access to end users and a longer timeline to validate. **With only a small number of credible buyers, the risk profile is simply different.**

> It also makes long-shot outcomes harder to assume. The kind of >1000× returns that are theoretically possible in early-stage software are structurally rare in defense.

That doesn’t make the category unattractive, it often produces highly resilient companies with deep strategic importance. On the other hand, **it does require investors to accept a different return profile**: growth that comes in step-changes rather than network-driven compounding, fewer customers, and a higher dependence on procurement decisions.

Among CEE investors who have spent time analysing the space, this shift in expectations is increasingly recognised: return profiles tend to look closer to PE than classic VC — less extreme upside, but also a more grounded downside when technology is tied to concrete operational needs.

## Procurement pipelines are slow (unless there is a war)

Defense startups operate under constraints that simply do not exist in conventional tech. Their primary customer is the states, not private industry, which means procurement generally takes longer and requires far deeper technical and security validation. There is the notable exception of Ukraine, where wartime conditions have forced procurement pipelines to be rebuilt for rapid testing and deployment.

Technologies must pass stringent testing, meet classification and safety requirements, and navigate export-control rules that restrict where and to whom they can sell. These limits make go-to-market fundamentally slower and more complex.

> There is no fast “land-and-expand,” no freemium motion, and no shortcut through early adopters in the conventional tech sense; even though some units or specialised teams may pilot new systems early, these are structured trials, not the kind of rapid user-led adoption seen in commercial software.

**Ukraine represents a uniquely open model**, where innovation happens through tight, iterative collaboration between frontline teams and founders, including founders from outside the country working directly with Ukrainian units. The path to revenue is real, but it is built around programmes, compliance and long-term reliability. The latter is defined less by a fixed product and more by the ability to operate, produce and adapt under continuously changing conditions.

## Autonomy starts with constraints

Autonomous systems are often framed as a leap into the future — drones and robotic platforms that can navigate, detect and act without a human in the loop. But in defense, autonomy is more about safety, reliability and control.

Across ISR, targeting and counter-UAS, autonomy only works when surrounded by a dense layer of guardrails: geofencing, the ability to identify friendly forces, recognition of civilian infrastructure, no-strike lists, fail-safe behaviours under jamming or signal loss. These mechanisms are not “add-ons.” They define whether a system is deployable at all.

This is why autonomy in defense is still one of the most technically demanding fields for early-stage companies. **The bar for accuracy, redundancy and predictability is dramatically higher than in commercial robotics**. In many cases, the engineering challenge is not “how autonomous can we make it,” but rather *“how can we make sure it behaves exactly within the limits we set.”*

The scale at which autonomy is now being deployed shows how quickly the field is maturing. [Auterion’s recently reported plan to deliver 33,000](https://auterion.com/auterion-secures-contract-to-deliver-33000-skynode-drone-strike-kits-to-ukraine?ref=therecursive.com) AI-enabled drone kits to Ukraine illustrates this shift: autonomy has moved beyond prototypes and into real, contested environments, where systems must handle jamming, degraded GPS and rapidly changing conditions.

**For investors, this creates both opportunity and complexity**. Autonomy is strategically important and has broad potential, but many safety-critical layers require deep engineering, long testing cycles and close work with end-users. In many ways, this is precisely the kind of frontier work early venture capital was built to support — yet today’s conventional VC has shifted toward lower-variance software bets, avoiding hardware or long R&D cycles. As a result, the most promising ideas in defense autonomy can look “too early” by current venture norms, even when the underlying need is immediate.

## Dual-use works only when sequenced, not simultaneous

Dual-use has become one of the most frequently cited concepts in European defense tech, often framed as a way to expand markets and make technologies more “venture-compatible.” For years, this label also emerged because **many funds simply could not or would not invest in defense** directly, pushing founders to position their technology as dual-use. In practice, though, early-stage teams rarely succeed when they try to serve both civil and defense customers at the same time. **The two markets operate on completely different rhythms**: different sales motions, different requirements, different procurement pathways, and often entirely different decision-makers and stakeholders.

Most founders in defense come from military or security backgrounds. Their networks, understanding of requirements and product instincts are shaped around defense use cases. That is an advantage — but it also means civil-market expansion usually requires building a parallel team with different skills, channels and a GTM strategy. The reverse is equally true: teams that start with civil robotics, sensors or AI often underestimate how complex defense procurement and safety validation can be.

That is why **dual-use works best as a sequence, not a starting point**. Early focus brings clarity: one core customer group, one core problem, one clear route to market. Only later, once the product and the organisation are stable, it does make sense to split into civil and defense lines with dedicated teams for sales, product and compliance.

A good illustration is Vermeer: the company originally built its GPS-free visual positioning system for film and industrial use — enabling highly precise drone flight for cinematography and inspection. Only once that core technology was proven did the team extend it into defense applications, where GPS-denied and jammed environments make visual navigation a critical capability. Rather than a rigid sequencing model, this reflects a pattern we see frequently: early teams often explore both civil and defense use cases, then double down where the initial pull is strongest. In practice, **many companies that start on the civil side find their strongest demand in defense** — *while the reverse rarely occurs*.

## Where is the next decade heading? Towards autonomy, data and counter-drone

From the conversations and signals across the ecosystem, three vectors appear to be gathering momentum: greater autonomy inside decision-making loops, the centrality of data and navigation resilience, and the rise of counter-drone and energy-bound systems.

### Greater autonomy in decision-making loops

The technology for more autonomous systems already exists; what limits deployment today are ethical, legal and safety considerations rather than capability. Elements are already in use today, most visibly within modern air-defense systems. The implication is clear: more autonomy is coming, because contested environments require faster sensing, interpretation and reaction than humans alone can provide. It is also driven by the sheer scale of what governments need to protect, from airspace and borders to critical infrastructure, where relying on continuous human touchpoints is simply not feasible.

### Data as the centre of gravity

Precision navigation, perception, cyber resilience and on-edge computation all depend on data pipelines that are robust under jamming, GNSS denial and degraded connectivity. In this sense, Europe’s gap in space infrastructure and advanced chips is a practical limitation on the performance of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. Investments like Helsing’s €600m round show how strongly capital is concentrating around sovereign AI-defense software. Moreover, the Vermeer’s GPS-independent visual navigation highlights how critical alternative positioning systems will be in environments where GNSS cannot be relied on.

### Counter-drone systems and energy-bounded directed energy

Drone warfare has fundamentally changed the battlefield, and Europe’s defense priorities with it. Counter-UAS solutions are becoming a core strategic capability. Directed-energy systems such as high-power lasers are promising but constrained by extreme energy requirements and thermal management. That makes innovations in batteries, charging systems and energy efficiency as important as the interceptors themselves.

Taken together, these vectors point to a future where defense innovation is less about single “breakthrough technologies” and more about integrated systems — autonomy, data and energy — that must work reliably under pressure.

### Clarity is what European defense needs now

Europe finally has the talent, capital and political will to build serious defense technology. The question now is whether we can approach this sector with the clarity it demands — recognising its constraints, respecting its safety requirements, and investing with a long-term view rather than borrowing assumptions from commercial software.

If we can do that, Europe has a real opportunity not just to catch up, but to shape how the next generation of defense capabilities is built. And that requires an open discussion — between investors, founders, engineers and policymakers — about what it will take to get there.

**This piece is meant as an invitation to that conversation.**
### Polish Nomagic Secures Series B Extension to Scale Physical AI for Warehousing
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/nomagic-raises-10m-series-b-extension-physical-ai-warehouse-robotics/
Last updated: 2026-02-02T14:09:15.000Z
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### Less Than 50% of CEE VCs Expect a Better Investment Climate in 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-vc-investment-climate-2026-investor-survey/
Last updated: 2026-02-20T16:29:08.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: EnduroSat Awarded Missile Defense Agency SHIELD IDIQ Contract
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-weekly-startup-funding-deals-ai-space/
Last updated: 2026-01-30T15:46:53.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why Raising Too Late Kills Startups
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/why-raising-too-late-kills-startups/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T11:49:01.000Z
Why Raising Too Late Kills Startups? In this episode of The Recursive Roundtable, we unpack one of the most misunderstood topics for founders: fundraising strategy — not just the “how,” but the when, the why, and the who.

🎙️ **GUESTS**:

- **Iliya Valchanov**, Co-founder & CEO @ Juma
- **Konstantin Bezuhanov**, Co-founder & CEO @ Evrotrust
- **Stoil Vasilev**, Co-founder & CEO @ Paypercut

*They share:*  
💡 why starting your fundraising too late is the #1 mistake seed-stage companies make  
💡 how to structure your investor outreach like a sales funnel  
💡 what separates “feature AI” from true AI-powered competitive advantage  
💡 how to choose the right investor — not just the one with the biggest check  
💡 terms, valuation, control and the long game of capital

*You’ll hear real stories about:*  
👉 outreach strategy and KPIs (77 conversations ≈ 1 deal)  
👉 managing rejection and staying confident  
👉 the importance of building relationships long before you need capital  
👉 why a bad partner can be worse than no partner  
👉 practical negotiation lessons and term-sheet wisdom

Whether you’re gearing up for your first round or planning Series A+, this episode gives you the mental model and playbook you need to approach fundraising with clarity and confidence.
### Top Funding Rounds Raised by Polish Startups in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-polish-startups-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T14:53:53.000Z
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### How Afranga Brings EU-Regulated Private Credit to Retail Investors Across 27 Countries
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/how-afranga-brings-eu-regulated-private-credit-to-retail-investors-across-27-countries/
Last updated: 2026-01-29T09:38:42.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Greek-Founded Pallma AI Raised a €1.36M Pre-Seed Round Led by Marathon Venture Capital
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/greek-founded-pallma-ai-raised-a-e1-36m-pre-seed-round-led-by-marathon-venture-capital/
Last updated: 2026-01-28T13:25:56.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Founders, Stop Dumping Money on Your Go-To-Market Strategy
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/go-to-market-strategy-for-2026-scale-without-big-budgets/
Last updated: 2026-01-28T11:50:50.000Z
If you’re a founder, at least once you’ve googled “go-to-market strategy.” You’ve asked ChatGPT, and maybe read a few Medium posts.

You’ve even downloaded every free template out there. And then followed the same default advice — **define your ICP, pick channels, build funnels, and run campaigns**.

It’s a great way to start, but most of the advice are expensive and slow.

Now you do not need to hire a team of sales or make a big budget. Cursor went from [$1M to $500M ARR](https://www.news.aakashg.com/p/how-cursor-grows?ref=therecursive.com) in about a few years without spending on ads. Midjourney hit $200M revenue with [11](https://medium.com/@danielbentes/the-tiny-teams-revolution-b98d1822ba19?ref=therecursive.com) employees. Grammarly built a [$13B valuation](https://en.ain.ua/2021/11/18/grammarly-raises-200m-at-a-13b-valuation/?ref=therecursive.com) mostly on product and SEO.

They just stopped doing what everyone else does.

## What works vs. what’s dead

In 2026, [81%](https://thunderbit.com/blog/b2b-buying-stats?ref=therecursive.com) of B2B buyers will pick their vendor before they even talk to sales. Read that again. Your expensive sales team is meeting people who’ve already decided.

Meanwhile, paid ads became a rich company’s game. The channels that used to level the playing field now favor whoever has deeper pockets.

But Cursor, Midjourney, Notion, and Linear all hit hundreds of millions without traditional sales teams or paid ads.

## So what’s actually working?

1/ **Forget your ICP too early.** When you lock onto one customer profile, you stop noticing other groups who might love your product even more. Test different segments, stay flexible. Early-stage startups grow through iteration, so an ICP can wait.

2/ **Build leverage instead of buying reach.** One good partnership can bring more real users than months of Facebook ads. Think about how Stripe became the default payment processor everywhere — as of 2025\. It gets around[ 35 000](https://sqmagazine.co.uk/stripe-statistics/?ref=therecursive.com) new businesses every month by integrating into products like Shopify, and Amazon.

Or how Zapier grew by integrating with everything — Slack, Google Sheets, HubSpot, Mailchimp. This makes distribution part of the product itself.

3/ **Community has become the most underrated growth engine**. [Midjourney](https://www.demandsage.com/midjourney-statistics/?ref=therecursive.com) has 20 million users on Discord with up to 2.5 million active daily. Each user is both a customer and marketing channel.

4/ **Your product is your go-to-market**. The best product-led companies post [130-150%](https://openviewpartners.com/product-led-growth/?ref=therecursive.com#how-does-plg-pricing-work) net dollar retention — existing users expanding naturally, without anyone selling to them. Cursor operates with [12 people](https://taptwicedigital.com/stats/cursor?ref=therecursive.com) generating $100M in revenue.

5/ **Cold email still works**. When you personalize, target precisely, and bring real value, it’s still one of the highest-ROI channels out there.

The cheapest strategies require patience and creativity. They can’t be delegated to an agency or solved by throwing money at the problem. That’s exactly why they work.

## Where to spend and where to save?

Your go-to-market strategy works in two distinct moments. First, when you’re reaching your first users and testing product-market fit. Second, when you already have PMF and want to scale.

Snapchat, Uber, and Revolut can burn millions on marketing. They have funding, teams, and data to back every move. Early-stage startups don’t. In both cases — whether you’re still testing or already scaling — you don’t need big budgets.

**Before PMF:** every dollar tests a hypothesis. Run small experiments to see which channels bring users who actually stay. Use their feedback to improve your product.

**Cheap channels matter more than paid acquisition** — LinkedIn for B2B, TikTok for Gen Z, Reddit for niche problems only your users understand.

**After PMF:** scale the channels that already perform. Track retention obsessively to maintain quality as you grow. Increase spending gradually.

A rough allocation could look like [40-45%](https://www.marketingscoop.com/marketing/startup-marketing-budget-how-to-write-an-incredible-budget-for-2023/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) on paid acquisition, 25% on content, 10% on events and PR, 5% on branding, and 10% on headcount or freelance support. But these numbers mean nothing if you are losing $2 on every customer you acquire. If this happens, it means that your unit economics don’t work.

**Unit economics is the reality check on whether each new user creates value or loses money**. It goes beyond CAC and LTV. Healthy growth needs strong margins, short payback, low churn, solid retention, real engagement, and working referrals.

When these metrics are still unstable, growth takes a back seat to efficiency and cost control.

**Save on:** large sales teams before product-market fit, broad paid acquisition, expensive marketing automation tools, generic content and brand campaigns, premature channel diversification.

**Spend on:** exceptional product experience, one brilliant community manager, strategic partnership development, high-quality SEO-optimized content, design that makes your product feel premium.

### “Spend your time where you can’t spend money.”

The math is simple. A world-class designer costs less than three mediocre SDRs. A community manager costs less than your monthly ad spend.

**Building a community means showing up daily for months before seeing results**. SEO takes six months minimum to gain traction. Product-led growth requires making hard product decisions that sometimes sacrifice short-term revenue.

**This is why most founders still default to the expensive playbook**. Writing a check for ads or hiring salespeople feels like progress. It’s tangible and what everyone else does.

But just because something feels like progress doesn’t mean it is. So spend your time where you can’t spend money.
### Top Funding Rounds Raised by Baltic Startups in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/top-funding-rounds-raised-by-baltic-startups-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-01-27T16:00:08.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Croatian InsiderCX Secures Seed Round to Expand Its AI-powered Patient Experience Platform
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/insidercx-seed-round-market-expansion-healthtech-patient-experience/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T12:31:02.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### New Index! How Well do the CEE Countries Support the Journey of an Entrepreneur?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-innovators-business-environment-index-2026-startupblink-countries-entrepreneurs/
Last updated: 2026-01-27T09:01:34.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Polish-Rooted Arctis AI Raises Million-Dollar Pre-Seed Funding for Construction Contracts
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/polish-rooted-arctis-ai-secures-million-scale-pre-seed/
Last updated: 2026-01-27T08:44:32.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Top Funding Rounds Raised by Hungarian Startups in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/top-funding-rounds-raised-by-hungarian-startups-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-07-10T10:31:11.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Top Funding Rounds Raised by Greek Startups in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/top-funding-rounds-raised-by-greek-startups-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T11:25:16.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### FinovateEurope 2026 to Gather 1,000+ Fintech and Banking Decision-Makers in London
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/finovate-europe-2026-to-gather-1-000-fintech-and-banking-decision-makers-in-london/
Last updated: 2026-03-26T15:54:36.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Top Funding Rounds Raised by Slovenian Startups in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/top-funding-rounds-raised-by-slovenian-startups-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-07-27T08:55:30.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Romanian Startups in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-romanian-startups-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T11:25:17.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Ukraine’s New Tech Unicorn Is Here
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-ukraines-new-unicorn-funding-deals/
Last updated: 2026-01-23T11:51:24.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Czech-Founded Mews Raises Over €255M Series D Round
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/mews-series-d-funding-300m-valuation-2-5-billion/
Last updated: 2026-01-22T15:29:03.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Ukrainian Preply: How a Regional EdTech Reached Unicorn Status?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ukrainian-edtech-preply-unicorn-status-learnings/
Last updated: 2026-02-13T14:17:47.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why the Sofia-Paris Tech Bridge is Open to Everyone
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/french-tech-sofia-bulgarian-startup-ecosystem/
Last updated: 2026-01-22T13:53:58.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Omid Ekhlasi on Building Techarena and Why CEE’s Founders Should Look North
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/omid-ekhlasi-on-building-techarena-and-why-cee-s-founders-should-look-north/
Last updated: 2026-01-22T16:02:27.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Bulgarian-Founded LatticeFlow AI Acquires AI Sonar to Deliver Secure AI Governance
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/end-to-end-ai-governance/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T09:11:53.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### EU Inc Is Confirmed. What That Means?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/eu-inc-was-officially-confirmed-von-der-layen-davos-what-that-means/
Last updated: 2026-01-21T10:27:16.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Top Funding Rounds Raised by Slovak Startups in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/top-funding-rounds-raised-by-slovak-startups-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-01-23T11:59:51.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Working Alongside Bulgaria’s Tech Scene: What We Witnessed in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/working-alongside-bulgaria-s-tech-scene-what-we-saw-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-01-20T09:12:30.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Czech Startups in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-czech-startups-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T11:25:17.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Serbian Startups in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-for-serbian-startups-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-01-23T12:15:19.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Vienna Business Agency Seeks 15 International Startups for 2026 Vienna Startup Package and DACH Market Entry
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/vienna-business-agency-seeks-15-international-startups-for-2026-vienna-startup-package-and-dach-market-entry/
Last updated: 2026-03-31T10:54:16.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### 30,000 Parts and 6% Visibility: The High-Stakes of Modern Automaking
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/automotive-supply-chain-visibility/
Last updated: 2026-01-19T11:08:13.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Biggest Funding Rounds of Croatian Startups in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/croatia-2025-top-biggest-funding-rounds-startup-investments/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T11:50:53.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Mira Murati’s Startup Loses Key Leaders as They Head Back to OpenAI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-weekly-funding-deals-ai-news/
Last updated: 2026-01-16T21:16:00.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### “The Judgment Call of Your Existence”: Lubomila Jordanova on the Weight of Acquisition Offers
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/plan-a-diginex-acquisition-lubomila-jordanova/
Last updated: 2026-01-16T09:08:45.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### AI Will Break Companies Before It Saves Them
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-boom-vs-dot-com-bubble/
Last updated: 2026-05-28T14:03:49.000Z
More than 50% of recent venture capital investment has flowed into AI, raising inevitable comparisons to the dot-com era, when capital rushed into internet startups before real value was fully proven. We discuss what history can teach us, why hype cycles are rooted in human psychology, and how this time may be both similar — and fundamentally different.

🎙️ **GUESTS**:

- **Svetozar Georgiev**, General Partner at Eleven Ventures
- **Raya Yunakova**, Investor at LAUNCHub Ventures
- **Tsvetan Tsvetanov**, Lead Software Engineer, Co-Owner at Camplight

The conversation examines what’s actually changing today:

☑️ why enterprise AI adoption is harder than expected;  
☑️ why many pilots never reach production;  
☑️ why AI is boosting individual productivity faster than it can transform whole teams or organizations.

We also unpack the growing impact on hiring, junior talent, and the future of technical education.
### Building a Startup Culture Through University Incubators: Ukrainian Experience
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/building-a-startup-culture-through-university-incubators-ukrainian-experience/
Last updated: 2026-01-15T14:31:36.000Z
Back in 2016, after visiting [a university incubator in Estonia](https://sciencebusiness.net/network-updates/university-tartu-startup-lab-enhances-competence-entrepreneurship-teachers-ukraine?ref=therecursive.com#:~:text=According%20to%20Andrii%20Zaikin%2C%20a,that%20is%20implemented%20across%20Ukraine.), I returned to Ukraine with a simple idea: our students also need **a space to test ideas, fail safely, and build things that matter.**

For the first two years, we conducted small pilots at various universities. Students volunteered, formed informal communities, and initiated early projects. It was exciting, but also clear that creating a full-scale incubator in every university wasn’t realistic yet.

By 2019, we realized the model needed a shift. Instead of trying to “install” an incubator everywhere, we moved online and focused on what scales naturally — education. That’s how the idea of [Entrepreneurial University](https://thedigital.gov.ua/news/education/initsiativa-mintsifri-ta-yep-pidpriemnitskiy-universitet-stala-odnieyu-z-naykorisnishikh-u-vishakh?ref=therecursive.com) was born: a structured academic course that replaces traditional incubation by teaching the core of startup thinking. We created a semester-long program, trained lecturers, and **integrated the course directly into official curricula** so it could run independently inside universities.

The real shift happened in the summer of 2020, when, with the support of the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the Ministry of Education, we introduced the new program to universities across the country. After we launched the course “*Innovation Entrepreneurship and Startup Management*,” we expected maybe a few universities to join. Instead, more than 140 applications were received in the first month alone. **We selected 70, and by September, the course was already being taught nationwide.**

Five years later, this model basically lives on its own. In some universities, the course is optional, in others it’s already mandatory, and every semester about 2000 students go through it. In total, [more than 20000 students](https://thedigital.gov.ua/news/education/mintsifra-ta-yep-zapustyat-drugu-khvilyu-initsiativi-pidpriemnitskiy-universitet?ref=therecursive.com) have taken the program, and many of them later join national startup competitions or build their first projects inside startup studios and incubators.

What began as a small experiment has quietly become one of the strongest drivers of Ukraine’s university startup movement.

## What happens when universities and incubators join forces?

Ukraine’s university ecosystem is still developing, but early successes show **how powerful embedded incubators can be when they work side by side with academic communities**.

The incubator model combines structured mentorship, hands-on workshops, lab access, and networking opportunities. Students and researchers receive guidance on business modeling, market validation, pitching, and scaling their ideas, while embedded incubators foster a culture that encourages experimentation and iteration.

This framework allows academic projects to transition efficiently from lab research to market-ready solutions, and I am glad I can share more about some of them here.

**Elomia Health**

[Elomia Health](https://elomia.com/?ref=therecursive.com) was born in 2019 from the founder’s personal experience with depression and a deep desire to destigmatize mental health care. He imagined a space where people could talk openly and launched an AI-powered chatbot that listens, understands, and supports 24/7\. The journey actually started earlier, in 2018, when the team joined one of the first cohorts of our university incubator.

At that time, we were still testing offline models in different universities, including a pilot incubator in Kharkiv. Even during that early period our support for Elomia Health was pivotal in shaping their business model. Through the YEP! program, the startup received mentorship on structuring a subscription-based B2C service and later scaling it into B2B offerings for employee benefits. The incubator also guided their market research, pitching, and strategic planning, helping transform a personal idea into a viable product.

Today, Elomia Health serves over 45k users, with 98% reporting that talking with the AI “helped” them.

**Lviv Hydrogen**

[Lviv Hydrogen](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lviv-hydrogen?ref=therecursive.com) started as a research project: the founder, a chemist and PhD student at [Ivan Franko National University of Lviv](https://lnu.edu.ua/en/?ref=therecursive.com), turned his work on metal-hydride materials into a startup idea in February 2023\. Through the YEP’s mentorship and Seeds of Bravery Program, the team created their first pitch deck, learned to assess the market, and defined a clear value proposition.

They also worked within [the SID City Science Park](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sid-city-scientific-park/?ref=therecursive.com) at [Lviv Polytechnic](https://lpnu.ua/en?ref=therecursive.com), which focuses on turning academic research into startup-ready technologies. The incubator provided mentorship, lab access, and prototyping resources that were crucial in moving from idea to prototype.

Today, Lviv Hydrogen develops demonstration modules for hydrogen storage using metal-hydride technology: 0.28 L volume, 1.8 kg weight, up to 70 bar pressure, storing around 24 g of hydrogen. The team has secured €60,000 in grant funding from Seeds of Bravery, filed a national patent, and plans to submit an international PCT application, moving toward TRL 6 after prototype validation.

**Univera**

[Univera](https://univera.app/en/students?ref=therecursive.com), a startup founded by students of Odesa Polytechnic, is building a seamless digital interface that connects universities with their students. What’s really cool is that the founders started as students volunteering in their university’s early offline startup initiatives, long before YEP moved everything online and scaled up.

Today, their solution is already active in 20+ universities, including [Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv](https://knu.ua/en/?ref=therecursive.com) and [Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.](https://kpi.ua/en?ref=therecursive.com) Over the past year, the team has secured $12k through the Alliance of Democracies’ democratic technology pitch competitions and has received a €50k grant from [Seeds of Bravery](https://seedsofbravery.eu/?ref=therecursive.com) to further scale their impact.

## How the university startup studios model works today

University incubators don’t succeed because someone sets a “model.” They succeed by changing the academic culture. In particular, I see a few recurring factors:

- - **Embedding entrepreneurship in the curriculum**. Formal courses alone don’t create startups, but they do normalize the idea that innovation is part of the academic community, not a special reward for a select few.
- - **Creating consistent, guided practice**. Hackathons, mentoring, and market validation workshops allow theory to become practice in a short period of time. Students learn by doing, failing, and repeating.
- - **Providing access to spaces where building can actually happen**. Labs, prototyping rooms, and science parks turn ideas into MVPs.
- - **Cross-pollination between students, researchers, and industry**. When chemists, engineers, economists and designers finally talk to each other, new ideas emerge that would never have emerged within the confines of a single department.
- - **National coherence instead of isolated efforts**. One incubator is a project, but dozens of universities working together become a full-fledged movement.

That’s why YEP positioned itself not as a single incubator but as a national catalyst, helping universities develop their own capabilities and models, rather than importing a single template.

## What worked and what clearly didn’t

One of YEP’s key successes has been the **launch and expansion of the “Entrepreneurial University” program**. That year, 70 universities introduced courses on innovation and startup project management, aiming to develop an entrepreneurial mindset among students, involve faculty in practical startup education, and engage university administration in creating systemic change.

These early efforts showed that **combining formal courses with hands-on activities** (workshops, hackathons, and mentorship) creates an authentic culture of experimentation. Support from national partners, including government leaders, also helped signal that university entrepreneurship matters and is **taken seriously at the national level**.

At the same time, certain obstacles persist. Many universities publicly supported “innovation,” but internal structures were slow to move. First, **bureaucracy** often outpaced student enthusiasm. Some incubators lacked sustainable funding and remained dependent on grants. Second, **changing mindsets** is harder than launching programs, and cultural inertia is real — that’s why the work is far from done.

If Ukraine (and other CEE countries) want its universities to become true engines of innovation, we need more than isolated success stories. We need:

- - Sustainable funding models for university innovation offices;
  - Integration between research labs and entrepreneurial programs;
  - Stronger partnerships between universities and industry;
  - National coordination, not fragmented local projects.

But above all, **we need to continue to nurture the culture that began to take shape in those crowded rooms where students refused to sit and just listen, but wanted to build.**

Because the future of Ukrainian innovation, or any other country in the region, will not be created by one incubator, one university, or one initiative. It will be created by a united, empowered national community of students, researchers, faculty, and partners who believe that universities can be the birthplace of real, impactful change.
### Biggest Funding Rounds for Bulgarian Startups in 2025: EnduroSat Still Leads
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/biggest-funding-rounds-in-bulgaria-h2-2025-endurosat-still-leads-among/
Last updated: 2026-07-13T14:06:07.000Z
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### DLD Munich 26 Brings Together Global Experts on AI and Europe’s Digital Future
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/dld-munich-26-2026/
Last updated: 2026-01-13T13:42:02.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### “Products Don’t Hold Companies Together, People Do”: Victoria Repa on Building BetterMe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/victoria-repa-betterme-people-over-products/
Last updated: 2026-01-13T12:47:34.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### e2vc Announces the First Close of Its €100M Fund III
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/e2vc-first-close-100m-fund-iii/
Last updated: 2026-01-13T13:12:58.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: CEE-Rooted Companies Take the Stage at CES 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-cee-companies-ces-2026/
Last updated: 2026-01-09T11:29:59.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Regional Cleantech Is Done Waiting
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cleantech-for-see-eu-funding-suzana-carp-eib-eic/
Last updated: 2026-01-12T09:03:29.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### What Compliance Changes Are Coming to FinTech in 2026?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/compliance-changes-fintech-regulation-2026/
Last updated: 2026-01-08T14:42:49.000Z
If you work in fintech, you’ve no doubt often felt how hard it can be to constantly shift your stance as the regulatory ground changes under your feet. For years, participants in this sector have complained that **financial regulation hasn’t kept pace with the pace of technological innovation**. But in 2025 — and in 2026, regulation is picking up the pace. So now it is on fintechs to make sure they’re the ones keeping up.

Personally, I see a clear pattern emerging: watchdogs want more visibility, more data, and more direct control over how digital finance operates. And while this may sound intimidating to some, it can also become a competitive edge for firms that adapt early.

So, what’s actually changing? Which regulatory priorities will affect the EU landscape for fintechs the most in 2026 and beyond it? Let us work it out.

## Supervision is moving towards centralization

If we look toward the EU, we can see that for years, this region’s model landscape was shaped by **national regulators interpreting the same rules in slightly different ways**. Now, however, that era is coming to an end, giving way to a demand for greater clarity.

ESMA is undergoing a major [MiFID II/MiFIR review](https://www.esma.europa.eu/trading/mifid-ii-and-mifir-review?ref=therecursive.com) aimed at tightening market structure rules, so as to make trading in Europe less fragmented, easier to understand, and harder to manipulate. In October 2025, the watchdog [issued](https://www.therecursive.com/content/files/www-esma-europa-eu/sites/default/files/2025-10/esma74-276584410-11123%5Fpublic%5Fstatement%5Fon%5Fthe%5Ftransition%5Ffor%5Fthe%5Fapplication%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fmifid%5Fii-mifir%5Freview%5Fno-2.pdf) a public statement that outlines revised transparency rules, showing that the review on the whole explicitly targets how transparent and open markets must be.

In broader terms, ESMA is looking at how markets are organized, how prices are formed, and how information is shared with investors. **For fintechs, this means more detailed reporting, stricter data standards, and fewer grey areas in how trading services must operate.**

At the same time, since around mid-2025, the regulator has been collecting feedback specifically focused on the [customer journey](https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-asks-input-retail-investor-journey?ref=therecursive.com). Whether any regulatory or non-regulatory barriers may be discouraging participation, how requirements operate in practice and shape investor experiences, and if any particular adjustments might help simplify things.

To me, this shows that the regulator is looking beyond just technical compliance and instead examining how people actually move through the entire investing process. It’s a strong sign that the **next wave of rules will focus more on onboarding flows, disclosure formats, and how firms shape investor decision-making**. Fintechs should anticipate tighter expectations for how their products are structured, explained, and distributed.

Finally, there is a strong push from the European Commission to give ESMA more direct control over exchanges, crypto firms, and clearing houses, instead of leaving most supervision in the hands of national regulators. The reason for this is simple: today, the same set of rules can be interpreted differently, depending on which EU member state they were dealing with. This tends to create a lot of confusion, slowing down cross-border business operations.

Should oversight become centralized under ESMA — and there’s a good chance that it will — those inconsistencies can be dealt away with. For fintech firms that operate across borders, it will also mean cleaning up their own internal processes and systems. Instead of using different reporting standards for different regions, they’ll need one consistent data setup that can report accurately to both ESMA and regulators in other countries. Companies that build with this unified structure in mind early on will find it much easier to scale across markets faster and avoid unexpected compliance issues later on.

## Crypto is being absorbed into mainstream financial regulation

For a long time, the crypto markets have been something that regulators tried to move around, as they were too niche to really accommodate. Now, they are far from niche, and so the days of “light touch” are over.

Since the introduction of [MiCA](https://www.esma.europa.eu/esmas-activities/digital-finance-and-innovation/markets-crypto-assets-regulation-mica?ref=therecursive.com), Crypto Asset Service Providers (CASPs) in the EU are required to meet most of the same expectations as traditional financial institutions: capital requirements, governance, local presence, and formal authorization.

The transition period runs into mid-2026, but the expectations are already clear. ESMA has even warned firms not to “badge-wash” — as in, not to use their “MiCA-compliant” status to market unregulated products alongside regulated ones

And even if we look beyond the EU, there are also examples of other regulators taking a highly structured approach to regulating this market. In Dubai, for example, the DFSA has established its [Crypto Token regime](https://www.dfsa.ae/news/new-dfsa-explainer-regulation-crypto-tokens?ref=therecursive.com) all the way back in 2022, and has been gradually updating it ever since.

The regime sets strict rules on governance, custody, disclosure and market abuse. It also recognizes only a curated list of tokens (around 80% of the global crypto market cap), and it can revoke recognition, instantly changing which assets a firm can legally support.

In other words, crypto infrastructure today increasingly needs to look and behave like FX or equities infrastructure. Same levels of surveillance, risk modelling, best execution, and reporting practices must be consistently applied. Firms that stop looking at crypto as a “special snowflake” and view it instead as just another instrument in their multi-asset stack will have an easier time in this regard.

## Operational resilience is the name of the game now

Operational resilience used to be a topic that everyone agreed was important, but rarely invested in properly. That changed with the EU’s [Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)](https://www.eiopa.europa.eu/digital-operational-resilience-act-dora%5Fen?ref=therecursive.com), which became fully enforceable in January 2025\. DORA mandates strong ICT risk management, third-party oversight, incident reporting, and regular resilience testing. And for the first time, regulators can directly supervise “critical” tech providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Bloomberg and LSEG — 19 major tech firms have been designated as such so far.

The DFSA in Dubai has taken a similar direction: its [thematic review](https://www.dfsa.ae/your-resources/publications-reports/thematic-reviews/thematic-review-2024-management-operational-risk-money-services-providers?ref=therecursive.com) of Money Services Providers in 2024 emphasized operational frameworks and Strong Customer Authentication, and the authority already had long-standing and detailed outsourcing rules.

In simple terms: regulators now care *exactly* who runs your cloud, payment hubs, and connectivity providers — and how you will operate if they fail.

From the point of view of fintech firms, **this means that “DIY infrastructure” will become a liability**. Institutional clients will naturally prefer partners that already offer multi-region setups, full vendor-risk mapping, audit trails, and DORA-style incident reporting by default. Operational resilience will shift from a behind-the-scenes IT concern to a core part of commercial strategy.

## The bottom line: 2026 will reward the ones who prepare

To put the long story short, **regulation is becoming more coordinated, more data-driven, and more demanding across the board**. And while it may appear intimidating, this is not at all a bad thing. In fact, clearer rules are exactly what mature financial ecosystems need, because they create clearer paths for growth.

The rules are changing quickly, yes. But with the right strategy, they can become a source of competitive advantage rather than a barrier. The firms that thrive in 2026 will be the ones that recognize these shifts early and build their internal processes accordingly.
### CEE Founders, Stop Hiring “Fundraising Consultants.”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-founders-stop-hiring-fundraising-consultants-you-re-hurting-your-company/
Last updated: 2026-01-07T14:12:55.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### 10 CEE-Founded Robotics Startups You Should Know
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-robotics-ai-startups-market-growth/
Last updated: 2026-01-07T14:13:04.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why Emergency Powers Are Democracy’s Stress Test
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/states-of-emergency-abuse-democracy/
Last updated: 2026-01-10T12:43:53.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### The Agency AI Reality Check: Why Your Clients Want a Discount (and Why You Shouldn’t Give Them One)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-agency-reality-check-clients-pricing-productive-report/
Last updated: 2025-12-29T11:07:10.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### The Drone Wall Test: Can Europe’s Defense Tech Move Faster Than Its Institutions?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/europe-drone-wall-ai-air-defense/
Last updated: 2025-12-23T09:52:10.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### What It Takes to Win From CEE? Learn This February at Unlockit
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/unlockit-2026-tanja-kuzman-program-interview/
Last updated: 2025-12-22T21:20:02.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: CEE HealthTech Startups Land Major Deals
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-startup-funding-weekly-roundup/
Last updated: 2025-12-19T15:24:18.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Coming soon
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/coming-soon/
Last updated: 2026-03-31T10:54:18.000Z
This is a rebranded site of **The Recursive,** currently in the making. In the meantime stay up to date at [*therecursive.com*](https://www.therecursive.com/content/files/2026/03/therecursive-com.html)!
### Slovenian Katalist Raises €1.28M to Build NextGen Video Production OS
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/slovenian-katalist-funding-generation-video-production-operating-system/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T09:11:55.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### GlycanAge Founders on Boosting Transition From “Wellness” Biomarker to Hospital Diagnostic
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/glycanage-investment-glycan-diagnostics-hospital-expansion-lauc-interview/
Last updated: 2025-12-18T10:00:40.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Why Web3 Needs More Women at the Helm
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/women-web3-leadership-gracy-chen-bitget/
Last updated: 2025-12-17T15:08:38.000Z
When we talk about Web3’s future, the conversation more often than not focuses on infrastructure: faster chains, better scalability, more secure architectures, and so on. But as someone who’s been working with this market for quite a few years now, I’ve come to believe that technology alone is not enough to take Web3 into its next stage of maturity.

The real bottleneck of any business is leadership design: **who builds the systems, who sets the norms, whose perspectives shape how we grow** — these are also questions that we must ask and consider carefully.

I’ve seen cases where exclusivity in founder networks and uneven access to funding have held companies back from scaling when they were led by fellow women. And to my mind, those are symptoms of a leadership culture that lacks diversity of perspective. Web3 is a highly-innovative space, which is precisely why it needs leadership models that are collaborative and inclusive in nature.

In this piece, I would like to take a closer look at why, exactly, having more women in leading positions is a strategic advantage rather than simply an item box to be checked in the name of abstract “diversity.”

## Technology can scale — leadership needs to be able to, as well

Across industries, there’s an ever-growing stockpile of evidence that companies with strong female presence in leadership tend to outperform those without it. To give just one of the more recent examples, Grant Thornton’s survey in 2025[ found](https://www.therecursive.com/content/files/www-grantthornton-com/content/dam/grantthornton/website/assets/content-page-files/insights/women-in-business/2025/women-in-business-2025-impacting-the-missed-generation.pdf) that greater diversity in the boardroom is likely to lead to better financial performance.

After interviewing over 14,000 organizations across 30+ countries, 17% of respondents felt that their company’s performance improved as a result of gender equality strategies. And on top of that, 20% also added that a greater female presence in senior leadership has made their firms more attractive to clients, partners, and investors.

In other words, having your boardrooms be more gender-balanced isn’t merely an ethical aim, it has a direct correlation to your efficiency as a business. **These findings align with what I’ve observed throughout my own career, whether in media, mathematics, investment, or now as CEO of a global exchange**.

I’ve often noticed that women tend to lead with a different set of instincts. Our strengths often lie in collaborative decision-making, deliberately building trust — both within our own teams and with outside parties and stakeholders — and thinking in long strategic arcs.

These traits align very well with the needs of decentralized markets, as their real-world adoption continues to grow. After all, Web3 is building what are essentially new financial rails and tools for the broader public to use. Trust, adaptability, inclusion and focus on communities have as much importance here as the quality of your code.

## Building inclusive leadership

One of the biggest misconceptions about gender inclusion is that representation can just improve naturally over time. In reality, it very much needs intent and effort.

For example, in my own company, half of the management team is female — a rarity in crypto and in finance generally. This wasn’t really a result of a quota or a diversity campaign, but it did happen because we **intentionally designed systems that allow entrance for women**. They can grow, receive support and mentorship, and get clear pathways to leadership positions.

We broadened our recruitment channels beyond the traditional tech-finance loop. We built flexible career tracks that recognize different strengths. Most importantly, we gave women equal access to decision-making opportunities from day one.

All of that was a deliberate move. To reiterate, diversity isn’t achieved by itself simply because you announce it. It is achieved by engineering an environment where it can thrive naturally.

## What Web3 could become with more women at the helm

Based on both my own personal experiences and the various stories I encountered over the years, **I fully believe that Web3’s culture would grow better with more women helping shape it.**

For one, it would be **more trusted**. Even now, despite all the progress it has achieved, this market still has a lingering stigma of being highly speculative. Women leaders are more likely to prioritize sustainability and ethical governance, which are essential qualities if Web3 wishes to achieve mainstream adoption. For a technology that aims to serve millions, if not billions, trust is non-negotiable.

At the same time, becoming more inclusive can have a direct impact on **product design**. It means that more builders with potentially good ideas gain visibility where previously they may have been overlooked. Introducing more women into leadership roles directly shapes who gets funded, who gets heard, and whose ideas stand a chance at becoming part of the global financial infrastructure in the new age.

Finally, there is a **boost to Web3’s overall resilience** to think about. Women tend to approach problem-solving with alternative thinking, which means they can point out potential blind spots in existing models and help improve them. And when a crisis situation takes place, whether technical in nature or due to a market shock, teams based on cooperative leadership that women favor have better chances to ride out the wave and recover faster.

All of these are real competitive advantages, and they further prove **how greater female inclusion can lead to Web3 being more capable of delivering on its own ambitions.**
### Are We Losing Our Professional Identities in the Age of AI?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/are-we-losing-our-professional-identities-in-the-age-of-ai/
Last updated: 2026-05-28T14:01:29.000Z
In this episode of The Recursive Roundtable, three practitioners unpack where AI truly adds value — and where it doesn’t. They focus on practical implementation, human judgment, and the guardrails needed to keep quality high.

We examine how to start with AI the right way (individual productivity tools vs. team-wide process changes vs. building ML products, and why not every problem is a fit), how to protect human intent and quality in content and decision-making (avoiding generative sameness, using clear context and strong first drafts), and what AI can and can’t do in product design/UX.

GUESTS:  
**Zamina Ahmad**, AI & ML Product Leader, CEO @ shades&contrast  
**Ioana Teleanu**, Founder & Design Consultant, ex-Miro & UiPath @ AI-R Design Studio, ex-Miro  
**Andrew Mende**, Senior Product Manager Machine Learning @ Booking.com
### Why Early-Stage HealthTech Needs a Different Investment Playbook
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/why-early-stage-healthtech-needs-a-different-investment-playbook/
Last updated: 2025-12-19T15:39:27.000Z
For more than a decade, venture capital has refined a highly effective formula for building companies in enterprise software, fintech, consumer technology, and others. Speed, scale, and aggressive capital deployment have become the default ingredients for success. **In healthcare, however, this same recipe often produces disappointing results.** The sector moves to a different rhythm – one governed by clinical evidence, regulatory scrutiny, institutional inertia, and, above all, trust.

**It is this mismatch between venture expectations and healthcare reality that underpins the strategy behind PurposeTech’s upcoming second fund, set to be formally announced in January 2026.** Rather than forcing HealthTech companies into exponential growth patterns borrowed from the VC playbook, the fund is designed around a more sober assumption: in healthcare, defensible niches can be built, but rarely through exponential growth curves. Instead, value is created through paced, profitable growth that reflects fragmented markets and conservative adoption.

To reinforce that philosophy, **PurposeTech has brought on board** [**Professor Shafi Ahmed**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafi%5FAhmed?ref=therecursive.com) **as Senior Partner for its second fund, joining General Partner** [**Zdenek Fred Fous**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/fredfous/?ref=therecursive.com)**.** Prof. Ahmed, an elite UK surgeon, globally recognized health futurist, and Nobel Prize nominee, brings decades of frontline medical experience to a fund explicitly seeking to rethink how early-stage HealthTech should be built and financed.

**The two recently sat down for an in-depth** [**podcast conversation**](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6coDkrqr9qCtMgRjvOLNSP?si=le4RjGk%5FS0iYpj9wKqpFdg&ref=therecursive.com)**, examining what is structurally broken in HealthTech investing and exploring what more functional alternatives could look like.**

### Lessons from the First Fund

Over the past two and half years, PurposeTech reviewed close to 3,000 early-stage companies across its core verticals in Central and Eastern Europe. **Roughly eight percent of the ventures reviewed demonstrated strong domain expertise, credible teams, and genuine clinical and operational relevance. Even within this high-quality cohort, the ability to raise capital remained exceptionally rare.**

**According to Fous, the issue was not execution or mediocrity, but economics.** Most of these companies addressed markets measured in tens or hundreds of millions of euros – commercially meaningful, but structurally incompatible with venture funds that require billion-euro outcomes to satisfy portfolio math. This helps explain why PurposeTech’s first fund, structured as a classic VC vehicle, invested in [fewer than 0.5%](https://www.therecursive.com/how-purposetech-backs-the-top-0-5-founders-in-health-climate-and-future-of-work/) of opportunities screened.

Fous argues that healthcare – defined by fragmentation, conservatism, and complex stakeholder dynamics – is poorly suited to high-velocity experimentation and aggressive scaling. When early-stage HealthTech companies are pushed into artificial hypergrowth, the more common outcomes are burnout and failure, not durable innovation or success.

### Designing for Profitability

PurposeTech’s second fund is structured to work within these constraints rather than against them. **Its thesis is to build a portfolio of niche, profitable HealthTech businesses that dominate specific niches instead of chasing unicorn valuations.**

**The fund will concentrate primarily on unregulated or lightly regulated segments, including preventive care, digital therapeutics, remote monitoring, and productivity tools for healthcare professionals.** These areas allow for faster iteration without compromising patient safety or regulatory compliance.

**Central to the strategy is an approach increasingly referred to as “seedstrapping”.** Instead of multiple funding rounds, the company typically raises funding once – usually below one million euros – designed to carry it to break-even within two to three years. The emphasis shifts from perpetual fundraising to early revenue, disciplined cost structures, and tangible customer value.

The ambition is not to create decacorns in a decade, but to build durable companies that grow steadily, generate cash flow, and become indispensable within their chosen niche markets. From a financial perspective, the fund targets returns in the range of 20%+ p.a. (IRR), driven primarily by cash-flow generation rather than valuation multiple expansion.

### A Clinical Perspective on Innovation

Prof. Ahmed’s involvement adds a critical dimension to this investment framework. With more than thirty years of surgical experience across the NHS and international health systems, he brings a practitioner’s skepticism to technology-driven healthcare narratives.

**For Shafi, innovation must address real systemic pressures. He highlights three in particular: workforce shortages, the rising burden of chronic disease, and the unsustainable cost of hospital-centric care models.** Technology, in his view, is valuable only insofar as it helps improve patient outcomes or redistribute care more efficiently.

One concept he frequently returns to is the “housepital” – the gradual migration of care from centralized institutions into homes and communities. Enabled by remote monitoring, AI-driven diagnostics, and wearable sensors, this shift has the potential to improve outcomes while reducing costs. **Shafi describes the current moment as a rare convergence of technological capability, patient demand, and regulatory openness.**

**Yet he is equally clear that adoption – not invention – is the real bottleneck.** Healthcare systems change slowly, and solutions that ignore incentives, workflows, and culture rarely scale.

### Building for Adoption, Not Just Technology

PurposeTech’s second fund reflects this also operationally. Roughly ten percent of capital is earmarked for venture building and portfolio-level support, aimed at helping companies navigate regulatory complexity, stakeholder alignment, and change management. The objective is to increase the probability that technically sound solutions achieve real-world uptake.

**Looking ahead, PurposeTech envisions its second vintage – PT Capital – as the foundation of a regional HealthTech platform focused on preventive care and healthspan extension.** Rather than a loose collection of investments, the portfolio is intended to function as an interconnected ecosystem, sharing capabilities, insights, and infrastructure.

The formal announcement of the fund will follow in January 2026\. For now, the message is clear: **in healthcare, realism may be the most radical strategy of all.**
### Jutro Medical Extends Series A to €36M to Scale AI-enabled Primary Care Rollup
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/jutro-medical-series-a-ai-primary-care-clinics/
Last updated: 2025-12-16T09:31:43.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Europe’s Defense Tech Debate Needs Context, Not Moral Panic
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/europe-s-defense-tech-debate-needs-context-not-moral-panic/
Last updated: 2025-12-19T15:54:58.000Z
Europe’s defense tech debate is happening at a moment of war on the continent, strategic dependency, and a generational investment gap. Dual-use complexity and the ethical burden of innovation in a world shaped by conflict are all real topics – yet **accountability, compliance, and robust guardrails** **are non-negotiable** in [defense tech](https://report.therecursive.com/?ref=therecursive.com). Any credible investor or founder in this space accepts that. The pace of VC may pressure traditional processes – but that’s precisely what venture capital exists to do. **Speed does not equal recklessness.**

While the ethical questions [raised by Elke Schwarz](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sifted.eu/articles/defence-tech-disaster-opinion&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1765809673135839&usg=AOvVaw1mXjdWsB8yyLOma5jQgerI) are important and deserve attention, the debate also needs context: practical insights about industrial capacity, decades of underinvestment, and the role private capital now plays in closing urgent capability gaps – gaps that governments can no longer address alone.

## The ecosystem will separate shortcuts from standards

**As in every industry, there will be players who look for shortcuts.** And there will be those who choose to build with rigorous assessments, ethical boundaries, and a long-term view. The ecosystem will sort them. Serious teams already hold themselves to a higher standard.

That distinction matters, and it applies to founders and investors alike. In this sector, **accountability is the starting point, not an afterthought**. Responsible venture teams and established industrial partners already treat compliance, export controls, and sanction regimes as foundational – for instance, our close cooperation with the Czechoslovak Group helps ensure strict compliance and practical industrialisation pathways.

**Nothing about the venture model changes this.** Venture capital compresses timelines, as it should; but speed in this sector is less about impatience and more about overcoming a system that has long been defined by heavy bureaucracy and multi-year procurement cycles.

One of the article’s central points – the discomfort around [dual-use innovation during wartime ](https://www.therecursive.com/dual-use-technology-in-defense-and-venture-capital/)– is more complex than the piece suggests.

**The uncomfortable truth is that war accelerates technology. It always has.**

Jet engines, cybersecurity, satellite systems, radars, medical imaging, drones, and the modern internet all emerged or matured under the pressure of conflict. This doesn’t make those conflicts any less tragic; it simply reflects the reality that urgency compresses development cycles. Acknowledging this does not make innovation less legitimate or less necessary.

## Building for the long term, beyond any single war

Similarly, most of what’s being built today – autonomy, advanced sensing, secure data infrastructure, cyber protection, next-gen manufacturing, robotics – will serve Europe long after the war ends. Any war.

Serious players don’t view these advancements purely through a defense lens; they see them as **part of rebuilding Europe’s strategic industrial capabilities**. These technologies are the backbone of what Europe will need to remain competitive, resilient, and strategically independent in the decades ahead.

> And this connects to a broader issue that is often missing from the debate: Europe has spent two decades outsourcing much of its industrial and technological base.

Not only defense: **manufacturing, materials, semiconductors, robotics – we have allowed critical capacity to migrate elsewhere.** In today’s fragile geopolitical climate, we find ourselves dangerously dependent on others for technologies that underpin our security and our economies.

We cannot enter an AI- and autonomy-driven era without rebuilding these capabilities at home. That requires investment – significant, fast investment – and collaboration across public institutions, established industry, and the innovative capacity of startups. Defense tech is one part of a much wider industrial re-foundation that Europe urgently needs.

## The €1.1 trillion reality behind today’s capability gaps

To understand why private capital is stepping into this sector, we should acknowledge an uncomfortable structural reality:

> for more than twenty years, European countries have underinvested in the foundations of their own security.

If EU member states had consistently met even the minimum guideline of 2% of GDP in defense spending since 2006, Europe would have invested roughly [€1.1 trillion more](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2023/749805/EPRS%5FBRI%282023%29749805%5FEN.pdf&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1765809673139210&usg=AOvVaw30tShMJfMaU2qJPRWahnwI) into its protection and resilience. That missing trillion did not just open a capability gap; it created a technological gap between the systems Europe has – and the systems Europe needs to operate safely and remain strategically autonomous in this world.

**Europe faces a structural dependency problem** – and reversing it requires investment at a scale and speed that public budgets alone cannot deliver.

That’s why the debate shouldn’t be framed as a moral binary between ‘public good’ and ‘private opportunism’. And [defense tech](https://www.therecursive.com/tag/defense-tech/) is one part of that effort. It intersects with civil infrastructure, manufacturing competitiveness, digital security, energy resilience, and the capacity to build complex systems on European soil.

**Responsibility and innovation are not mutually exclusive.**

In our part of the ecosystem, serious actors are not putting ethics aside or chasing growth at any cost. We know what is at stake, and we are committed to doing this the right way – transparently, within the rules, and with respect for both the risks and the consequences.

Conversation is welcome – and necessary. But to be constructive, it must sit within the full context: the €1.1 trillion underinvestment, the accumulated industrial and technological debt, the reality of wartime acceleration, and the simple fact that Europe cannot rebuild its strategic capabilities without the involvement of both public and private actors.

This is not about profiting from conflict. It is about **ensuring that Europe is not left exposed, dependent, and unprepared** in a world that is changing faster than many expected.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: More Funds Opening Up for New Startups
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-more-funds-opening-up-for-new-startups/
Last updated: 2025-12-12T12:44:48.000Z
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### 18 Deep Tech Startups from CEE You Should Keep an Eye On
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-deep-tech-startups-newcomers-to-watch-2026/
Last updated: 2026-06-23T13:51:28.000Z
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### Three New CEE Funds Deploy €90M+ to Power Early-Stage Innovation
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-venture-funds-early-stage-innovation-growth/
Last updated: 2025-12-11T11:12:55.000Z
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### Identity After the Merger: A Case Study on Turning the Strengths of Seven Companies Into One Coherent Story
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/brand-identity-after-the-merger-a-case-study-on-turning-the-strengths-of-seven-companies-into-one-coherent-story/
Last updated: 2025-12-11T10:46:45.000Z
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### Why Venture Capital Gets Misunderstood
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/venture-capital-misconceptions-cee-tech-future-bootstrapping-funding/
Last updated: 2025-12-10T10:39:54.000Z
**The venture capital model is under fire again**. Founders complain about dilution and loss of control. Commentators question whether VCs create real value or just inflate valuations. Aspiring entrepreneurs wonder if bootstrapping isn’t the more honest path after all.

I’ve heard these criticisms for years   *—*  as a founder, angel investor, LP, and now as a GP at Eleven Ventures. And while some concerns are valid, most stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of **what venture capital is designed to do, and more importantly, what kind of companies it’s designed for**.

So let me address the most common misconceptions directly, using what I’ve learned from 15+ years on every side of the venture table.

## Judging rockets like bakeries

The core problem with most VC criticism is that people apply the **wrong expectations** to the wrong type of company.

A bakery and a rocket company don’t operate under the same rules. One optimizes for steady cash flow, local market share, and predictable growth. The other bets on breakthrough technology, massive scale, and winner-takes-most dynamics. You wouldn’t judge a bakery for failing to reach orbit – so why judge a rocket company for not turning a profit in year two?

**Venture-backed startups are rocket companies**. They’re built for exponential growth in markets where being second or third often means being irrelevant. That requires a different kind of fuel, a different risk tolerance, and a different definition of success.

When critics say “most VC-backed startups fail,” they’re right. But they’re missing the point. Venture capital doesn’t aim for a high batting average, it aims for asymmetric outcomes. And that’s not a flaw, it’s the **entire design of the asset class**.

## How venture returns actually work

Let me break down the math, because this is where the confusion starts.

A typical VC fund invests in 20-30 companies over several years. Of those:

- 50-60% will fail or return less than the invested capital,
- 30-40% will return 1-3x the investment (modest successes),
- 5-10% will return 5-10x or more (the winners that carry the fund),
- 1-2% might return 20x, 50x, or even 100x (the outliers that define a generation).

This distribution aligns well with a notoriously famous saying: *it is a feature, not a bug*. Venture capital exists **precisely because traditional financing models** (banks, private equity, revenue-based lending) **cannot support this kind of risk profile**.

Banks need collateral and predictable repayment schedules. Private equity needs steady cash flows and near-term exits. Venture capital accepts that most bets will fail because the few that succeed can compensate for all the losses and still generate outsized returns.

If you’re building a company that can predictably grow 20-30% per year with strong unit economics from day one, you don’t need venture capital. You need a bank loan or a patient bootstrap strategy. But if you’re building something that requires years of R&D, network effects, or market education before it generates revenue   *—*  something that could be worth €500M or nothing   *—*  then venture capital might be your only option.

## What good VCs actually do beyond writing checks

Here’s another misconception: that VCs are just passive capital providers who show up for board meetings and collect returns.

In reality, the best venture investors act as **coaches, thought partners, and pressure-testers – especially during the hardest moments**. They’ve seen dozens of companies navigate similar challenges. They know which patterns lead to breakthroughs and which lead to dead ends. And they’re incentivized to help, because their returns depend entirely on your success.

When we built [Telerik](https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-ecosystem-growth/), our early investors didn’t just provide capital   *—*  they challenged our assumptions, connected us to customers and talent, and helped us think through strategic pivots that ultimately shaped our acquisition by Progress in 2014\. Now, as a GP at Eleven Ventures, I see the same dynamic play out with our portfolio companies. Founders approach us not just when they need money, but **when they need clarity**. Should we enter this new market? How do we structure our sales team? What’s the right time to raise our next round? These aren’t questions you ask your accountant or your lawyer. You ask someone who’s been through it before.

Many companies approach us even when they’re profitable, not because they need cash, but because they want this partnership. That tells you something important about **what good venture capital actually provides**.

## Bootstrapping vs. VC: A strategic choice, not a moral one

Let me be clear: bootstrapping is not morally superior to raising venture capital. And raising VC is not a shortcut for lazy founders.

These are strategic choices that depend entirely on the type of company you’re building and the ambitions you have for it.

**Bootstrapping works brilliantly when:**

- You’re building in a market with clear demand and fast payback periods
- You want to retain full control and ownership
- You’re optimizing for profitability and sustainable growth
- You can reach scale without massive upfront investment

**Venture capital makes sense when:**

- You’re building something that requires years of investment before product-market fit
- Speed to market is existential
- Network effects or winner-takes-most dynamics dominate your market
- You need to build infrastructure, R&D, or a team before revenue materializes

**Neither path is easier**. Bootstrapped founders face constant resource constraints and slower growth. VC-backed founders face dilution, investor expectations, and the pressure to grow faster than might feel comfortable.The key is choosing the model that matches your ambition, your market, and your risk tolerance.

## Why LPs invest in Venture Capital (and why it matters)

Here’s a question most critics don’t ask: if venture capital is so flawed, why do sophisticated institutional investors (pension funds, hedge funds, family offices) keep allocating billions to the asset class?

The answer is **portfolio theory**. LPs don’t invest in venture capital because it’s safe or predictable. They invest because it’s [uncorrelated with other asset classes](https://www.therecursive.com/money-in-motion-report-a-deep-dive-into-hnwis-in-cee/) and offers asymmetric upside.

A diversified LP portfolio typically includes public equities, bonds, real estate, venture capital. Venture capital plays a specific role in this mix: it’s the high-risk, high-reward counterweight that can generate 3-5x fund returns over 10 years when done well. And because VC returns aren’t correlated with public markets, they provide diversification benefits that improve the overall [risk-adjusted performance of the portfolio](https://www.therecursive.com/eib-eif-enbw-earlybird-energy-revolution-ventures-portfolio-vc-risk-management/).

This is why venture capital exists as an asset class. Not because every fund succeeds (many don’t), but because the ones that do can generate returns that no other asset class can match.

## What happens to ecosystems without early-stage risk capital

Beyond financial returns, venture capital plays a broader role that often gets overlooked: it enables innovation that wouldn’t happen otherwise.

Think about **Payhawk, OfficeRnD, Dronamics, FindMeCure**. These companies didn’t start with revenue. They started with bold ideas, technical risk, and long development cycles:

- [Payhawk](https://www.therecursive.com/the-first-unicorn-effect-meet-the-founders-of-of-payhawk/) needed years to build a financial infrastructure platform before it could scale.
- [Dronamics](https://www.therecursive.com/dronamics-european-drone-flights-step-funding/) required massive R&D investment to develop cargo drones.
- [FindMeCure](https://www.therecursive.com/findmecure-raises-a-seed-round-to-bring-innovative-health-treatments-to-market-faster/) was solving a problem that had no obvious business model at first.

Without early-stage venture capital, these companies wouldn’t exist. And without them, our ecosystem would be poorer   *—* not just financially, but in terms of ambition, talent development, and the signal we send to the next generation of founders.
### “There is One Non-Negotiable Trait for Backing University Spin-Offs…”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/europe-university-spin-off-boom-freiraum-ventures/
Last updated: 2025-12-09T08:15:11.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### What Agency Founders Should Know Before Building Their First Product
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/agency-product-pivot-customization-trap-saas-strategy-toolza-first-hand/
Last updated: 2025-12-08T13:36:19.000Z
**Most CEE startup founders start their entrepreneurial journey by building an agency,** like Omnisend, which began as a digital marketing agency, or MailerLite, which started as a web design studio in 2005 and pivoted in 2010 to productize email marketing. It’s a [simpler way to generate revenue, learn the market](https://www.therecursive.com/jeta-zagragja-kosovo-outsourcing-anchorzup-software-development-product/), and build connections before shifting focus to a product.

For 12 years, we ran service businesses as well, 3 companies with more than 100 people across 5 countries. Then we started building **Toolza**, a financial management platform. The transition turned out to be **trickier than we expected**. So we decided to collect our learnings to help other first-time product founders avoid potential pitfalls. Because running an agency and building a product are two very different things.

## **Wait for the right signal**

Not every agency can and even should become a product company. **The right timing is clear when you encounter a problem expensive enough that solving it could become a business in itself.**

We knew it was time when we faced our own operational challenge: we needed custom financial workflows for our ERP system. We didn’t have that expertise in-house at that time, so we reached out to another agency for a quote. The estimate was $100,000\. That number stopped us in our tracks, and we started wondering how many other businesses were facing the same expensive pain.

That realization became our signal to start [the customer development process](https://www.therecursive.com/finding-mvp-in-depth-customer-interviews-research-toolza-3-12-2025/). We discovered that other businesses had spent two or three times more building similar systems, while existing solutions on the market were either too expensive or too complex. It became clear: we weren’t just solving our own problem – we could build a financial management tool that solved a widespread, costly pain point.

**Your signal might be different**. Pay attention to repetitive pains that keep draining time and money. When you’re solving the same costly issue for the tenth client, that’s probably your cue.

And, by the way, we rejected that $100,000 proposal and spent a year building our custom workflows (which was another signal).

## **The part nobody warns you about**

Moving from a “client-first” agency to a product-first company requires the **deepest cultural and personal change**. In services, you win by being a hero, saying “yes” to every client request, working late hours, and customizing solutions until the client is happy. In product companies, you win by saying “no” and prioritizing.

**We had to unlearn being the service hero**. Our job shifted from solving a client’s immediate crisis to solving the industry’s shared, fundamental pain. We embraced the idea that the industry is the client – not John from Company X or Sarah from Company Y.

This helped us move past the pressure of trying to build a single perfect solution for one company and focus instead on crafting a product that works for a wide range of similar businesses.

## **Listen hard, but don’t hard-code**

The transition phase is toughest when you still have demanding service clients generating cash flow while building a product. This is where many companies fail, **getting stuck in a loop of constant client customization**. We almost did too.

The approach that helped us was to generalize, not hard-code. [We listened hard to clients](https://www.therecursive.com/finding-mvp-in-depth-customer-interviews-research-toolza-3-12-2025/): what hurt them, what confused them, and what slowed them down. We’d solve that pain first, then generalize it into a module, template, or integration so that the next 10 customers get it out of the box.

**Shift your focus from being customer-centric to being outcome-centric**. Say “yes” only if the request can scale. Translate client feedback into fundamental primitives (settings, templates, API endpoints). This way, you keep solving real problems while sticking to a clear, scalable product vision.

## **The timing mistake that can cost you months**

There are many pitfalls on the road from being an outsourcing agency to becoming a product company, and we fell into a few of the biggest ones.

We started developing the core product and conducting customer development calls in parallel. **The feedback loop was too fast**, constantly changing our roadmap almost every week. Instead, try to make your processes isolated and iterative. Complete a thorough round of customer development, finalize your V1 vision and roadmap, then start coding.

Once interviews are done, analyze what you’ve learned, find the common themes in requests, assess their priority against the core vision, and learn to say “no” to anything that doesn’t fit the architectural future. **If you try to meet too many unique requests, you can lose your main focus.**

## **Your old reputation will follow you**

For a long time, our previous clients and the market continued to see us as a service company. That sort of perception can slow down sales and customer feedback, simply because it takes time for people to move you from one box to another in their minds.

**It took almost a year and a half of consistent communication to shift that image**. You’ll need to repeat your message – in every call, deck, and channel – that you’re now building a product, not just offering services anymore.

## **What founders should actually do**

If you’re running a successful agency today and dream of a SaaS product, don’t wait for a venture capitalist to validate you. **You’ve already been validated not by one but by a few dozen of your paying clients.**

Start by creating a clear picture of the efficient world you’re building. Share that vision openly with your network and conduct customer development sessions to see how it resonates with their fundamental concerns.

If your vision solves a critical, recurring problem and makes a standard process significantly more efficient, you already have your product idea. Taking action is the only thing that remains. The money and the clients will follow if you offer a solution that solves their problems more efficiently than any custom development.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: OpenAI Moves to Acquire Polish-founded Startup
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-news-roundup/
Last updated: 2025-12-05T14:09:18.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### OpenAI to Acquire Polish neptune.ai to Strengthen Its AI Training Infrastructure
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/openai-acquires-polish-neptune-ai-to-strengthen-its-ai-training-infrastructure/
Last updated: 2025-12-04T13:07:19.000Z
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### The Hidden Banks of Europe: How Embedded Finance Powers the Growth of European Tech
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-hidden-banks-of-europe-how-embedded-finance-powers-the-growth-of-european-tech/
Last updated: 2026-07-14T08:56:26.000Z
State of Embedded Finance 2025 – Opportunities and Risks as the Industry Matures and Heads into Consolidation

_This post is for subscribers only._
### How Europe Can Win in Global Innovation: Insights from How to Web’s “Keep Building” Roundtable
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/european-innovation-ecosystem-cooperation-how-to-web/
Last updated: 2025-12-03T15:56:55.000Z
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### “AI Shouldn’t Be English-Centric”: Meet Latvian Foundation Model Optimized for 34 European Languages
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/tilde-model-tildeopen-ai-grand-challenge-european-languages-llm/
Last updated: 2025-12-03T11:58:56.000Z
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### Mobile Wave Solutions’ Five Lessons for CTOs in 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/mobile-wave-solutions-five-lessons-for-ctos/
Last updated: 2025-12-08T13:50:55.000Z
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### WIRED Launches Greek Edition, Expanding Its Reach Across Southeastern Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/wired-greece-launch/
Last updated: 2025-12-03T11:09:39.000Z
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### Rohlik Executives’ New Venture: Duvo.ai Raises to Rewire Retail Operations
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/rohlik-founders-new-venture-duvo-ai-seed-funding-retail-operations/
Last updated: 2025-12-02T12:05:11.000Z
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### Silicon Valley VC Backs Balkan Founders’ AI Safety Startup With €2.32M
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/enough-ai-wearable-safety-device-funding/
Last updated: 2025-12-05T11:51:00.000Z
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### From Sofia to Riyadh: Strengthening Bulgaria’s Startup Ties Abroad
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/alexandra-todorova-bridger-network-bulgarian-diaspora/
Last updated: 2025-12-02T08:27:57.000Z
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### The Cybersecurity Mistakes That Leave Companies Exposed ft. AMATAS
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/the-cybersecurity-mistakes-that-leave-companies-exposed-ft-amatas/
Last updated: 2026-05-12T07:50:25.000Z
Can companies really stay safe in a world where attackers only need to be right once? In this episode of The Recursive Podcast, we sit down with Miroslav Naydenov, a cybersecurity expert at Amatas, who has spent years on the front lines of digital crisis management — restoring breached systems, outsmarting attackers, and preparing businesses for threats they don’t even know exist.

We talk about why most companies misunderstand their risk, how attackers operate like sophisticated businesses, and why AI and deepfakes are about to trigger an identity crisis unlike anything the digital world has seen.  
What you’ll learn:

🛡️ Why preparation decides everything, and why companies still wait for regulations before taking security seriously.  
👥 The real weakest link: people — how employee behavior, misconfigurations, and remote access open the door to attackers long before any technical vulnerability does.  
🤖 How AI and deepfakes are rewriting cybercrime — and why distinguishing real from fake will become one of the next decade’s biggest challenges.  
🔗 The silent danger of supply chain attacks — why trusted partners can become your biggest vulnerability overnight.  
🧠 This episode is a must-watch for founders, operators, IT leaders, and anyone building a digital-first business, especially those navigating remote work, sensitive data, or regulated industries.

[Tune in to the episode!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7IY-xVI77I&t=2s&ref=therecursive.com)
### Jeta Zagragja: Outsourcing Makes (More) Sense for Emerging Markets
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/jeta-zagragja-kosovo-outsourcing-anchorzup-software-development-product/
Last updated: 2025-12-01T11:13:15.000Z
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### Bulgarian-founded euShipments Secures Majority Acquisition by Austrian Post Following BlackPeak’s Exit
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bulgarian-founded-eushipments-secures-majority-acquisition-by-austrian-post-following-blackpeak-s-exit/
Last updated: 2025-11-28T14:03:04.000Z
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### Pilots Succeed, Scale Fails: The Capital Architecture Problem in Climate Tech
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/pilots-succeed-scale-fails-the-capital-architecture-problem-in-climate-tech/
Last updated: 2025-11-28T12:46:06.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Estonian Startup Secures €10M for Hydrogen Generators
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-estonian-startup-secures-e10m-for-hydrogen-generators/
Last updated: 2025-12-01T10:55:11.000Z
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### Vít Horký on the Three Pillars Every Startup Ecosystem Needs to Scale
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/vit-horky-czech-founders-startup-ecosystem-interview/
Last updated: 2025-11-27T14:13:15.000Z
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### “If We Get It Wrong, Founders Won’t Adopt It”: The Legal Design for the 28th Regime
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/eu-inc-28th-regime-legislation-deadline-european-parliament-startup-scaling/
Last updated: 2025-11-26T14:50:58.000Z
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### What CEE Startups Need More Than Money
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startups-ecosystem-ukraine-investments-fastest-growing-venture-capital/
Last updated: 2025-11-25T11:54:37.000Z
The Central and Eastern European (CEE) has grown remarkably over the past decade, yet despite this, the region’s startup ecosystem remains constrained. And the bottleneck is not a lack of capital, nor is it simply a matter of political risk or market size, as people sometimes assume…

The CEE startup ecosystem, with its total startup enterprise value [growing 15.5 times since 2014](https://www.therecursive.com/content/files/dealroom-co/uploaded/2025/03/dealroom-cee-report-2025-x21901.pdf), exceeds the European average, and the region saw significant funding activity, raising over €1.15 billion across Q2 and [Q3 of 2025](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/vc-funding-in-cee-report-q3-2025?ref=therecursive.com). This diverse tech scene is anchored by key markets, including **Poland**, which is considered the most developed, leading the region in 2024 with [over €2 billion raised](https://www.trade.gov.pl/en/news/poland-drives-the-startup-revolution-in-central-and-eastern-europe/?ref=therecursive.com), supported by the influential Polish Development Fund (PFR), and boasting 280,000 software developers and multiple unicorns like ElevenLabs and Docplanner.

**Ukraine** has the largest talent pool (340,000 developers) and sustains a base of over [2,500 active startups](https://www.therecursive.com/content/files/civitta-com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/scaling-up-accelerating-ukraines-tech-sector.pdf) despite the ongoing war, while **Romania** has over 202,000 tech professionals and a dynamic ecosystem valued at [around €19 billion](https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/romanian-startup-and-vc-ecosystem-report?ref=therecursive.com), producing unicorns like UiPath and eMAG.

**Czechia**, with 100,000–130,000 tech specialists and government support from CzechInvest, [raised](https://www.therecursive.com/czech-startups-raise-e47-5m-in-h2-2024-with-seed-round-surge/) approximately €264 million in 2024 and is home to unicorns like Productboard and Mews, and **Bulgaria**, with over 126,000 tech professionals, is also contributing to the region’s growth, having produced its first unicorn, Payhawk, in 2022.

While each CEE ecosystem has its own character, several shared strengths give the region a powerful competitive edge.

## Superpowers of CEE ecosystems

**1\. High-quality tech talent**

CEE countries have large pools of skilled software developers, many of whom graduated from **well-regarded STEM programs at leading universities**. The global tech community recognizes the region’s engineers for their technical proficiency, problem-solving abilities, and adaptability.

**2\. Cost efficiency**

Developer salaries in CEE remain significantly lower than in Western Europe or the US. This empowers startups to build strong technical teams without spending too much on talent. Such a cost advantage extends beyond wages. Thanks to it, **early-stage companies can stretch pre-seed and seed capital further**, achieving meaningful product development with more flexible budgets.

**3\. Execution mindset**

Another strength of CEE founders is their execution-driven mindset. Investors who know the region well often describe them as “doers” — **people who focus more on building, shipping, and iterating at speed**. This pragmatism makes them attractive to venture capital, as it translates well into tangible progress even with limited resources.

**4\. Global mindset from day one**

With relatively small domestic markets for certain products, **CEE founders are used to building products for international customers from the outset**. Many startups have remote-first models and design their operations for cross-border scaling, which allows them to enter foreign markets quickly.

## What the general public gets wrong about CEE

Despite the region’s rapid growth, several misconceptions still shape how the world perceives it.

#### Myth 1: There isn’t enough venture capital or investor interest

In 2024 alone, Poland attracted over €2 billion in venture funding, making it one of Europe’s fastest-growing VC markets. Multiple CEE-focused funds have launched across the region over the past years. According to the European Investment Fund, the number of such funds [doubled](https://www.therecursive.com/cee-regional-investment-activity-2x-faster-than-the-european-total/) between 2017 and 2023.

Among VCs active in CEE, the consensus is that **there’s more capital available than startups ready to absorb it** at the VC scale.

#### Myth 2: The region is too politically unstable

The reality is that risk varies significantly across CEE markets. Ukraine is in the midst of a war, yet its startup ecosystem continues to grow and attract international investment. It still [counts](https://www.therecursive.com/content/files/civitta-com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/scaling-up-accelerating-ukraines-tech-sector.pdf) 2,500+ active startups and 340,000+ IT specialists, making it one of the largest tech talent pools in Europe.

Meanwhile, Czechia and Poland are members of the European Union with stable regulatory frameworks that rank among the most politically stable emerging markets in the world. As per the World Bank, both countries also score well in the [rule of law and regulatory quality](https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/worldwide-governance-indicators/interactive-data-access?ref=therecursive.com).

#### Myth 3: CEE is only about outsourcing

Just in Ukraine, outsourcing exports amounted to approximately $6.4 billion in 2024, representing 11.5% of the country’s total exports. But while IT outsourcing has historically been a big part of the region’s tech industry, it is far from the full picture.

**CEE has produced globally competitive, product-led companies**. Grammarly, a Ukraine-born product unicorn, was valued at $13 billion in [2021](https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/grammarly-raises-200m-at-a-13b-valuation-to-make-you-an-even-better-writer-through-ai/?ref=therecursive.com). Polish ElevenLabs, a voice AI platform, was [valued](https://elevenlabs.io/blog/series-c?ref=therecursive.com) at $3.3 billion during its Series C earlier this year.

According to [Dealroom](https://www.therecursive.com/content/files/dealroom-co/uploaded/2025/03/dealroom-cee-report-2025-x21901.pdf)’s latest report on the region, the total enterprise value of CEE startups grew 15.5x since 2014, outpacing Western Europe (6x) — a growth driven largely by product-led startups, not outsourcing firms. Outsourcing remains a strength, but it’s beginning to coexist with a growing, product-driven innovation economy.

## If capital is abundant, why aren’t more CEE startups raising at scale?

Based on my own reflection and conversations with fellow investors, the bottleneck is **founder retention and the recycling of entrepreneurial success back into the ecosystem.**

In Ukraine, over 90% of scaleups move their headquarters abroad, a decision often driven by the war. But even in stable markets such as Estonia, 54% of scaleups relocate, according to 2025 data from Dealroom.

For B2B software founders targeting the US, relocating is often a rational and commercially necessary decision. Yet **ecosystems back home benefit enormously when these entrepreneurs stay engaged** — whether by running remote teams locally, mentoring new founders, or reinvesting as angel investors.

Without such involvement, the region loses out on a phenomenon that has been crucial to other global hubs: **the “startup mafia effect.”** In Silicon Valley, the alumni of PayPal and Stripe used their capital, experience, and networks to launch and scale the next generation of unicorns. Estonia’s own Skype mafia played a similar role in building the country’s reputation as a startup powerhouse.

To change this trajectory, **the region needs more founders who remain engaged with their local ecosystems after relocation or exit**. Equally important is the prospect of return. Founders who exit successfully abroad can bring capital, networks, and experience back into Bulgaria, Czechia, Poland, Romania, or Ukraine, becoming active players in shaping the next wave of growth.

Some may even go further by establishing new venture firms. A recent example is Glovo’s founders, Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud, who [launched](https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/07/yellow-a-new-vc-firm-from-glovo-founders-and-atomico-investor-is-betting-on-southern-europe/?ref=therecursive.com) Yellow, a fund dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs across Southern Europe, Glovo’s home region.

## What matters most now isn’t money

I believe there are three pathways that can help the region to realize its full potential and ensure the recycling of entrepreneurial success.

- - First, founders can remain connected to their home markets: **running remote teams**, keeping an operational base in CEE, or otherwise maintaining a presence in the region.
  - Second, those who exit abroad should consider **returning with capital and networks**, becoming active angels, mentors, or operators in their home countries.
  - And third, a handful of founders can even go further, **launching venture firms of their own**.

Yet capital by itself will not turn CEE into a global startup powerhouse in the short to mid-term. Over time, abundant capital will teach founders — through successes and failures alike — and gradually raise the bar. But what matters most now isn’t money. It’s **time, attention, and hands-on guidance from successful founders** who have had a successful exit. One such committed mentor can often have more impact on the ecosystem than a fund check.
### Polish Juo Raises €4M to Expand Its Physical Product Subscription Platform
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/juo-raises-4m-to-scale-physical-product-subscription-infrastructure/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T09:13:12.000Z
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### Bulgarian HackSoft Joins UK Waracle, Expanding European Presence
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/hacksoft-joins-waracle-european-expansion/
Last updated: 2025-11-24T11:36:50.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Day One Capital Launches New €45M Pre-Seed & Seed Fund to Back CEE Startups
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/day-one-capital-new-early-stage-fund-cee/
Last updated: 2025-11-24T10:10:46.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: The Largest Defense-Tech VC Fund in Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-funding-roundup-latest-news/
Last updated: 2025-11-21T09:42:12.000Z
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### Largest Defense-Tech VC Fund Hits €150M First Close
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/europe-defense-tech-investment-keen-venture-partners-fund/
Last updated: 2025-11-20T15:06:18.000Z
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### PolyModels Hub Secures €7.8M Series A with Backing from Greece’s Marathon Venture Capital
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/polymodels-hub-7-8m-series-a-funding/
Last updated: 2025-11-20T12:27:47.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Who Gets EIF Funding? Marcel Müller-Marbach on the VC Competitive Process
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/european-investment-fund-innovation-scale-up-growth/
Last updated: 2025-11-19T16:12:54.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### EU’s Crypto Regulation: Current Situation and What is Next?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/mica-2-0-eu-crypto-regulation-dominance-what-is-next/
Last updated: 2025-11-18T09:52:40.000Z
Europe has never been known for precipitate innovation. It takes a cautious path, prioritising regulation over disruption while other nations rush in. So, it’s not enormously surprising that the **European Union was the world’s first territory to attempt regulation of the cryptocurrency space.**

With the launch of the **Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) [regulation](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1114/oj/eng?ref=therecursive.com)**, the EU hasn’t just stayed true to its regulatory form, it’s taken a decisive global lead, setting a precedent for others to follow.

**The move wasn’t without controversy**, but while addressing the flaws that have become ingrained into the crypto space, MiCA also positions Europe as a potential leader in an arena that’s always lacked clarity.

But there’s more to do if the EU wants to turn its first steps into a position of long-term influence.

## How MiCA could shape the EU’s role in the future of cryptocurrency

For years, cryptocurrency was beyond regulation. Not just too decentralised, too novel, and too far removed from traditional legal systems to fit within existing rules, but **too unwilling to even try to comply**. It was its own thing, an alternative to established finance. As such, most governments took a hands-off approach, letting the industry evolve on its own.

The result has been the development of a chaotic and uncertain environment, off-putting for businesses and consumers alike. But as crypto adoption grows and its integration into mainstream finance becomes inevitable, **the need for clear regulation has become urgent.**

MiCA recognises this, placing the EU in the unusual position of outpacing other territories. **While the United States still leans on litigation and enforcement and the UK is slowly shaping its own framework**, the EU has offered a single, unified regulatory structure across its 27 member states for more than a year, delivering a rare sense of consistency and clarity in a landscape that has been anything but.

Nevertheless, **MiCA can only be just the beginning**. While it sets clear standards for stablecoins and crypto-asset service providers, covering licensing, transparency, and operational requirements, it can’t be denied that it leaves significant gaps. Key areas, including decentralised finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and staking remain outside its current scope.

These gaps can’t be allowed to stay unaddressed if the EU wants to maintain its advantage and genuinely lead the field.

## Should the EU be looking to a MiCA 2.0?

MiCA was never meant to be the final word on crypto regulation. Nor should it be. Its true value lies in **what the EU does next.**

If the EU can build on MiCA’s foundations, by developing a more adaptive, **future-ready framework capable of evolving alongside the crypto landscape**, it could dictate the future of crypto regulation globally. What’s called for is a MiCA 2.0, that holds the capacity to become a scalable, comprehensive rulebook, fit for a single market of over 400 million people.

Such a framework wouldn’t just offer regulatory clarity, but hold the potential to transform the EU into the world’s most attractive hub for crypto firms, **while strengthening investor protection and trust**. In doing so, Europe could once again position itself as a global standard-setter, just as it did with GDPR.

**Despite early scepticism, GDPR became the blueprint** for data privacy laws around the world, from Switzerland to South Korea. It proved that the EU can lead on regulation with global influence. Now, with MiCA, it has the chance to do the same for digital assets.

## What should the EU do next?

The next obvious step for the EU is to further MiCA’s remit by closing the gaps left by its current iteration. That means tackling the most difficult to regulate areas, including DeFi, staking, and NFTs. While they were once considered niche, they’re now central to the digital asset ecosystem, so ignoring them is no longer an option.

Equally important is **ensuring consistent enforcement of all current and future MiCA regulations**. Without uniform application across all 27 member states, MiCA risks becoming fragmented and losing its credibility, just as other EU regulations have in the past. A robust, cross-border supervisory framework is critical, and it must be implemented swiftly if MiCA is to reach its full potential.

## Staying ahead in a shifting regulatory landscape

MiCA has given the EU a head start in crypto regulation, but that lead won’t last by itself. The **UK, though smaller and still developing its regulatory framework**, is nimble, forward-thinking, and well-positioned to capitalise on any EU errors or oversights. And while the **US seems enmeshed in its own insular problems**, when it does make a move, it has the financial power and global influence to make an immediate impact.

So, **this is no time for the EU to lose momentum**. To maintain its position as a global standard-setter, policymakers must remain confident and act fast. With the right choices, the EU still has the opportunity to shape how crypto assets are integrated into the future of global finance, but it can’t afford to hesitate.

Like GDPR, MiCA has shown the world what the EU can do. **It’s brought clarity and structure, to what was once viewed as the lawless Wild West of finance**, providing direction where it has been notable by its absence.

But there is no time for complacency. **MiCA is currently too narrow and too slow**. It’s not equipped to keep pace with the rapid innovation of the sector, which opens it up to future loopholes and inefficiencies, risking its future viability. So, if the EU truly wants to safeguard investors, and foster trust through transparency and consistency, now is the time to do more. It has the tools, the influence, and the momentum. The only question is whether it will seize the opportunity.
### How Benjamin Wolba is Turning Hackathons into Europe’s Defense Tech Movement
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/european-defense-tech-hub-innovation-ukraine-drone-warfare/
Last updated: 2025-11-20T08:34:47.000Z
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### Radix Ventures Backs Polish Biotech Startup Proteine Resources with a New Funding
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/proteine-resources-secures-12m-funding/
Last updated: 2025-11-17T12:35:49.000Z
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### Beyond the Ego: Why Your Business Needs External Eyes ft. VEDA Works
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/beyond-the-ego-why-your-business-needs-external-eyes-ft-veda-works/
Last updated: 2026-05-12T07:50:26.000Z
Can founders really scale without letting go? In this episode of The Recursive Podcast, we sit down with Boyan Stoyanov, an entrepreneur and operations strategist with a decade of experience building and running teams across Europe & Southeast Asia.

After leading recruitment and people operations for digital-first companies, Boyan now helps organizations scale sustainably under the VEDA brand — uniting operational design with accounting, payroll, and financial strategy to help founders move from working in the business to working on the business. We talk about his journey from Asia back to Bulgaria, why most companies get stuck small, and how VEDA’s merger with Hireworks is designed to solve the scaling problem end to end.

What you’ll learn:  
🏗️ The hardest founder shift: delegating not just tasks but decision-making, and how to build the infrastructure to do it safely.  
🏝️ How Southeast Asian business culture compares to Eastern Europe: trust-first relationships, indirect “no,” negotiation norms, and why you need boots on the ground.  
📈 Why hiring can hurt capacity in the short term, and how onboarding, process, and performance loops must improve across the whole funnel to truly scale.  
⚖️ The case for fractional operational leadership vs. a full-time hire, common mistakes with consultants, and how VEDA’s integrated ops + finance approach accelerates growth.

🧠 This episode is a must-watch for first-time founders, scaling operators, and leaders eyeing international expansion, especially those considering fractional services as a smarter path to senior expertise.

[Tune in to the episode!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZUCB758WCg&t=2498s&ref=therecursive.com)
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Regional Investors Back Health, HR, and Defense-tech Ventures
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-weekly-digitail-meout-eu-startups-deals/
Last updated: 2025-11-14T19:19:44.000Z
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### 12,000 Startups and 8 Unicorns: Has the Balkans Reached Growth Plateau or Next-Level Maturity?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-balkan-startup-venture-report-innotechnics-2022-2025/
Last updated: 2025-11-14T09:34:58.000Z
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### Viber Pay Partners with Paynetics to Scale Across 7 Markets, Working Toward Its Super App Strategy
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/viber-pay-partners-with-paynetics-to-scale-across-seven-markets-in-a-new-step-toward-its-super-app-strategy/
Last updated: 2025-12-03T13:21:33.000Z
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### 6 CEE FemTech Startups to Watch
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/6-cee-femtech-startups-to-watch/
Last updated: 2025-11-14T19:22:30.000Z
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### Can Bucharest Become a Cloud Engineering Hub in the AI Economy?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/can-bucharest-become-a-cloud-engineering-hub-in-the-ai-economy/
Last updated: 2025-11-13T07:19:11.000Z
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### The Risk Spectrum: Managing Portfolio Risk at Earlybird, EnBW, ERV and the EIF
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/eib-eif-enbw-earlybird-energy-revolution-ventures-portfolio-vc-risk-management/
Last updated: 2026-02-13T14:17:15.000Z
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### Hungary’s MeOut Group Acquires EU-Startups
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/meout-group-acquires-eu-startups/
Last updated: 2025-11-12T09:58:41.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### “AI has always been in our DNA”: Interview with Tsvetan Alexiev, CEO of Sirma Group Holding
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/sirma-ai-tsvetan-alexiev/
Last updated: 2025-11-10T14:30:41.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Doers Go Global. Next Stop, Dubai
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/doers-go-global-next-stop-dubai/
Last updated: 2025-11-10T13:53:25.000Z
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### Romanian-founded Digitail Raises €20M to Modernize Pet Care Through AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/digitail-raises-23m-ai-veterinary-platform-series-b/
Last updated: 2025-11-10T17:15:50.000Z
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### e2vc Principal Tunya Irkad on Getting Into VC and Funding “Insane Founders”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/tunya-irkad-e2vc-engineer-breaking-into-vc-becoming-investor-funding-thesis/
Last updated: 2026-07-07T08:07:07.000Z
“*People often ask how I got into VC straight out of college. Truth is, it’s rare — funds often prioritize immediate execution over mentoring their talent*,” tweeted **Tunya Irkad** last summer. Now **Principal of e2vc**, managing a fund about €70 million that invests in [startups across Central & Eastern Europe](https://www.therecursive.com/open-source-daytona-fuels-the-developer-community-worldwide-with-a-new-seed-funding/), the Baltics, and Turkey.

How someone becomes an investor? It is not something you learn at a college. So, when I saw Tunya’s post I knew I would want to talk to her about the experience. This engineer turned investor joined e2vc in 2021 (before [500 Emerging Europe, that operates independently from 500 Global](https://www.therecursive.com/500-emerging-europe-unveils-its-new-brand-e2vc/)). She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is currently working to connect startups with technology teams in Turkey and CEE region, with larger investors in the US.

Besides invaluable insights into her journey, how the e2vc’s unique investment and operations approach influenced it, **we also talked extensively about investor-founder relationships and what truly sets successful founders apart**.

## From engineer to investor

Tunya already started **crafting her career while studying engineering**. It is a rare find in the investor world, but now she reflects it has helped hone her analytical thinking and process optimisation skills. Although, the most important aspect was familiarity with technology. **Tech has been the driving force behind most of the startups**, and as she points, “*for me it is very important to be able to discuss technology behind solutions, and whether making an investment makes sense or not*.”

That is especially true with all the AI hype, she adds, “*you have to have more awareness, more knowledge of the BS that could be slipped under the AI hype*.”

However, rather than following a conventional engineering career path, **she explored a wide variety of roles through numerous internships** — ranging from pharmaceutical at Novartis to consulting at Ernst & Young. These experiences helped her quickly identify the work environments she enjoyed and discard those that didn’t fit her interests. Her first exposure to the venture side though, came through an Angel Investment Network.

> *“The fact that you have to learn (…) pulled me fast into the world of VC. I get FOMO‑d and I’m obsessed with knowing everything that’s happening, especially on the tech side.”*

So, when the Istanbul‑based team from 500 Emerging Europe launched their second fund, she seized the opportunity to join as their first junior hire. **The fund’s flat organizational structure proved instrumental in her rapid growth**. “*Everyone is given a space, an opportunity, and resources to be able to construct their own pipeline, lead and champion the founders that they like, and convince the general partners to invest in them*,” she highlighted. This approach allowed her to lead her first investment already as an analyst.

> *“I’ve always believed that it is not about betting on trends — it’s about recognizing obsession early. The founder’s, and sometimes, your own.”*

Over the next few years she expanded her remit, covering ecosystems such as Croatia, Hungary, and Serbia — and building a strong network of founders and investors across CEE and Turkey.

## “Insane Founder” mentality

Our conversation rolled out after Tunya’s appearance at the startup stage of Infobip Shift 2025 conference, and our next topic was actually influenced by something she mentioned on a panel: ‘***I am only interested in funding “insane founders*”**.’ How you construct thesis around that, I wondered humoured, asking if she cares to elaborate.

> In her mind, the word “insane” captures a level of commitment that goes far beyond a typical startup hustle. It’s the **willingness to keep building when the odds are stacked against you**.

In emerging markets funding is thin, talent pools are small, and the market can be skeptical. Tunya believes only founders who are “*insane enough to do this to themselves*” can survive.

*“When I say ‘insane founders,’ I mean people like* [*Ivan Burazin of Daytona*](https://www.therecursive.com/open-source-daytona-fuels-the-developer-community-worldwide-with-a-new-seed-funding/)*: relentless, creative, and never satisfied with easy wins,” she concludes.*

When she talks about **the bond between a venture fund and the founders it backs**, she never describes it as a simple “money‑for‑equity” deal. ”*I try to be their *toughest critic and biggest ally*: the person who shares pages of insights on their industry but also checks in when the morale dips. I’m not a passive investor*,” she says.

In the same manner, Tunya gravitates toward the kind of ventures that demand long-term conviction and genuine technical empathy: robotics, AI infrastructure, vertical AI, and voice-driven, workflow-intensive platforms.

> *“I love founders who build things people can’t yet imagine scaling,” she says. ”These are the kinds of companies that test patience and conviction.”*

## More than the money

Tunya notes that **she tries to be the person founders can reach out to anytime**. “*Sometimes it’s to think through a product or growth question, a positioning challenge, or simply to talk through a tough moment. My style with founders is *high-trust and high-context*. I’d rather be the person they call first when something breaks — because that’s when real partnership shows. It’s never just about numbers for me; it’s about clarity, strategy, and grit*.”

Overall, the relationship between founder and an investor is meant to be a *long‑term* partnership, not a one‑off thing. However, Tunya noticed “**when there is a lot of money floating around*, founders sometimes take it without checking what the investor brings to the table.*.”

> “*It’s the most important thing, to find the best partner possible. (…) If you only take the money and don’t look into what this investor means to you in five years, you’ll regret it later.*”

The right partner should stay useful for the next round, open doors, and have a solid reputation in the ecosystem, she points.

### Founders and investors, stop doing this!

On another note, because regional ecosystems are not that big, investors talk. Tunya warns founders to avoid “nice‑but‑not‑investing” introductions, an intro from an investor who isn’t actually putting money in can damage both the founder’s prospects and the investor’s credibility.

How it backfires? When a non‑committing investor introduces you around, the first question that boomerangs back from other is: Why they are good for me and not for you?

So, Tunya advises: “*Don’t get intros from an investor who is not investing in you… cold outreach is much better than getting an introduction from an investor who decided not to fund you*.”

## Bridging Emerging Europe to San Francisco

Nowdays Tunya is busy with supporting portfolio companies and talent‑mapping, building a diaspora‑focused program in San Francisco and maintaining **the bridge to Silicon Valley**. Beyond investments, she notes that her mission in SF is deeply personal, *“to build a home for CEE and Turkish founders in the world’s most competitive ecosystem.”*

**Through e2vc’s Nest initiative**, the fund aims to be a crucial support system for founders navigating the competitive San Francisco landscape. This includes, among other things: **warm introductions** between different founders, and to investors; assisting with **visa processes**; guiding them to essential **service providers**.

Furthermore, Tunya and the team address the significant challenge of talent acquisition in the Bay Area by **helping diaspora founders hire high-quality teams from their local ecosystems**. This is facilitated by a dedicated talent team that not only assists with recruitment but also with culture building. The fund actively maintains a “talent mapping” initiative, engaging with engineers and professionals across big tech companies to identify future founders.

For all the talk of networks, Tunya insists **regional founders need to come to Bay Area in person, at least for a short while once a year**. “*The place itself rewires you. It’s just being there. Just being there makes you want to create something meaningful*.” It’s not romanticism so much as being dipped into that type of thinking and surroundings. Even a quiet dinner doesn’t stay quiet: “*table away, you start hearing people talking about go-to-market strategy*.”

That constant push is part of what the fund “offers,” as she puts it. Not hype, but immersion. The team now cycles through San Francisco more often so they can bring back **current context**, not secondhand notes. “*Constantly talking to ambitious people who are building incredible things has a daily deep-dive effect on me*,” she adds. “*It keeps me sharp, curious, and humbled at the same time. I have a feeling that I can also provide this as a resource to the founders in my network from outside the Bay Area*.”

## The III Fund closing in

The e2vc fund is currently finalizing the process for the first close of their III Fund, targeting $100 million with ambitions to reach $150 million. **The focus remains on Central Eastern European and Turkish founders, with an increased emphasis on diaspora founders** and a new structured program to bridge them to the Bay Area.

She also highlights they will be more focused on **reserving capital for follow‑on rounds**, a lesson learned from the four unicorns which emerged across two funds. “*We would like to have enough allocation for the follow-on rounds and we will separate that amount just for the follow-ons*,” she emphasized, ensuring continued support for their successful portfolio companies.
### 6 CEE Countries With AI Factories Backed by EU
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-countries-launch-ai-factory-eu-projects-insait-pharos-slaif/
Last updated: 2025-12-16T12:23:11.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Spotawheel Secures €300M to Accelerate Used Car Subscription
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/spotawheel-lands-e300m-to-accelerate-used-car-subscription/
Last updated: 2025-11-10T08:45:07.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: €80M United Founders Fund
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-weekly-roundup-november-2025/
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### Balnord Exceeds Target for €70M Early-stage Fund, Plans €100M Final Close by 2026
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/balnord-baltic-deeptech-fund-70m-raise/
Last updated: 2025-11-07T09:58:39.000Z
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### Investors in Prague Highlight Europe’s Shift Toward Long-Term Tech Sovereignty
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/engaged-investments-2025-europe-ai-defense-venture-capital/
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### European Investment Fund Invests €20M in TIN Capital’s Cybersecurity Fund
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/eif-invests-20-million-tin-capital-cyber-tech-fund/
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### Financing the Frontier: Inside CFO Insights’ Blueprint for Europe’s Scaleups in Deep Tech, Climate, and Defense
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cfo-as-a-service-cfo-insights-deeptech-ai-defense/
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### United Founders Launches €80 Million Fund to Back Europe’s Next Tech Decacorns
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/united-founders-launches-80m-european-tech-fund/
Last updated: 2025-11-04T09:58:40.000Z
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### Evrotrust Raises €6.6M to Roll Out the European Digital Identity Wallet in Bulgaria
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/evrotrust-raises-6-6m-to-expand-eudi-wallet-across-europe/
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### From Seed to Exit: Croatian-Founded SplxAI Acquired by Cloud Behemoth Zscaler
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/zscaler-acquires-splxai-for-advanced-llm-security-and-ai-governance/
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### Polish Holi Raises €3M to Tackle Obesity with AI-Powered Digital Clinic
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/holi-raises-3m-seed-to-expand-digital-obesity-clinic-europe/
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### Future Unicorns’ Next Chapter: Pavlina Yanakieva on Stepping Down, and Konstantin Kunev on What Comes Next
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/future-unicorns-next-chapter-pavlina-yanakieva-on-stepping-down-and-konstantin-kunev-on-what-comes-next/
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Bulgarian-founded EnduroSat Secures Third Major Funding Round This Year
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-bulgarian-founded-endurosat-secures-third-major-funding-round-this-year/
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### EnduroSat Secures €90M Funding and Opens New Space Center to Accelerate Satellite Production
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/endurosat-104m-funding-expand-satellite-production/
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### Next Consult Introduces an AI-Powered Digital Workforce to Transform Customer Engagement
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/next-consult-introduces-an-ai-powered-digital-workforce-to-transform-customer-engagement/
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### Can Regulation Drive Innovation? Inside Philip Morris Bulgaria’s Sustainability Shift
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/can-regulation-drive-innovation-inside-philip-morris-bulgaria-s-sustainability-shift-dilyana-yakova-manager-regulatory-affairs/
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### SalesPatriot Secures €4.3M to Automate Defense Procurement
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/salespatriot-seed-ai-defense-procurement-crv/
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### Your Next Investment Is a Math Problem
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/data-driven-venture-capital-statistical-modeling-natasa-ralevic-vestberry/
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### How Smart Can AI Be With Our Knowledge?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ai-knowledge-retrieval-rag-stefan-damm-cto-mimirio/
Last updated: 2025-10-28T13:09:28.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Is the Space Tech Finally Boosting Off?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bogdan-iordache-space-tech-investment-2025/
Last updated: 2025-10-27T09:33:37.000Z
Look up to the sky — we’re a miracle living on one of the millions of other pebbles in the universe. Since forever, it has been the destiny of humankind to explore the frontier – and today’s frontier is space. After millennia of civilization, we finally boosted out of Earth’s orbit to explore it.

Consequently, **space tech is increasingly emerging**, although the building blocks have been around for longer. Q3 2025 space tech investments have hit a record $3.5B value, as per [Seraphim’s Space Index](https://seraphim.vc/seraphim-space-index/?ref=therecursive.com), driven by new demand (defense, EU sovereignty), better tech, and new regulations.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/therecursive-com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/seraphim.png)

Credit: Seraphim Space Index

## 80 years ago, mankind set out to conquer space…

Each space program reached further — **first the Earth’s orbit, then the Moon, and later the outskirts of our solar system**. Their progress has been slow and heavily dependent on state-sponsored research and infrastructure.

However, in 2015, **SpaceX** reignited the space race by inventing the reusable rocket—an incredible accomplishment, especially for a private company —that **enabled much faster iteration across all aspects of spacecraft development**. Since then, SpaceX has launched over 500 successful missions.

The decrease in cost/kg launched into space, the miniaturization of electronics, more reliable and powerful engines, better energy sources, and communication infrastructure have allowed for an acceleration of space development, starting with the **Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites**.

The proliferation of LEO satellites, which are smaller and cheaper, is the primary reason why the [number of operating satellites has been growing by 40%](https://blog.ucs.org/syoung/how-many-satellites-are-in-space-the-spike-in-numbers-continues/?ref=therecursive.com) in absolute terms year by year, and it’s projected to continue growing at the same rate until at least 2030.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/therecursive-com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/operating-cost-satellites.png)

Credit: Union of Concerned Scientist

This new class of satellites has extended existing services and enabled many exciting new use cases. Earth Observation enables satellites to capture optical, radar, SAR, RF, thermal, and hyperspectral data and use it for a multitude of use cases, including **forest and crop monitoring, city monitoring and planning, ship tracking, disaster monitoring, defense technology use cases, and many others.**

Earth Observation use cases have already generated multiple billion-dollar companies, including [Planet Labs](https://www.planet.com/?ref=therecursive.com), [Maxar Technologies (now Vantiv)](https://vantor.com/?ref=therecursive.com), [ESRI](https://www.esri.com/en-us/home?ref=therecursive.com), and many others.

But LEO satellites, and soon VLEO satellites (Very Low Earth Orbit), have enabled other services, such as:

- high-speed, low-latency broadband internet offered by [Starlink](https://starlink.com/?ref=therecursive.com), the satellite constellation developed by SpaceX,
- Hubble Network’s in-orbit satellite Bluetooth data connectivity service,
- in-orbit microgravity manufacturing for pharmaceuticals and special materials developed by [Varda Space Industries](https://www.varda.com/?ref=therecursive.com) (US) or [Space Forge](https://www.spaceforge.com/?ref=therecursive.com) (UK),
- and in-orbit data centers built by [Starcloud](https://www.starcloud.com/?ref=therecursive.com) (US), using low temperatures in space for cooling.

## Growing companies, expanding use cases

SpaceX is no longer the only provider of launch services and the only builder of reusable rockets. Blue Origin (US), RocketLab (NZ), Firefly (US), Isar (DE), Space Pioneer (CN), Skyroot (IN) are in different stages of building launch vehicles for different use-cases (small/mid/large payloads), joining established players such as Arianespace (FR).

New satellite manufacturers such as EnduroSat (BG), Apex (US), Kepler (CAN), Gomspace (DK), and many others are also launching new products, along with the existing traditional satellite manufacturers such as SpaceX (again, US), Airbus (FR), Thales (FR), Lockheed (US), and others.

And to power this accelerating industry, **new players are developing power and propulsion, comms, optics, telemetry, and re-entry capsules**. While some of these components are proprietary to each manufacturer and serve as differentiators, many others are similar and will be manufactured at scale for all of them.

All of this infrastructure has to be put into orbit and then maintained. But not all satellites need to be fully assembled on Earth; some parts can be manufactured in orbit. In-space manufacturing providers, such as Dcubed (GE), Solestial (US), or Redwire (US), use either **3D manufacturing or roll-out solar array technology to manufacture or assemble solar panels in space**, simplifying satellite deployment.

Another special use case is **space cargo**, which allows for transporting cargo from one place to another on Earth directly via orbit. Companies such as Space Cargo (LU), Atmos (DE), and The Exploration Company (DE) are developing specialized cargo-carrying spacecraft.

## The Earth’s orbit is getting busier.

Maintaining space infrastructure is not yet a “today problem”, but will definitely be a “tomorrow problem”. [ESA’s](https://www.esa.int/Space%5FSafety/Space%5FDebris/ESA%5FSpace%5FEnvironment%5FReport%5F2025?ref=therecursive.com) Space Environment Report shows an acceleration of all tracked objects in Earth orbit over time:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/ae/b8aee878-7ddc-40ad-8f68-92a28c560560/content/images/therecursive-com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/orbit-traffic-evolution.png)

Credit: ESA’s Space Environment Report 2025

A busy orbit means more **challenges for space monitoring, mission design and simulation, in-space maneuvering and servicing, and, later on, debris removal**. And many new space tech startups are already working on these challenges.

Take debris removal — imagine maneuvering a satellite flying around the Earth at over 25.000 km/h, to gently push spacecraft debris or a piece of rock, so that it is directed towards the Earth on the right trajectory, and it does not collide with other in-orbit satellites or in-mission spacecraft, before moving to the next task. To fully exploit Earth orbit, we’ll need to solve incredibly complex problems, requiring improved engines, sensing capabilities, and more.

The stakes are getting higher, and failures now cost millions. As launches, satellites, and human spaceflight become increasingly common, they need to be **easily tracked, financed, and insured**. Companies like Flow Engineering (UK), Epsilon3 (US), and Charter Space (UK/US) are building the right products for the job.

Space is also the next barrier of defense. The Trump administration, which established the [United States Space Force](https://www.spaceforce.mil/?ref=therecursive.com) in 2019, has promised to place special emphasis on space defense and potentially revive the “Star Wars” plan first promoted by the Reagan administration to create a space force of satellites equipped with laser weapons.

Until then, using Earth Observation services for defense purposes has become common, especially in the context of the Russian war in Ukraine, where [ICEYE](https://www.iceye.com/?ref=therecursive.com) (FI) services have proven highly efficient.

So far, it seems like we haven’t even left the orbit.

Beyond VLEO, LEO, and GEO, we can start planning for asteroid mining, Mars colonies, and deep space exploration.

The future starts again, tomorrow.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: A Startup Taking Drone Tech from Film to Defense
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-funding-roundup-october-2025/
Last updated: 2025-10-26T09:28:00.000Z
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### “Access to Financing Can No Longer Wait”: Inside the First Financing & IPO Summit by VERTIK
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/access-to-financing-can-no-longer-wait-inside-the-first-financing-ipo-summit-by-vertik/
Last updated: 2025-10-23T11:49:33.000Z
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### TEDAI Vienna: Joscha Bach on Avoiding the Dot-Com Trap in the Age of AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/joscha-bach-tedai-vienna-2025-ai-alignement-ai-bubble-regulation/
Last updated: 2025-10-23T11:07:36.000Z
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### The Rise of Fractional Services: Why CFO-as-a-Service is Gaining Traction Among Entrepreneurs
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/veda-finance-how-cfo-as-a-service-is-empowering-startups-to-grow/
Last updated: 2025-10-23T09:19:14.000Z
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### Boost.space Closes Seed Round at €6.17M, Further Fueling Its “Agentic Database”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/boost-space-seed-round-fueling-us-expansion-and-agentic-database/
Last updated: 2025-10-22T13:15:17.000Z
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### Estonian Yaga Raises €4M to Redefine Fashion Across Africa and Middle East
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/sustainability-meets-style-yaga-raises-pre-series-a-fashion-marketplace/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T07:40:51.000Z
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### Can You Prove Your Identity Without Sharing Personal Information?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/zero-knowledge-proofs-zkps-the-secure-future-of-digital-identity-verification-amidst-ai-fraud/
Last updated: 2025-10-21T10:47:14.000Z
This July, **hackers breached Tea**, a popular social app designed to help women vet the safety of men they’ve matched with on dating apps. It was **nothing short of disastrous**, with hackers accessing and subsequently leaking [some 72,000 images submitted by women](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7vl57n74pqo?ref=therecursive.com) as part of the sign-up process. Tea had claimed these verification images would be deleted immediately after being uploaded and confirmed. Instead, photos of women holding up ID cards next to their faces proliferated through the internet. It was the kind of honeypot break-in a malicious actor could only dream of. And it all could have been avoided.

We’re living in a digital world where **cybercrime is rampant and getting worse**. Between January and June of this year, the UK [reported that a record-breaking 217,000-plus cases of fraud risk](https://fintech.global/2025/08/06/identity-fraud-hits-118k-as-ai-bypasses-checks/?ref=therecursive.com) were filed to its National Fraud Database, with major spikes in public sector and gambling-related identity fraud. Increasingly **sophisticated AI deepfake** technology is no doubt partially to blame. A recent [TRM Lab report](https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/ai-enabled-fraud-how-scammers-are-exploiting-generative-ai?ref=therecursive.com) counted a 456% rise in generative AI-enabled scams between May 2024 and April 2025, and [one Feedzai survey of financial professionals](https://www.feedzai.com/pressrelease/ai-fraud-trends-2025/?ref=therecursive.com) found that only 8% reported never seeing generative AI being used by criminals.

Downstream of these developments is souring public sentiment. The average person’s data appears to be more at risk than ever. **A company says it won’t store your identification verification selfie**, and a few months later it’s floating around the internet. You join a betting site for the championship game, and suddenly someone’s in your account that’s connected to your bank. The natural reaction is to not want to upload any sensitive information at all, which may explain some of the backlash to new online safety laws in the UK.

This new reality also lays bare a bigger issue. **Poorly secured data honeypots are an obvious problem**. Then again, those honeypots shouldn’t exist in the first place, and they wouldn’t if a better online verification system was widely available.

## New rules, new digital verification tech

We cannot do away with digital verification, particularly as AI deepfakes make it easier than ever to fabricate an ID card or a selfie. Being able to prove we are who we say we are is critical to keeping a huge amount of online services operating safely and effectively. People can’t just opt out and continue to use the internet normally. Still, they’re correct in thinking that face scans and full photos of their passport or driving license entail a huge privacy risk.

Better technology can enable people to prove their identity without letting the internet regress into a Wild West of deepfakes and constant privacy breaches. Verifiable credentials stored in digital identity wallets are among the most practical ways to do selective disclosure. Since **electronic IDs with zero-knowledge proof capabilities** are more secure than many existing KYC methods, they can fill the cybersecurity space opened by better AI deepfakes.

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) of identity allow individuals to share one identity-verifying piece of information with a website without any sensitive or irrelevant information changing hands. A site that needs to check your age doesn’t need your full home address, but it’s going to receive it if the **verification process involves uploading a photo of a plastic driving license**. With the zero-knowledge proof, the process doesn’t need birthdate or any other personal information. The user’s eID contains the exact birthday, and thus it ‘knows’ that the user is over 18\. Using a ZKP, the eID then sends information that the legal age statement — ‘This user is 18 or older’ — is true directly to the website. It doesn’t disclose the actual month, day, or year of the user’s birthday. **It just sends verifiable proof** that they were born either before or on this day 18 years ago.

Just as this can be done with age, it can be done with sex, home country, marital status, and so on. This isn’t some futuristic vision. This zero-knowledge proof technology exists, and we ought to be enabling and encouraging its use.

**These eIDs also need to be issued and backed by governments**, with full guarantees of decentralization and privacy-first infrastructure. Government-issued credentials are essential because they guarantee trust and data quality. Private wallets can complement them, but only if users have genuine choice over which to use.

## Zero-knowledge proofs to all the people

Digital privacy’s public image is not in a particularly good place. Besides better implementation and adoption of ZKP-enabled eIDs, we also need a **well-considered program of public communication on this technology**. People won’t use eIDs if they think they are just the latest verification technology bound to put their data at risk.

Central to this communication is the basic premise that zero-knowledge proofs significantly minimize disclosure. They have the potential to enable a truly privacy-first internet and, by extension, a genuinely safer internet. But **this is all dependent on a combination of efforts from a range of actors**.

In governments, there needs to be a newfound political will directed toward widespread interoperable eID issuance. Issuance must be accompanied by a comprehensive public-facing campaign around eIDs’ safety and ease of use. Regulated businesses need to be taught how they stand to benefit, and begin accepting them for digital verification. This move will naturally encourage public participation by virtue of being public-facing in its own right.

Coordinating this **confluence of political will, public awareness, and business-side technological change** is a difficult maneuver. That’s no excuse. The enormous surge in AI fraud and worsening public perception of data safety demands action. The innovation part is already done, after all.
### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Dexory Raises Series C
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-weekly-roundup-funding-partnerships-global-impact/
Last updated: 2025-10-18T08:04:10.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### No Team, No Code? No Problem! This Accelerator is Supporting Founders to Fly Solo with AI
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/myroboteam-accelerator-supporting-founders-ai-co-founder-idea-validation/
Last updated: 2025-10-28T12:01:58.000Z
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### Cyprus Startup Reality Check: Can It Become More Than Tax Haven?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cyprus-startup-reality-check-can-it-become-more-than-tax-haven/
Last updated: 2025-10-19T06:40:26.000Z
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### From Bulgaria to Greece: Fibank’s Hyper‑Personalised Banking
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/from-bulgaria-to-greece-fibank-s-hyper-personalised-banking/
Last updated: 2025-11-18T15:45:50.000Z
Fibank’s Chief Digital Officer Vladimir Ikonomov talks about the bank’s digital‑only expansion into Greece and the innovative services it’s bringing to customers. Learn how a traditional bank is positioning itself alongside fintechs and what the future of banking looks like.

☑️ 24/7 localized customer support with native Greek speakers  
☑️ Real‑time payments, instant loan approvals and AI‑driven hyper‑personalization  
☑️ MyFibank app perks: permanent 1% interest on current accounts, up to 2% on term deposits, and cashback on card transactions  
☑️ Competitive strategy against fintechs and plans for further regional growth  
☑️ Vision for the next 5‑6 years: voice‑command assistants, instant product issuance, and the evolving role of physical branches

[Tune in to the episode!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdVUuXl88w0&ref=therecursive.com)
### 10 Most Relevant Fintech Trends in 2025
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/10-most-relevant-fintech-frends-in-2025/
Last updated: 2025-10-16T11:06:57.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### CEE-Based Funds: Investing in European Defense
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-defense-venture-funds-rearm-europe/
Last updated: 2025-10-15T13:11:02.000Z
_This post is for subscribers only._
### Dexory Raises €143M, Securing Romania’s Second-Largest Series C
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/romanian-dexory-series-c-warehouse-automation-robotics/
Last updated: 2025-10-14T20:11:52.000Z
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### Czech-founded Resistant AI Secures €21.6 Million Series B to Combat AI-Powered Financial Crime
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/resistant-ai-raises-25m-series-b-for-financial-crime-prevention/
Last updated: 2025-10-14T07:26:14.000Z
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### Europe’s Defense Future Takes Shape in Sofia
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/regional-defence-summit-2025-bulgaria-innovation/
Last updated: 2025-10-13T12:52:56.000Z
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### Europe on the Move: Bits & Pretzels Fuels Unity and a New Risk Culture
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/europe-on-the-move-bits-pretzels-fuels-unity-and-a-new-risk-culture/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T08:49:32.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Major Funding Rounds From Estonia to Greece
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-startup-funding-roundup-october-2025/
Last updated: 2025-10-11T09:43:31.000Z
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### Sofia Tech Park is the Bulgarian Host of CASSINI Hackathons & Mentoring vol.10
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/sofia-tech-park-is-the-bulgarian-host-of-cassini-hackathon/
Last updated: 2025-10-10T13:34:48.000Z
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### What Can We Learn From Munich Startup Ecosystem and Its “Pay-It-Forward” Culture?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/martin-giese-startup-ecosystem-lessons-munich-eastern-europe/
Last updated: 2025-10-10T13:48:31.000Z
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### Where Ideas Met Opportunity: How to Web Conference Brought the Region’s Tech Leaders Together
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/where-ideas-met-opportunity-how-to-web-conference-brought-the-region-s-tech-leaders-together/
Last updated: 2025-10-09T08:48:56.000Z
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### Claim the Future 2025: CEE’s Insurance Industry Steps Into the Age of Claims Innovation
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/claim-the-future-2025-insurance-innovation-sofia/
Last updated: 2025-10-13T12:34:59.000Z
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### Provectus Capital Partners Secures Over €162M First Close for Second Southeast Europe Buyout Fund
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/provectus-capital-partners-first-close-fund-ii-162m/
Last updated: 2025-10-14T08:16:53.000Z
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### The Big Bang of the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Bulgaria & CEE
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startups-ecosystem-unicorns-endeavor-bulgaria-anniversary/
Last updated: 2025-10-08T11:41:53.000Z
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### Founder Red Flags: Behaviors That Shut Investors Out
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/vc-raising-the-red-flag-investing-spotting-trouble-before-you-raise-invest/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T13:24:22.000Z
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### Ukraine’s First Fintech Unicorn: UMAEF Backs monobank Maker at $1B
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/ukraine-s-first-fintech-unicorn-umaef-backs-monobank-maker-at-1b/
Last updated: 2025-10-07T12:21:59.000Z
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### Doers Summit Debuts in Dubai this November – A New Global Chapter for Founders and Investors
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/doers-summit-debuts-in-dubai-this-november/
Last updated: 2025-10-07T11:25:13.000Z
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### Dirty Data, Clean Decisions:  What’s Really Shared at Venture Intelligence Day
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/dirty-data-clean-decisions-what-s-really-shared-at-venture-intelligence-day/
Last updated: 2025-10-07T07:55:39.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Cat Longevity, Laser Weeds, and Drone Swarms
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-startup-tech-weekly-cat-longevity-laser-weeds-and-drone-swarms/
Last updated: 2025-10-03T15:16:10.000Z
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### AI Is Hungry: Which Platforms Feed It Your Data in 2025?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/2025-social-media-privacy-ranking-incogni-ai-data-collection/
Last updated: 2025-10-13T07:56:10.000Z
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### 10 Years Later: Balkan Startups’ Biggest Wins and Hardest Lessons
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/10-years-later-balkan-startups-biggest-wins-and-hardest-lessons/
Last updated: 2026-05-28T14:01:21.000Z
In the first episode of The Recursive Roundtable series we celebrate the 10‑year anniversary of Endeavor Bulgaria!

Dilyana Haralanova, COO of The Recursive, was joined by Jack Thorogood (CEO of Serbian scale-up Native Teams, Milena Milić (Manager of startup community Garaza), and Max Gurvits (VC investor and partner at Vitosha Ventures) to discuss how the Balkan startup scene has evolved and where it’s headed.

**What you’ll learn:**

⭐ The biggest hurdles CEE founders faced 10 years ago vs. today  
⭐ How EU membership and early government‑backed funds jump‑started regional ecosystems  
⭐ The role of diaspora talent and returning emigrants in accelerating growth across the Balkans  
⭐ Success stories shaping the region – from early unicorns to emerging AI‑driven scale‑ups  
⭐ Future outlook: regional collaboration, emerging specialisations, and the surge of new venture capital funds

[Tune in to the episode!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSSJLFrX7Gg&ref=therecursive.com)
### European Startups Just Got a Bay Area “Embassy”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/european-startups-just-got-a-bay-area-embassy/
Last updated: 2025-10-04T18:26:57.000Z
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### VERTIK Launches Financing & IPO Summit 2025 to Widen Capital Access for Romanian Entrepreneurs
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/vertik-financing-ipo-summit-2025-non-bank-capital-due-diligence/
Last updated: 2026-02-13T14:18:36.000Z
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### Polish Orbotix Raises €6.5M to Accelerate Autonomous Defense Drones in Europe
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/orbotix-funding-drone-swarming-defense-in-europe/
Last updated: 2025-10-01T08:50:49.000Z
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### TEDAI Vienna: Advait Sarkar on Designing AI That Challenges, So People Think (Better)
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/tedai-vienna-advait-sarkar-designing-ai-that-supports-critical-thinking/
Last updated: 2025-10-01T13:30:52.000Z
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### Czech Supernova Raises Series A to Bring Vibe-Coding to a Whole Product Team
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/supernova-raises-series-a-investment-portal-vibe-coding-for-entire-teams/
Last updated: 2025-09-30T13:31:28.000Z
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### Is Advisory the Best Kept Secret in Startup Growth? And Can Founders Afford It?
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/is-advisory-the-best-kept-secret-in-startup-growth-and-can-founders-afford-it/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T11:52:22.000Z
In CEE, founders still often lack structured access to expertise that can transform their ideas into scalable businesses. Branding, cybersecurity, business process optimization, or partnerships management all require deep, specialized knowledge, but most early-stage teams either cannot afford it or do not know where to start.

[The EBRD’s Star Venture Programme](https://www.ebrd.com/home/what-we-do/products-and-services/support-for-start-ups-and-msmes/our-programmes/star-venture.html?ref=therecursive.com) plays a crucial role in covering this need. Beyond [Cambridge workshops](https://www.therecursive.com/how-university-of-cambridge-experts-are-helping-romanian-scaleups-close-the-strategy-gap/), mentoring and investor pitch events, one of its most powerful yet lesser known components is [tailored advisory](https://www.ebrd.com/home/what-we-do/products-and-services/support-for-start-ups-and-msmes/access-business-advice.html?ref=therecursive.com).

For the startups [selected in the 2025 cohort in Romania](https://www.therecursive.com/from-talent-to-execution-at-scale-ebrd-s-star-venture-programme-returns-to-romania/), Star Venture covers, through grant funding, **the full net cost of advisory projects**, up to a total budget of €40k (maximum €30k per project). In practice, this gives founders the chance to work with experienced consultants on issues that can unlock growth, without draining already limited resources.

It is a part of the programme that does not always make headlines but can make a difference. Advisory projects help founders become aware of blind spots, bring clarity to complex decisions, and accelerate the maturity of their business.

## Founder Perspective: Jobful Case Study

To illustrate how this plays out in practice, we spoke with **Mihai Cepoi, CEO and Co-Founder of** [**Jobful**](https://jobful.io/?ref=therecursive.com), a Romanian startup helping companies streamline recruitment while offering candidates an engaging job-seeking experience. Having accessed funding for advisory through Star Venture in 2022, Mihai explains how external consultancy turned into a strategic advantage for his company.

### Before joining EBRD’s Star Venture programme, had you ever worked with an external consultant?

When we joined Star Venture, Jobful was already in its third year from official launch and had pivoted once due to the impact of the pandemic. The business was still in its early stage, yet we had been hitting our heads against a couple of walls. External consultancy was part of our operational framework, but rather tactical and specific on some activities. It was only after we were able to access EBRD funding for advisory that we realized this could play as a strategic advantage.

### What was your initial expectation when you heard advisory services were part of the Star Venture package?

We didn’t know what to expect, we were really enthusiastic about working with EBRD and the associated ecosystem, ready to absorb knowledge for the benefit of our venture. It was also very good timing for us, as we wanted to write a larger project for EIC Accelerator funding but couldn’t really afford the needed expertise.

### Which area of consultancy did Jobful benefit from?

We received support from EBRD to work with an external consultant to write a proposal for EIC Accelerator, and the outcomes of this project (i.e. business plan) were later used in all our fundraising efforts.

After the initial experience with Star Venture, we included external consultancy services in our operational model for different areas. The second project we did, also supported by EBRD but under a different programme, was on positioning and go to market strategy. Over the past years we’ve also prioritized consultancy services for capital raising and AI strategy, using our own resources.

### How did advisory support influence your growth trajectory?

This first project had multiple benefits, it created the context for us to invest more attention in the long-term vision and in identifying the change that we want to make through our innovation processes. This approach led to the creation of our social impact strategy, theory of change, and projects like [Jobs4all](https://jobs4all.ro/?ref=therecursive.com) serving vulnerable communities.

From a growth perspective, I believe it was rather an impact in our operations maturity. We now have this filter we add on our plans to identify if we have internal expertise on a topic, if we want to hire a new colleague with such expertise, or if it’s a “one time” need for which we have to find an external consultant.

### What would you tell a founder hesitating to work with an external consultant, thinking that it’s “too corporate”?

No matter how brilliant or smart you are, there are areas or topics relevant to any startup in which, compared to an expert working on that for years, your knowledge and understanding is actually almost irrelevant. This is especially true considering the current market context and growing challenges of building a successful venture.

Advisory can play a great role in equipping startups with the ability to build lasting capacity from early on, embedding external expertise into internal decision-making processes, and sharpening the maturity of the company as it grows.

As more founders capitalize on this type of support, the region stands to gain companies that are resilient, competitive, and ready to scale beyond their home markets.

## Inside EBRD’s Advisory Programme

Advisory under Star Venture is never delivered as an off-the-shelf package. Each project begins with a diagnostics process that identifies the specific challenges holding a company back. From there, the scope can stretch between key areas like **strategy** (business planning, financial management, fundraising), **marketing & sales** (branding, digital marketing, e-commerce optimization, partnerships, internationalization), **sustainability** (ESG strategy, environmental compliance), **quality management** (ISO standards, certifications), **ICT** (software development, cybersecurity), etc.

The common denominator is that every intervention is tailored to the needs of the company, connecting founders with experts who can deliver targeted solutions at the right moment in their growth. Another thing that all projects have in common: EBRD covers the cost.

The EBRD Star Venture Programme is active in 26 of the Bank’s countries of operation, having helped over 550 early-stage companies. In Romania, the programme is funded by the TaiwanBusiness-EBRD Technical Cooperation Fund through the EBRD’s Small Business Impact Fund (Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the TaiwanBusiness-EBRD Technical Cooperation Fund).
### Why Brilliant Products Still Fail to Raise Capital
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/product-failures-why-brilliant-ideas-fail-to-raise-capital/
Last updated: 2025-09-30T05:38:49.000Z
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### Why Pen Testing Can’t Be a Checkbox Anymore: Plainsea’s Marko Simeonov on Building Continuous Security from the Inside Out
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/continuous-penetration-testing-cee-plainsea/
Last updated: 2025-09-29T13:54:28.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: Seeds Finally Popping, Nvidia Bets on ElevenLabs
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-weekly-funding-roundup-nvidia-eleven-labs/
Last updated: 2025-09-28T11:56:21.000Z
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### How to Know Which People Your Business Can’t Survive Without
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/key-person-risk-in-startups-how-to-identify-plan-and-protect-your-business/
Last updated: 2025-09-25T11:15:20.000Z
*A practical framework to identify key people, assess risks, and decide what to do next.*

Founders spend most of their time finding market fit, checking out competitors, hiring, fundraising, attending board meetings and analyzing financials and projections. In CEE markets, where startups and scaleups are founder heavy, one type of question is rarely asked: “*What if our CTO is unavailable for 30 days*”.

It is not merely about mortality – burnout, sudden departures, illness, or even paternity leave can remove someone from the team overnight. For startups and scaleups, such loss can be detrimental – not because competitors got better, but because a team member was irreplaceable. This raises an uncomfortable question: do you know **who in business plays a make it or break it role**?

## **Why key people matter more than you think?**

Corporations build redundancy into every function: if CFO leaves, there are deputies, if Sales VP quits, there is regional head ready to step up. Startups and scaleups rarely have such setup early on.

When you are in the growth phase you are flexible, lean and pivot, people are not just roles – they are the business, they are the face to customers, media and investors.

Business Development is not just about closing deals, they hold most of the **client relationships** and know their counterparts personally. **CTOs are walking technical documentation library**. HRs are the beating heart of the company that holds so much of the **ethos of the company**.

That is why identifying the key people is not just about job description but also about impact, dependency and risk mitigation. Situations where this is important are not that rare actually. Check these scenarios:

1. A UK investor required continuity measures before releasing funds. A CEE startup paused closing for two weeks until key roles were mapped and mitigations documented. Lesson: **map roles early to avoid conditional funding surprises**.
2. A compliance officer named on licenses became unavailable. Onboarding froze. Naming a deputy, restoring access, and documenting workflows reopened the pipeline. Lesson: **assign deputies for named responsibilities.**

## **Key Person risk framework**

So, how should the process of assessing key person risk look like?

### Step 1: map business-critical functions

List the functions that could stall your business within weeks. Of course, it depends on the business sector and business model. For startups and scaleups that would be:

- fundraising,
- product development,
- technical architecture,
- regulations and compliance,
- customer relationships.

The first clue that someone is a “key person” is that **their function cannot be paused or reassigned without serious consequence** – restructuring, cost, delay, loss of quality, loss of market confidence.

### Step 2: Run the “what if they vanished?” test

Run through this questionaire:

- Can you find good replacement within 30 days?
- Would customers, vendors notice?
- Would investors ask for a quick zoom call?
- Would operations be disrupted?
- Would a launch be delayed?
- Would a fundraising stall?

If any of the answers pause threat, answer is Yes — the person is a “key person”. This exercise often surprises founders. It’s not always the CEO who emerges as most critical, it might be the technical co-founder, or even a senior employee with a rare certification.

### Step 3: Consider factors outside the company

For example: person is GDPR sole point of contact, or sole financial signatory for deadlines. Compliance officer is named on key licenses. Sales lead has admin access to CRM or manages clients worth 60% of the revenue… Maybe founder personal credibility unlocks capital or him/her leaving would trigger bad publicity? Or maybe one of the software engineers has unique knowledge about key code?

The absence of these people is not assessed only on a practical level, often optics impact could be **media-related, market confidence-related or investor-related.**

### Step 4: Sort and group roles – replaceable vs irreplaceable

|             | Fast Replaceability <30-90 days | Slow Replaceability \>90 days |
| ----------- | ------------------------------- | ----------------------------- |
| High impact | replaceable                     | Irreplaceable = key person    |
| Low impact  | replaceable                     | replaceable                   |

Irreplaceable roles cause immediate disruption to services, product development, cashflow, compliance or fundraising. Prioritize the top-right corner: high impact, slow to replace. Being clear about this difference helps founders prioritize where to focus their energy.

### Step 5: Risk management with layered responses

Once you’ve identified your key people, as a founder attention shifts to: *how do we manage this risk?* Different approaches work together, rather than in isolation.

1. **Succession planning**: keep up-to-date communication, have handover procedures, train deputies, no single person owns a process end-to-end, organizational memory and governance.
2. **Cross functional overlap:** rotation or systematic share of knowledge between founders/heads, dual admins, testing permissions quarterly
3. **Contractual** – shareholder agreements, client contracts, vendor terms, knowledge transfers to reduce dependency on individuals
4. **Investor communication**: Being transparent about how you have assessed and mitigated key person risk during due diligence can strengthen trust during funding rounds.
5. **Key person insurance:** A financial safety net if an irreplaceable founder or executive dies or becomes incapacitated – it ensures the company has resources to stabilize, hire replacements, or satisfy buyout clauses.

## **A Practical Checklist for Founders**

Here’s a straightforward action plan.

**Within 30 days**:

- - List your top five most critical roles.
  - Run the “what if they vanished?” scenario.
  - Identify who falls in the “irreplaceable” category.

**Within 90 days**:

- - Start documenting knowledge for irreplaceable roles.
  - Cross-train team members where possible.
  - Review shareholder agreements for buyout obligations.
  - Review access hygiene.

**Before major business events or funding round**:

- - Report on key person risk to your co-founders/board.
  - Consider Key Person Insurance if the absence of one person would materially affect investors’ confidence.
  - Present a simple risk-mitigation plan to investors, it signals maturity and foresight.
  - Assemble Continuity pack for the data room.

**Key person risk management is a mature business practice**. The founders who systematically identify these dependencies and plan for them build companies that can weather unforeseen changes and attract and retain investors who value operational maturity.
### Greek Big Pi Ventures Closes €130M Growth Fund
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/big-pi-ventures-130m-growth-fund-greek-tech/
Last updated: 2025-10-08T11:43:54.000Z
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### Countdown to How to Web Conference 2025: Where Eastern Europe’s Startup Scene Comes Together
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/countdown-to-how-to-web-conference-2025-where-eastern-europe-s-startup-scene-comes-together/
Last updated: 2025-09-24T10:07:10.000Z
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### Poland’s sun.store Raises €6M to Scale Its B2B Solar Marketplace
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/sunstore-6m-seed-funding-solar-b2b-marketplace/
Last updated: 2025-09-24T09:06:28.000Z
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### Presto Tech Horizons Steps In as Sole European Backer of Firehawk’s Over €50M Round
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/presto-tech-firehawk-60m-investment/
Last updated: 2025-09-24T06:12:37.000Z
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### Zero One Hundred Launches Fund II and Expands Portfolio
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/zero-one-hundred-0100vc-launches-fund-ii-and-expands-portfolio/
Last updated: 2025-09-23T18:15:32.000Z
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### Fixing Fundraising: The Digital Toolkit Redefining How Startups Raise Capital
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/fixing-fundraising-the-digital-toolkit-redefining-how-startups-raise-capital/
Last updated: 2025-09-23T09:51:16.000Z
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### Bridging Borders: The Investor Tables Where CEE’s Next Big Tech Deals Take Shape
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/bridging-borders-the-investor-tables-where-cee-s-next-big-tech-deals-take-shape/
Last updated: 2025-09-26T08:11:05.000Z
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### “There is no liquidity in Europe, period.”
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/infobip-shift-europe-vs-usa-startups-scaling-eu-inc/
Last updated: 2025-10-09T08:08:06.000Z
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### CEE Startup & Tech Weekly: New €500M Fund, SEON’s Over €67M Raise, and DRUID AI’s Global Push
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-tech-weekly-funding-roundup-aspire11-seon-druid/
Last updated: 2025-09-19T13:31:53.000Z
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### CEE Lags in AI Adoption, Front-Office Assistants Could Change That
URL: https://www.therecursive.com/cee-lags-in-ai-adoption-front-office-assistants-could-change-that/
Last updated: 2025-09-19T15:46:47.000Z
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