Europe has the talent, research, and capital to lead in deep tech — but fragmented laws, tax systems, and investment rules keep startups from scaling. To compete globally, the continent must move beyond national borders and build a truly unified ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship.
While messy code slows your product, "culture debt" quietly stalls execution as you scale. Here is how founders can build organizational clarity before implicit habits slow the team and company.
The "if-then" rule is dead. As modern workflows grow too complex for static logic, businesses are swapping rigid, traditional automation for adaptive, goal-oriented AI agents. But how do you control a system that "thinks for itself"?
Can an algorithm handle an unexpected midnight crisis? Treating HNWI's like a premium mass market is a costly mistake. While AI excels at logistics, wealth management relies on human trust and subtle context.
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...
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...
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...
The results of the US elections and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine have fundamentally redrawn Europe’s investment map. Defense technologies, 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...
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...
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...
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...
Today, the narrative around high-risk AI systems is taking a new turn. Since the EU AI Act is set to come 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...
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...
Viktor Mitev Viktor is a partner at EY Bulgaria 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...
We often choose markets carefully after months of analysis and forecasting, but sometimes, a market chooses us. At Pluria, 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...
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...
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...
Back in 2016, after visiting a university incubator in Estonia, 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...
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....
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...
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...