Norma's natural language analytics, already adopted across 10,000 Foodics branches, will now power the next generation of agentic AI for restaurant operations.
From participation rates above 90% to measurable changes in team performance, Mirror 360's first large-scale deployment explores what becomes possible when feedback shifts from a periodic exercise to a continuous process.
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.
“When researchers come to us, it doesn’t start with a negotiation,” Viktor Olsson of KTH Innovation explains. Here’s how Sweden’s founder-friendly university model is creating a deep tech powerhouse and what CEE can learn from it.
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.
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.
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.
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
Through a partnership between BSMEPA, Future Unicorns Accelerator, and The Recursive, Bulgaria's first coordinated Startup Grind delegation connected founders with the conversations, relationships, and market perspectives shaping global tech, while strengthening ties with Silicon Valley.
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.
Three of Southeast Europe's most established technology companies, Next Consult, btProvider, and C4 Nexus, are bringing together more than a decade of collaboration, 200+ specialists, and over €20M in annual revenue under the new Trimaranix brand.
Warsaw-based Microamp has secured €6.5 million 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.
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.
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.
Lithuanian defense-tech startup PDKINEMATICS secured a €2 million seed round 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.
Greece's innovation ecosystem attracted more than €732 million across 95 funding rounds in 2025, marking another year of strong growth. In this interview, Found.ation's Filippos Zakopoulos explains why capital is no longer the biggest challenge.
Sloneek Intelligence connects corporate data across every HR application in use, and can be controlled entirely by voice or chat. The new round will fund the platform's AI development and expansion into the UK and Polish markets.
Founded by investors with backgrounds in Wall Street biotech research and healthcare finance, Kos aims to give European life sciences companies greater access to US industry expertise, capital, and networks.
Slovak startup Definic, previously known as Nordics, raised €2.5 million ($2.9 million) in seed funding to help enterprises pick the right IT vendors through AI-driven vendor intelligence and benchmarking.
