As mega-rounds rewrite early venture rules, boutique and emerging investors are being forced to adapt their playbooks, or risk getting priced out of the action.
More than a decade of building without outside funding has brought its share of lessons. The guest piece reflects on what worked, what didn’t, and what other founders might learn from the experience.
Forget the decade-long SaaS slog: AI startups are hitting $100M ARR in under three years. An analysis of 17 industry darlings reveals a shared playbook rewriting B2B growth, and it’s not just tech hype.
EU banks are embedding AI into core operations, but overlapping rules like DORA and the AI Act leave regulators with a headache: supervising it all consistently. Can Europe align its oversight before cracks show?
Long known as a physical bridge between continents, Türkiye is expanding beyond simple transit routes. Fueled by homegrown unicorns and targeted investments, the nation is shifting focus from passing along physical goods to anchoring Eurasia's tech network.
The EU's grace period for DORA compliance is officially over. As regulators launch automated cross-checks, nearly half of all financial entities face massive penalties, and even tech giants like AWS aren't safe. Are your operations ready for active enforcement?
The Balkans’ next growth story may come from its long-standing strengths in industrials, infrastructure, energy and manufacturing could prove more durable (and globally relevant) than the trends currently commanding the most attention.
How does a pre-seed AI startup win enterprise clients without a recognizable brand? Drawing from real deployments with Ukraine's Ministry of Justice and major retailer Silpo, this article shares practical lessons on building trust, closing enterprise deals, and the signals investors should look for.
When a B2B site acts like retail, sales reps flee to spreadsheets and WhatsApp. True B2B requires mapping approval chains, gated specs, and legacy ERPs. Fixing the storefront won't work if your ERP logic stays broken.
Europe’s AI Act was mocked for preferring rules over innovation. Now, as US political whims disrupt giants like Anthropic, legal stability looks like a superpower. Austria wants to lure top AI labs to the EU, but can regulation alone replace American compute?
Tripling output sounds great, until your audience walks away. A CEE marketing agency learned the hard way that generic AI assistants lack local nuance, tanking engagement. With the rise of AI search, culturally hollow text faces extinction. Are you automating your own downfall?
Coinbase and Kalshi are moving AI from customer support to the core trading floor. But as regulators circle, can we trust algorithms with real capital?
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...
