In partnership with
Dear readers,
This week’s edition is a field report from the edge of SaaS transformation in 2026, written live from SaaStanak 2026 in Šibenik - a setting that, in hindsight, fits the moment better than any conference hotel in a major tech hub ever could.
Inside the conference, the usual SaaS narrative breaks down quickly. Instead of consensus, there are overlapping realities as founders are rebuilding companies under AI pressure, operators are redefining what productivity even means inside their teams, and investors are recalibrating assumptions about growth, distribution, and defensibility.
Alongside the conference coverage, this edition also maps broader regional movement: the growing turbulence in CEE’s venture capital, including partner and analyst reshuffling across funds; new capital formation and expansion from LAUNCHub Ventures and Skybound Venture Capital; and continued consolidation and cross-border activity, including Toptal acquiring Macedonian IT talent platform Adeva.
There are also counterpoints to the usual “growth narrative”: the shutdown of Croatian startup rmBug and its rare decision to return its full €400K pre-seed investment, a signal of how differently outcomes are being negotiated in today’s startup environment.
Enjoy the edition!
Bojan Stojkovski
Editor-in-Chief, IT Logs
Inside the Balkans’ biggest SaaS gathering
SaaStanak 2026
It took nearly 15 hours to get here. Between long stretches of Balkan highway and a nearly four-hour wait at the Serbian-Croatian border, the journey already felt like a metaphor for the state of SaaS in 2026: friction-heavy, occasionally absurd, but still fundamentally directional.
By the time Šibenik finally appeared, our fatigue was real, but so was the sense that something important was going to unfold in the outskirts of this small Croatian coastal town. Despite the constant noise that SaaS is fading under the weight of AI, around 300 attendees were about to spend three days proving the opposite in practice, not theory.
A conference designed to collapse distance
The setting itself mattered, since this wasn’t a standard conference hall rotation of keynotes and exits. SaaStanak is built as a contained environment where founders, operators, investors, and engineers inhabit the same physical and social space.
The town of Šibenik
You get lunches with founders who are scaling ARR into eight figures, drinks in shorts with investors watching the sun drop over the Adriatic, and late-night conversations that drift from AI agents to hiring bottlenecks to whether traditional SaaS categories still even make sense. The effect is subtle but important: ideas that appear on stage afterwards circulate and are discussed by the various conference attendees everywhere around the conference.
That design is very intentional for SaaStanak’s founder and CEO Leonard Eldic, who framed the state of the industry in an honest way.
“We still need to build products, we all call them SaaS AI products, however I think our problem is the branding problem, because SaaS is not sexy anymore. But we do make it sexy here.” he tells IT Logs. The observation reflects a broader contradiction: SaaS is simultaneously considered mature and obsolete in online discourse, yet every serious operator in the room is still building it, funding it, or scaling it.
Eldic also pointed to something that becomes obvious after a day in Šibenik: the conference is less about passive consumption and more about proximity. “Everyone stays in the same hotel, you hang out with attendees and speakers for the full duration of the conference.” That proximity removes the usual conference hierarchy as speakers don’t vanish after their talk, founders don’t retreat into separate tiers, and investors don’t become untouchable. Everything collapses into a single, continuous conversation layer.
SaaStanak
The Balkan SaaS mindset: compete, don’t defer
That blending of roles becomes even clearer when you listen to the region’s operators. Serial entrepreneur Tomislav Car, speaking from the perspective of someone building against global SaaS incumbents from Croatia, was blunt about where things stand. “The last 12 months were probably the most complicated period in my career,” he said, describing the operational reality.
His company Productive sits in a market where competitors are “huge companies with thousands of employees, global US companies, all worth billions,” yet his framing is no longer defensive. “When I was younger I thought we can never go against them,” he said. “Then I got older and figured out - they have this huge market, and we can steal from them.”
Tomislav Car/SaaStanak
That shift - from intimidation to extraction is one of the dominant mental models among Balkan SaaS founders. But Car’s most important point was structural: AI is not just a feature layer; it is basically rewriting how software is produced internally.
“You’re less a programmer writing code and more orchestrating agents, reviewing specs, reviewing AI code,” he said. And that shift produces a second-order problem: productivity expectations become unstable. “We didn’t go out and say everyone should be 8x faster,” he added. “We said 2x over six months is realistic.”
Car also captured something that ran through almost every hallway conversation in Šibenik: the psychological strain of transition.
“The current state of the industry is psychologically not great. Employees worry about getting replaced by AI. Executives worry their business is getting disrupted. So, everybody’s freaked out on both sides.”
Pivots, pressure, and AppSumo economics
If Car represents structured adaptation, Macedonian entrepreneur Nick Velkovski represents survival-driven improvisation. His well-known startup story begins with scraping Reddit in real time and ends with legal pressure that nearly killed the company. “We were the kids who raised money,” he said. “People knew us as the Reddit guys.” Then came months of legal correspondence: “I spent the whole summer of 2022 exchanging legal letters with lawyers and thinking what we were going to do next.”
What stands out in his story aside form the pivot is the velocity of rebuilding under constraint. “With 126K in the bank and without firing a single person, we built HeyReach in four months,” he said. But even after rebuilding, stability did not arrive. “We were literally two months away from bankruptcy.”
The turning point came through an unconventional distribution bet: AppSumo. “The moment I signed the deal was Friday night, 2am, in a club with a drink in one hand and the phone in the other hand. Seven days later we took home 320K.”
Nick Velkovski/SaaStanak
Velkovski’s broader insight is about incentives in modern growth channels. “When you pay influencers, you get the wrong incentives,” he said. “We wanted people who genuinely like the tool.” And his planning philosophy reflects the volatility of the current SaaS environment: “I’m not the guy trying to think three years ahead. We open doors and see what works.”
SaaS is splitting: winners, followers, and everyone else
Serbia-based marketing strategist Milica Balaban adds a different layer to the discussion, focusing less on product and more on stratification. “Everybody’s saying SaaS is dying. I don’t have that impression,” she tells IT Logs. But she immediately reframed it with a sharper observation: “It’s developing and thriving, but only the A players are thriving.”
That compression effect is becoming increasingly visible across SaaS categories. AI doesn’t just accelerate output, but also showcases inequality between companies that can execute quickly and those that cannot.
“It’s much easier to ship, much easier to build anything,” she tells IT Logs. “You have so many more opportunities than a couple of years ago.”
Milica Balaban/SaaStanak
“The newer generations are going to thrive in this space,” she added. The implication is structural: lower technical barriers increase market density, but reward speed, distribution, and clarity of positioning even more aggressively than before.
Attention as infrastructure and execution under pressure
Global startup star founder and investor Nathan Latka framed SaaS through a different axis entirely: distribution as the primary moat. “If you’re not going to commit to at least 100 podcast episodes, don’t start,” he said, stripping content strategy down to endurance rather than creativity.
His underlying argument was that SaaS companies systematically underestimate informational asymmetry. “The only way your show goes viral is if you discover something the internet doesn’t already know,” he said.
That principle drives his interviewing approach, which is deliberately extractive rather than conversational. “What’s your burn rate? How much cash do you have in the bank?” he said, describing how he pushes founders into revealing operational data.
Thus, in a market increasingly saturated with AI-generated summaries, polished narratives, and recycled insights, original structured data becomes a competitive asset.
“Every SaaS company should build and own their distribution channels,” he added.
ClickUp’s Chris Cunningham closed the spectrum of perspectives with the least romantic interpretation of SaaS transformation. “Business is war,” he said.
According to him, the logic here is that AI compresses decision cycles and reduces tolerance for hesitation. “You have to make hard calls. Sometimes you have to cut a team you built for years.” he emphasized.
In his framing, attachment becomes a liability in fast-moving markets. “The market does not care how long you worked on something,” he said. “It cares whether it works.” And speed becomes existential. “If you wait, you move too slow.”
His argument is not about aggression for its own sake, but about survival in compressed innovation cycles where delay compounds faster than ever.
Chris Cunningham/SaaStanak
Having all of this in mind, the impressions during the conference were not neatly aligned into optimism or pessimism, but something more operational and unresolved. While SaaS is no longer stable or predictable, it’s definitely not disappearing.
It’s fragmenting into different speeds of execution, different levels of AI adoption, and fundamentally different interpretations of what a software company even is. The old shared assumptions about product, distribution, and even engineering roles are now context-dependent, team-dependent, and increasingly tool-dependent.
The constant thread across all talks - from structured transformation, to survival pivots, to stratification dynamics, to distribution-first thinking, to execution under pressure - is not that SaaS is dying, but that it is being continuously redefined while still operating at full speed, with a conclusion that it is still alive… but no longer comfortable.
The SaaStanak parties
Across the region…
Global talent marketplace and fully remote consulting company Toptal has acquired Macedonian IT talent platform Adeva. Adeva is known for connecting enterprises and fast-growing firms with developers, architects, and technology consultants, and the acquisition is expected to strengthen Toptal’s global talent network and expand its capabilities in supporting large-scale and mission-critical technology projects.
Adeva’s founders Katerina Trajchevska and Tosho Trajanov
In a not-your-usual fundraising story, Croatian startup rmBug is shutting down just months after raising a pre-seed investment. The company, which developed a tool for managing access to production databases, is closing after co-founders Luka Kladarić and Mario Danic decided to part ways over differences in the project’s future direction. In a rare move for the regional startup ecosystem, rmBug will return the full €400K investment to its backers, Croatian serial entrepreneur Damir Sabol included.
Bulgarian VC firm LAUNCHub Ventures, which is preparing to launch its fourth fund, is expanding its presence in the Western Balkans with the appointment of Vedran Blagus as associate partner on the ground, who previously spent eight years at South Central Ventures. LAUNCHub has already backed several regional startups, including Croatian companies SplxAI and GlycanAge, as well as Serbia-origin crypto platform Kriptomat.
Greek VC firm Skybound Venture Capital, founded by George Varvarelis and Thalia Misailidou, has announced a first close of $38 million for its new deep tech-focused fund. The investment vehicle is backed by the European Investment Fund through EquiFund II, alongside a group of strategic private investors, with the aim of strengthening and reshaping the regional deep tech ecosystem.
Why does every QBR sound like it took an hour to prep?
The strategic-account QBR has a different feeling. The CSM walks in knowing the buying committee, usage trends, support history, news on the company. They've blocked an hour to prep. The customer feels seen.
The other 190 QBRs don't get that hour. The CSM scans the dashboard five minutes before the call. They wing it. The customer answers the same baseline questions for the third time this year.
What if every QBR was a strategic-account QBR? Two minutes before the call, your CSM has the full brief in Slack: usage trends, support history, NPS, news on the company, what their champion just posted on LinkedIn.
Every customer feels like your top customer. Even when there are 200 of them.
3,000+ tools connected. SOC 2 certified. Your data never trains models.
"It was almost instantly adopted by the bulk of my team." Boris Wexler, CEO, Space Dinosaurs
Rumor has it…
Word on the street is that CEE’s VC ecosystem is entering a turbulent phase, with partners, analysts, and operators increasingly changing sides between funds or moving into startup roles. The reshuffling shows a broader pressure from slower fundraising, weaker exits, and shifting AI-driven investment priorities. In the long run, the shift could create a more competitive and specialized VC landscape, while also widening the gap between dominant regional funds and smaller players struggling to adapt.
More tech rumors? Reach us at [email protected]
The Investor take…
Marius Istrate, Chairman of the Board of TechAngels Romania
IT Logs: Where do you think the smartest money is going this year?
Marius Istrate: The smartest money, as always, will go towards the best teams solving real problems.
IT Logs: Bigger bets on fewer startups, or smaller checks spread wider?
There is a concentration of capital: larger bets in fewer startups that address problems in larger markets.
IT Logs: What is moving valuations more in 2026: real traction, AI buzz, or solid unit economics?
Complexity of the problem being solved as well as the potential market.
Upcoming (and ongoing) events in the region…
SaaStanak 2026 - May 25-27, Sibenik, Croatia
Southeast Europe AI Summit - May 28-29, Novi Sad, Serbia
UNCHAIN Festival - June 17-18, Oradea, Romania
