Dear readers,

Over the past decade, How to Web has grown from a startup conference into part of the infrastructure of Romania’s tech ecosystem, connecting founders with investors, talent, customers and international markets. In this week’s edition, Monica Zara, Head of Conference at How to Web, explains how the event’s role has changed as Romanian startups have become increasingly global from day one.

Across the region, LAUNCHub Ventures closes the first €65 million of its new SEE-focused fund, Slovenia’s Silicon Gardens backs a US AI hiring startup, Bulgarian-founded 1club raises €2.2 million to fuel international expansion, and Romanian startup Kyndred lands €500K for its AI companions.

We also look at Italy’s growing interest in SEE’s startup ecosystems, as Italian investors and funds appear to be stepping up their engagement across the region.

Enjoy!
Bojan Stojkovski
Editor-in-Chief, IT Logs

For more than a decade, How to Web has evolved alongside Romania’s tech sector, changing from a conference primarily focused on giving early-stage founders access to information into a broader platform for connections, capital, talent and international exposure.

That evolution also reflects a larger shift in Romania’s startup ecosystem. Founders are increasingly building with international markets in mind from day one, investors have become a much larger part of the ecosystem, and the distinction between a Romanian startup and a global company founded by Romanian entrepreneurs has become less straightforward.

For Monica Zara, Head of Conference at How to Web, that changing role is central to what the event is trying to accomplish. “The main goal is to connect the brightest minds with future opportunities and give them all the resources, context, and inspiration to do so,” Zara tells IT Logs.

That means How to Web is no longer simply a place where startups come to listen to speakers. It increasingly functions as a meeting point between different parts of the ecosystem: founders and investors, startups and potential customers, technology companies and talent, researchers and entrepreneurs.

And the scale has changed with it. Zara says the latest edition she has overseen became the conference’s biggest so far, with more than 2,000 attendees and more than 70 speakers from around the world. But the numbers only tell part of the story.

The 2026 edition is built around the question “What will you build when you can build anything?”, with tracks covering productivity and human capital, the future of work, competitiveness in the AI era, agentic systems and AI-native technology, and startup and market dynamics.

From information to access

When How to Web started, the problem facing founders was relatively straightforward: access to information was limited. Zara describes the early editions as being focused heavily on early-stage startups and giving founders access to the resources and knowledge they needed to succeed. Fifteen years later, that problem has changed dramatically.

This is extremely  important for a startup ecosystem such as Romania’s, where the local market alone is rarely sufficient for ambitious technology companies.

Romanian founders, according to Zara, have always had ambition. What has changed is the starting point. Instead of first building for Romania and thinking about international expansion later, more founders now approach their companies as global businesses from the beginning.

“Maybe now it's more focused on starting from day zero as being a global company,” she says.

That creates a different set of problems. A founder might have the technology and an international market in mind, but still need to figure out who their business partners will be in the US, how to manage legal and accounting requirements across borders, and how to build distribution.

That is where How to Web increasingly positions itself as infrastructure rather than simply an event. “We focus to bring in the room the people you can create a connection with, and you can do business tomorrow or business in five years depending on what's the stage with your business and product,” Zara says.

A launchpad for Romanian founders

One of the clearest examples of that role is Spotlight, How to Web’s early-stage startup competition. For the 2026 edition, 20 startups were selected to pitch for access to international investors and mentors. But Zara argues that the competition itself is only one part of the value.

That visibility can translate into introductions, meetings and new opportunities. Sometimes, Zara says, it is simply about somebody hearing about a startup and subsequently pitching it to someone else.

Veridion is an example she points to. The company appeared at How to Web in 2019, but did not win the Spotlight competition. Its presence at the conference nevertheless gave the company visibility, and it subsequently became one of the stronger companies to emerge from that year's event.

The lesson, in Zara's telling, is that an ecosystem-building conference does not necessarily create value through a single winner. “It is about the spotlight, the visibility they get, the network, the mentors that we are assigning, and the entire ecosystem, basically, the community around this,” she says.

That community has expanded considerably since those editions. Zara estimates that How to Web went from having roughly 20 to 30 startups involved to close to 300 in recent years. The investor community has expanded even more dramatically: from perhaps 50 investors in 2019, mostly local, to close to 200 today.

The change matters because it demonstrates how Romania's startup ecosystem has become more interconnected with international capital and the broader European technology market.

It also changes what a conference can do. A decade ago, bringing founders and investors into the same room was itself meaningful. Today, however, with more investors, founders, service providers, researchers and technology companies participating, the challenge is increasingly one of curation.

From startup conference to ecosystem platform

That broader role is visible in the people How to Web now attracts. Alongside founders and investors, the conference increasingly includes software development companies, professional services firms, research organizations, ecosystem organizations and people working on startup legislation.

Romanian software companies are also confronting a structural question: whether they should continue primarily building software for clients or develop their own products.

That is a particularly relevant issue in Romania, which built a large technology-services sector around its pool of engineering talent. The next stage of ecosystem development may depend partly on whether that technical expertise can increasingly translate into companies owning products, intellectual property and international distribution.

The conference also maintains connections with Romanian research centers and universities, although Zara acknowledges that the country's research ecosystem is not yet producing thousands of startup spin-offs.

The goal, she says, is to keep those institutions connected to the broader technology ecosystem and give researchers opportunities to participate in it. That makes the event less like a traditional technology conference and more like a temporary marketplace for the Romanian and regional startup economy.

There are investor meetings, founder events, operator gatherings, workshops, roundtables, business dinners and side events. The physical environment is designed around keeping participants interacting rather than simply attending a series of talks and leaving.

The result is an ecosystem event where different communities can find their own entry points while still being connected to the larger network.

The next challenge is not building technology

That role is becoming particularly relevant in the AI era. How to Web's 2026 agenda is built around a problem that Zara sees as increasingly fundamental: technology is becoming easier to build, but deciding what is worth building is becoming harder.

“You can build on a wrong idea or on a good idea,” she says. “And maybe the needs now are more about how you build the distribution process after you build the technology.”

That represents another important shift for Romanian founders. AI can dramatically shorten the time required to prototype software, but it does not automatically solve the harder problems of finding customers, integrating products into enterprise infrastructure, maintaining technology or building a sustainable distribution channel.

Zara also sees a tension between venture capital expectations and the realities of deep technology development. Founders can feel pressure to generate customers and revenue before their technology is mature enough for large enterprise deployments.

For How to Web, that makes the conference's networking function arguably as important as its stage programming. The main question now is how to connect startups with the people who can help them commercialize, finance, distribute and scale what they build.

That is also why the conference has grown beyond Romania itself. Zara points to founders such as those behind Bible Chat, Dexory, Veridion, Designverse and OmniConvert as examples of the people and companies connected to the broader How to Web community, while stressing that the story extends across Eastern Europe.

The underlying contribution of How to Web to Romania's startup ecosystem, then, is difficult to measure through a single investment, acquisition or startup success story. As Zara puts it, founders today can potentially build a product in a matter of hours or days. The harder question is what happens afterwards.

“You can vibe code a platform, right? It takes you maybe 24 hours, but you need to maintain the code. You need to find the right clients. This is what we are focusing on right now.” Zara concludes.

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