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Dear readers,
This week, we take you to Sarajevo, where three founders are building companies in corporate well-being, media-tech, and gaming - doing it all in a market with little structured support. In our featured story, we explore how they rely on diaspora networks, state grants, improvised events, and persistence to grow when early-stage capital and infrastructure are scarce.
Beyond Bosnia and Herzegovina, the newsletter covers regional moves in AI, edtech, and software, highlighting startups raising significant funding, expanding internationally, or entering new markets. We also touch on rumors about European SaaS firms reconsidering reliance on U.S.-based payment services.
In our Investor Take, a venture partner explains why 2026 is shaping up as a year for deeptech, dual-use, and hard-tech bets, with capital concentrated on fewer startups and traction and defensibility outweighing hype in valuation decisions.
Enjoy the newsletter!
Bojan Stojkovski
Editor-in-Chief, IT Logs
“We had to change the game”: Three Bosnian startups stories
Privee World’s founder Dino Colakovic on the left side of the picture
On paper, Bosnia and Herzegovina has a startup scene. In practice, as one founder puts it bluntly, “there is no system” to support the scene. Furthermore, there are no local VC funds writing early-stage checks at speed. What exists as of late, though, is something more improvised: events, introductions, diaspora bridges, state grants, and a great deal of stubbornness (or as we call it in the Balkans - “inat”).
In Sarajevo, we spoke to three founders - Belma Sekavic Bandic, Dino Colakovic and Dino Trnka - who are building companies in corporate well-being, social media, and video games. While their sectors differ, their constraints do not, as they address the same themes: building a business in conditions where there is no suitable infrastructure.
When the core idea isn’t a tech one
For Belma Sekavic Bandic, founder and CEO of Zen2Fit, the starting point was exhaustion. “It didn’t start as a tech idea. It started more from a human need and from my personal experience.” she says.
After years in C-level roles in Bosnia’s banking sector, she began questioning the imbalance between work and home. During a nine-month notice period, she found herself “mentally away”, detached yet still formally employed, and the result was burnout.
“I realized that exhaustion and stress and disconnection from health and well-being, might be something that most people also face. This wasn’t only in banking, but overall.” Belma recalls.
When she tried to find support for herself, she found very little that felt holistic. That gap became Zen2Fit: an all-in-one mobile and web-based platform. Her philosophy is simple: “Health is like a fitness journey. It’s not a destination, it’s a journey, and you have to live it every day.”
Today, Zen2Fit works with ten companies, supported by four full-time and several part-time staff. The product has moved beyond beta toward paying customers. Yet the structural challenges remain.
“Let’s start with challenges. You don’t have a system in one place. You don’t know who to talk to.” Instead, progress comes through iteration and presence. “You see one event, then you go there, and you get to know people. And then you ask, what is more around? Where can I go?” she explains.
Bandic acknowledges a personal advantage: years in the corporate world meant she already knew decision-makers. “If I started with 20, I don’t know if I would have the grit and capacity to do all of this,” she says. “When you see all doors are closed, you say, there must be something out there. Let’s call some other people.”
That mentality has brought Zen2Fit to viability, and now the next step is scale. “What we proved is that we have a viable product, what we need now is scaling.” And scaling, in Bosnia, comes back to the capital, which is hard to get, especially at an early stage. If the startup scene is to grow, she argues, funding cannot remain an exception. A mix of talent and experience can also help with the scaling, she explains.
“We have some mentors and regional experts guiding us, showing us a path we haven’t yet taken. My experience comes from the corporate world in this region, and while I’m confident there, I haven’t personally led a startup through rapid scaling. That’s what I need to learn now,” Belma says.
“When you are flying, only angels can support you”
If Bandic’s journey began with burnout, Dino Colakovic’s began with belief. “Once you have that idea, you are full of energy. You talk to everyone.” he says.
Dino Colakovic on the left
Industry professionals reacted positively to his idea, but the momentum shifted for better when the first investor stepped in. Former professional footballer Vedat Ibišević became an early angel investor in Colakovic’s media-tech startup Privee World - way before the company was even formally launched.
“He was the first one to invest. We had just a slide deck idea. But this is the moment when you explode, the whole team. That’s why they are calling them angel investors. First guys who believe in your team.” Colakovic says, and adds, half poetically: “When you are flying, only angels can support you.”
Soon, more friends from the US and Bosnia followed and invested in the startup. But once the team began pitching more broadly, and sent hundreds of decks across Europe and America, they hit a wall.
“The most questions these guys were asking us was, from which part of the world are you? It would be great if you are in Berlin. If you are in London,” he says, adding that geography became the friction they had to deal with.
So, they changed their strategy. “We had to change the game. And if the capital has a home, that’s Switzerland.” he notes.
Through diaspora networks, they reached a Bosnian executive at ARX Capital in Zurich. These were not typical modern venture capitalists, but long-horizon equity investors. “There were lots of questions about that, because we are from Bosnia. But internal lobbying helped convince clients to invest in a startup from Sarajevo,” he says.
The result was transformative. “They helped us scale. They helped us to get the first investment from abroad to Sarajevo. It was a really huge, huge thing.”
Four years after midnight
While Dino was pitching to angels and Swiss equity investors, his namesake Dino Trnka was building a video game alone at night.
“It was more of a hobby for me. I was working full-time in an IT company, and I was working on this video game idea late in the evenings and on the weekends.” he says.
He had no gaming background, but over four years, he learned everything from scratch. In 2023, he shipped his first title on Steam and the Epic Games Store. “We were honestly surprised by the reception,” he says - first in Bosnia and the region, then from foreign streamers.
The Chill Dragon Games founders
That momentum, combined with a state-sponsored grant, allowed him to formally open Chill Dragon Games in Sarajevo. The grant provided office space and also helped them attend workshops, including investor pitch sessions.
“The grant was a big boost,” he says. Eventually, he left his full-time job. “Right now, I’m fully dedicated to the startup.”
His new project is more ambitious: a narrative-driven action RPG. The studio has hired designers and a writer. The ambition is global from day one. “If we’re going to make games, we’re going to sell them everywhere,” he says, adding that their target markets are the US, Europe, and Asia.
However, as in the previous cases, structural obstacles persist. “Game development is quite novel here. There is no structured national association and at the moment, everybody is working independently,” he says.
Taxation and legal frameworks create additional friction, especially with international sales. Still, he sees enormous potential. “There is huge potential in terms of people, in terms of talent, in terms of pure passion,” he says. Young developers message him offering services, sometimes even volunteering to collaborate for free.
Trnka is a firm believer that indie studios have one key advantage over AAA publishers: risk tolerance. Large corporations “cannot take as much risk because they invest huge amounts of money in the game creation process.” Indie teams, though, can experiment.
“We are living in this interesting era where everybody’s making remakes. But gamers are craving innovation.” For Trnka, the ambition goes beyond releasing games - he now wants more workshops, mentorships, even conferences that will eventually grow into a Bosnian gaming ecosystem.
The original story is published on the Swiss EP website.
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Across the region…
Greek-founded Axelera AI, which develops AI acceleration hardware, has raised more than $250 million in a new funding round aimed at supporting its global commercial expansion. The round was led by Innovation Industries and included new investors such as BlackRock and SiteGround Capital, alongside existing backers including Bitfury, CDP Venture Capital, and Samsung Catalyst Fund.
Axelera AI’s founders
Bucharest-based Kinderpedia has secured €2.2 million in a seed round, bringing its total funding to €3.9 million since launching in 2018. Backers include Simpact Ventures, Roca X, and Early Game Ventures. The startup offers an AI-powered school management platform for K–12 schools and preschools and plans to use the funds to expand across CEE, the Middle East, and Africa, while enhancing its AI features and multilingual support.
There’s a new regional AI-native startup on the block! Based in N. Macedonia, Tracium is focused on monitoring AI agents in production environments. With a single line of code, the company says its platform tracks agent behavior, operational costs, and system failures, giving teams clearer visibility into how their models perform after deployment.
Bulgarian software company Sirma has begun trading on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, completing a dual listing and signaling its ambitions to expand further across Europe. Founded more than 30- years, the company is now positioning itself as a pan-European AI technology provider as it enters this new phase of growth.
Rumor has it…
Amid growing unease over transatlantic dependencies, several Croatian SaaS founders are quietly weighing whether to reduce their reliance on U.S.-based payment giants such as PayPal and Stripe, according to industry sources. The discussions, still informal and in early stages, reportedly intensified after renewed concerns that a single political decision in Washington could disrupt access to critical financial infrastructure for European companies.
The Investor take…
Tichomir Jenkut, partner at Presto Tech Horizons
IT Logs: Where do you think the smartest money will go this year?
Tichomir Jenkut: Defense and dual-use tech, without question. ReArm Europe has unlocked serious capital flows that weren’t there 18 months ago, and we’re seeing that trickle down from primes to startups solving real operational problems – ISR, electronic warfare, counter-drone.
Beyond defense, I’d watch hard-tech categories where AI is a component rather than the product: robotics, advanced materials, space infrastructure. The “pure AI” wave is maturing; the next cycle belongs to companies where software meets the physical world.
IT Logs: Do you expect bigger bets on fewer startups, or smaller checks spread wider?
Concentration. The era of spray-and-pray is winding down, especially in deeptech, where long development cycles punish undercapitalized companies.
The funds performing well right now are the ones that picked a lane – a specific technology domain or end market – and went deep. You simply can’t do meaningful due diligence on a quantum computing company or a satellite payload startup while running 50 diverse portfolio companies. Expect fewer deals, more conviction, and more hands-on support from investors who actually understand the technology.
IT Logs: What will move valuations more in 2026: real traction, AI buzz, or solid unit economics?
Traction, but only if it’s the right kind. A defense startup with a signed MoU from a NATO member is worth far more than one with impressive demos – because government procurement timelines are brutal and most companies never survive long enough to close.
AI buzz has peaked. Founders still use it as a signal boost, but sophisticated investors discount it heavily now. Unit economics matter most at Series B and beyond; at seed and Series A in deeptech, investors are still largely betting on the team and the defensibility of the technology.
Upcoming events in the region…
Podim is one of the most prominent startup and tech events in the CEE region, taking place in the Slovenian city of Maribor. This year’s edition will be held on May 11-13, 2026
Podim 2025
“At Podim 2026, we’re not gathering people to exchange business cards. We’re bringing together founders who scaled to $10M ARR, investors managing billions in capital, operators building AI companies at real scale. And ecosystem leaders actively shaping Europe’s next chapter,”
Matej Rus, CEO of Podim
Money Motion 2026 - March 11-12, Zagreb, Croatia
Adriatics Tech Summit 2026 - March 30 - April 1, Sarajevo, BiH
SaaStanak 2026 - May 25-27, Sibenik, Croatia
Southeast Europe AI Summit - May 28-29, Novi Sad, Serbia
