Dear readers,

As conference season gets underway this autumn, we take a closer look at some of the biggest conferences held in SEE or founded by people from the region. We kick things off with WeAreDevelopers, where Bosnian founders Sead Ahmetovic and Naida Vikalo are taking a distinctly European and Balkan-rooted developer community global, with events now spanning across Europe, North America and India.

Elsewhere in this edition, The Founder Take features Astute founder and CEO Vida Stanic on speed, depth and the realities of building an AI-first startup. Across the region, we look at Bulgarian spacetech EnduroSat’s new unicorn status, Romania’s FintechOS latest funding round, and a new regional VC fund. 

In Rumor Has It, we revisit the region’s funding problem from another angle: perhaps some of the strongest founders are simply taking their pitches straight to US investors, rather than European ones.

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

For Sead Ahmetovic, the road to building one of Europe ’s largest developer communities started in a place far away from Silicon Valley. He was born in Odzak, a small town in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, before moving to Vienna and eventually finding his way into the tech industry as a developer at an Austrian startup. 

Today, Ahmetovic is the co-founder and CEO of WeAreDevelopers, a global community and conference platform bringing together developers, engineers, tech companies and AI builders. Alongside him is Naida Vikalo, another Bosnian whose career at WeAreDevelopers began in business development and marketing before moving into the CEO Office and eventually becoming COO of the company. 

Together, the two are now helping take a company with distinctly European and Balkan roots into some of the world's most important tech markets. The geography is changing, but the core idea is consistent: developers need somewhere to exchange knowledge, understand new technologies and, increasingly, figure out how to actually put those technologies into production.

Over the years, their flagship Berlin event that attracts more than 17,000 attendees annually grew out of Europe, and the organization is now expanding into North America and India, creating a network that increasingly stretches across three major tech ecosystems. This new global footprint includes events in San Jose, California and Bangalore, India alongside its established European presence, while its community continues to operate throughout the year.

No single breakthrough behind the expansion

There was no dramatic eureka moment behind that expansion, Ahmetovic candidly tells IT Logs. WeAreDevelopers did not suddenly decide that it needed to become a global conference brand and then build a strategy around a particular number of attendees or events. “It's just continuous and organic growth.” he points out.

The company focused on listening to its community, watching where technology was heading and adapting accordingly. That approach also explains why AI appeared in the organization's programming before the current explosion of interest in generative AI, agents and AI coding tools.

Ahmetovic points to applied AI conferences WeAreDevelopers organized in Vienna back in 2018 and 2019, attracting thousands of people at a time when many of today's dominant AI conversations were still largely confined to specialist communities. “We had the first applied AI conferences already in 2018 and 2019 in Vienna with three, 4,000 people, where we talked about stuff that is actually happening right now,” he says.

His description of the organization's growth is less about a single strategic masterstroke and more about “listening, adapting, learning, growing.”

Vikalo sees much the same process from the operational side. There was no single point when WeAreDevelopers decided that Berlin was no longer enough. Instead, developers and partners kept asking the same question: why wasn't the organization coming to North America?

Three different ecosystems, three different strengths

Ahmetovic describes North America, Europe and India as complementary rather than competing environments. North America, and particularly the Bay Area, has become an innovation powerhouse, with AI laboratories, venture-backed startups and companies experimenting with technologies that may eventually reshape entire industries.

Europe has a different strength: enormous established industries, research capabilities and regulated environments where technology has to work in the real world. That means automotive, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, insurance and other sectors where deploying a technology is often considerably harder than demonstrating that it works in a lab.

India brings another dimension to that equation since it has one of the world's largest technology workforces and a huge population of developers who have spent years working in global tech and outsourcing industries.

The Bosnian entrepreneur sees an important historical parallel between India and the Balkans. Both regions have long been associated with outsourcing and offshoring. “In India, we see something similar to the Balkans, which have also traditionally been outsourcing regions. Indian developers are very strong at execution and delivering high-quality work. What they can learn now is how to take that expertise and build on it by learning from other ecosystems,” he tells IT Logs.

That’s a conversation that should sound familiar across SEE, where software outsourcing has played a major role in building the region's tech sector. Vikalo sees some of the same patterns but emphasizes that the markets are developing in different ways. Indian developers, she says, are highly focused on upskilling and learning what new technologies are available, while companies are increasingly building their own centers and structured programs around emerging technologies.

How AI changes the developer conversation

That difference becomes particularly interesting when AI enters the picture. For all the talk about different technology cultures, Ahmetovic does not see a huge divide in whether developers are adopting AI tools.

“Everyone is kind of using it at the same level because you don't have another choice. You have to use it because everyone else does. Adoption was slower at first because the models had much higher error rates, but now almost every company uses AI. It’s like farming: you can do the work by hand, as some of us did helping our parents, or you can use a machine. The main difference now is how companies use it.” Ahmetovic explains.

The AI shift is also changing the conversations developers are having about their own work. Vikalo says that as machines take over more routine technical tasks, developers have more reason to think about what the technology is actually delivering for a business.

However, that does not necessarily mean every developer needs to become a salesperson. Ahmetovic explicitly pushes back against that idea. In his view, the more important change is the growing importance of systems thinking.

There is also an unexpected downside to AI's productivity promise. More automation does not automatically translate into less work. Ahmetovic says that developers can now initiate multiple tasks simultaneously and then move between them while AI systems process the work. The result can be more context switching rather than more free time. “Actually, what I see across the board, everywhere, even with myself, is everyone is so much more stressed,” he reflects.

On the other hand, Vikalo sees why the sales-founder phenomenon is particularly visible in San Francisco. The region has a dense startup culture in which very small teams can be created around an idea and begin building almost immediately. she said.

In such an environment, people inevitably wear multiple hats. But as companies mature, specialized sales, marketing and leadership functions generally emerge again. Therefore, the challenge is not necessarily teaching people how to code, but creating the conditions in which developers can move from execution toward product thinking, entrepreneurship and ownership.

Building bridges rather than copies

WeAreDevelopers is now trying to institutionalize these ideas at a much larger scale. Ahmetovic says the organization wants to create tech conversations that move in both directions between continents, bringing European delegations to the Bay Area and US companies into Europe, while eventually establishing similar exchanges with India.

The existing Berlin conference already has a substantial international audience, with Ahmetovic saying around 60% of attendees are international and that US tech companies make up a significant share of its partners. “There has always been this kind of transatlantic bridge between Europe and the US for WeAreDevelopers,” he tells IT Logs.

The idea is not to make every market behave like Silicon Valley, but quite the opposite, and the value of the network comes from putting different approaches into the same room. For companies, the expansion also creates another function. Vikalo says WeAreDevelopers can lower the barrier for partners entering markets where they do not yet have strong relationships.

Instead of attending a generic tech conference and hoping to find the right people, companies can interact with a highly concentrated developer audience. “You're getting high exposure to this niche audience rather than a more generalistic audience,” she says. That makes the events less about a three-day conference and more about creating an entry point into an ecosystem.

This is ultimately where WeAreDevelopers' expansion fits into the broader tech landscape. Ahmetovic describes the core mission of WeAreDevelopers as getting technology into the real world rather than simply discussing the next generation of models.

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