Hi there,

This week’s edition looks at what it really takes for a Balkan tech company to scale in the age of AI, beyond hype and noise. Our main story goes deep inside Macedonia-born Semos Cloud’s disciplined, bootstrapped journey toward a $100 million ARR target - from its unlikely beginnings in remittance rewards (read: loyalty programs) to becoming a multi-product, AI-native enterprise platform serving global clients.

Across the region we cover Croatia’s InsiderCX raising fresh capital in healthtech, CircuitMess taking its STEM kits to the world’s biggest toy fair, Luka Dončić turning his personal brand into a direct-to-fan business, Collabwriting rebranding as Cluing, and Serbia’s early push into humanoid robotics manufacturing. 

We also unpack the growing turmoil at Cognism and close with a candid debate on whether the Balkan tech ecosystem is mature enough to support real, independent tech journalism.

Enjoy the read,
Bojan Stojkovski
Editor-in-Chief, IT Logs

The AI transition for tech companies nowadays is often framed as inevitable. What is less discussed though, is how uneven that transition actually is, and how deeply it depends on leadership, culture, timing, and product discipline. While some companies are sprinting, others are being frozen by noise, hype, and organizational inertia.

Semos Cloud, a Macedonian-born enterprise software company, now Series B ready yet still bootstrapped, with more than 100 employees, offers a rare case study of how a product company from a small, transitional economy is pushing through the AI era without losing strategic focus.

For Aleksandar Misovski, COO of Semos Cloud, the difficulty of the transition is not technological, but rather cognitive. “I have a problem with the word failure. For me, failure does not really exist - what exists are attempts. Everything is learning.” Misovski tells IT Logs. 

And that precise mindset would become the backbone of how the company approached its AI transformation.

From remittance rewards to enterprise platform

Semos Cloud emerged from a simple, real-world problem-solving effort. Engineers at Semos, a local software company in Macedonia, set out to solve a specific problem: enabling people working abroad to receive digital rewards for the remittances they sent back home to their families. The prototype relied on familiar tools - Microsoft SQL, jQuery, and on-premise servers with no grand AI ambitions and scarcely a cloud strategy in sight.

However, an email from SAP arrived and fundamentally shifted the company’s path. The German software giant was building partnerships for its emerging platform and invited teams to a hackathon. While others brought technical demos, the Semos team brought a complete, ready-to-use business solution: an employee recognition and rewards system. This won the hearts of that event and immediately found its use cases in production environments - as a zero-customer solution that proved ready for real enterprise adoption.

The project eventually spun off as an independent company. Their strategy was explicit: go global first, everything else later.

Today, Semos Cloud operates as a multi-product enterprise platform, with offices in Skopje and a distributed team drawing talent from around the world - including Germany, Spain, Croatia, Serbia, Brasil, Canada, the US, and Colombia. The company delivers innovative AI-first products that are transforming culture intelligence to drive performance in the AI era. With enterprise clients across global markets and a consistent 30+ percent annual YoY growth trajectory, their ambitious goal is to reach $100 million ARR within the next three to four years.

AI arrives - and nothing is optional anymore

When large language models entered the mainstream in late 2022, Semos Cloud was unusually prepared.

Their first move was not to build entirely new products, but to infuse every existing product with powerful AI-based tools - from intelligent copilots that draft personalized messages and guide feedback, to proactive AI agents that deliver real-time coaching, actionable insights, and leadership nudges.

“This transformation is existential. Those who adapt will survive and thrive. Those who don’t will struggle,” Misovski warns.

That transformation is now visible in Semos Cloud’s latest releases. One of the flagship launches is the Total Rewards Hub, a comprehensive platform that equips employees with real-time access to their full rewards package - from compensation and benefits to recognition. With personalized statements and data-driven insights, it simplifies visibility into the true value of what the company invests in each individual, while helping leaders optimize their rewards strategy.

At the same time, Semos Cloud has introduced its first fully AI-native product: semos.ai’s Manager AI Agents, a multi-agent platform designed to elevate managers into “super managers.” The platform provides a set of specialized, domain-focused AI agents that support managers as proactive digital HR partners and leadership intelligence companions.

Rather than relying on managers to manually orchestrate leadership and people processes, these agents assist across key workflows such as recognition, feedback, performance conversations, communication structuring, meeting intelligence, coaching prompts, and follow-ups. Over time, the experience becomes increasingly contextual and personalized based on how managers interact with the agents, the data they connect, and the situations they face.

“Instead of managers manually orchestrating processes, the agent does it. It becomes the digital equivalent of the HR business partner model,” Misovski says.

Their go-to-market strategy embraces a bottom-up approach: it begins by empowering individual managers within organizations - who gain immediate value from AI agents in their daily flow - before scaling to full enterprise-wide adoption. A prime example is the Meeting Agent, a core component of the semos.ai architecture. This intelligent agent joins meetings seamlessly, listens attentively, summarizes key discussions and decisions, extracts conclusions, assigns clear action items with ownership and deadlines, and delivers instant follow-ups and reminders. 

“What used to be impossible in the analog world is now trivial,” Misovski notes.

The real difficulty of AI transition

For Semos Cloud, the true challenge in transitioning to AI wasn't technical engineering - it was instilling strategic discipline across the organization. “The hardest part is learning to distinguish signal from noise,” explains Misovski. “Noise comes in many forms: constant disruptions, fleeting trends, and what I call 'urgency theater.' Everyone treats everything as urgent, and teams rush to chase every new trend - that's pure noise. The real work is staying focused on what actually moves the needle.”

He believes product strategy begins not with what you choose to do, but with what you consciously choose not to do. “Strategy is filtering. Refining inputs, reducing noise and choosing focus,” he tells IT Logs.

That discipline is what allowed Semos Cloud to avoid chasing AI hype while still moving aggressively into AI. As the company grew past 100 employees, complexity increased exponentially.

While small teams can move on instinct, large systems require structure: discussion, rapid iteration, fast validation, and the willingness to abandon what doesn’t work.“There is no falling, no failing. Only learning.” he repeats. 

The Balkan constraint: distribution, not engineering

The biggest structural weakness in the region, according to Misovski, is not engineering talent.

Today, it demands consultative selling: deeply understanding buyer pain points, building trust at the CxO level, handling objections, and closing high-value, multi-year contracts - skills that require confidence, empathy, and strategic storytelling rather than just technical depth. Without it, even great products stagnate.

That is why Semos Cloud invested heavily in global sales, partnerships, and long enterprise pipelines - and why their transformation is as commercial as it is technical. “We are building a 100-year company. Not a take-the-money-and-run story,”  Misovski says, adding that they reinvest profits and prioritize internal culture.

AI is moving fast and most people are falling behind.

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