ScaleupFest 2026 agenda

AI can create content and automate outreach, but it cannot manufacture trust. We invited some of the greatest community builders, event organizers from the CEE/SEE region, who mobilize ~ 10 000 entrepreneurs a year to bring you their best advice and lessons. This session explores why people still travel to meet face-to-face, what makes them engage and take action, and how founders can turn authentic communities and relationships into a competitive advantage.

How can a brand built in CEE become relevant across more than 100 countries? Co-owner and chairman (former CEO) shares the decisions and hard-earned lessons behind BioTechUSA’s international growth, from choosing markets and building local teams to combining influencers, retail, e-commerce and global partnerships without losing a consistent brand identity.

Scaling from CEE can be challenging, especially targeting enterprise players. Two exceptional founders tell you how they scaled the business, product, company from the first revenue to hundreds of global players, including the likes of Google or big telcos. Stories and rarely told insights about fundraising and how to be acquired by Microsoft.

The talent playbook that works at 10-20 people can break at 80 or 100, especially when the company starts scaling across countries. Drawing on lessons from Wise, UiPath and DATAPAO, this session explores how hiring must evolve at each growth stage, how to balance skills, culture and potential, incentives and ESOP, and what “high talent density” really means beyond Silicon Valley theory. IExpect practical insights on building international teams, attracting senior leaders and keeping exceptional people when larger companies can offer more.

Rapidly growing scaleup’s CEO and CSO share their experience and insights about AI in GTM - so expect real life case studies from CEE/SEE region with global experience. Beyond their own stories, we also ask them to discuss what the future brings about sales in the AI era. Is 200M+ revenue and 200+ corporate customer experience enough to sign up to their session?

Why CEE/SEE fast growing companies and their founders turn their focus to US/UK, relocate the business, move there? What to consider before that? Key steps, investor and founder consideration when it comes to such strategic steps. We bring you a case study, but also invite a legal expert (with multiple cross-border and transatlantic deal experience) to clarify many questions around it. How not to risk your business and slow down your growth.

Landing a corporate pilot is easy. Turning it into repeatable enterprise revenue is not. A global scaleup MD / sales leader, a former corporate insider and a growth investor unpack how CEE/SEE companies can reach the right buyers, build internal champions, shorten complex sales cycles and move from PoC to signed rollout. As always: no generic advice, just best practices, and hard-earned insights.

Perciv AI started in automotive, tested opportunities across several industries and ultimately found its biggest potential in defence. Customer feedback reshaped the product, an investor came on board, the strategic direction became clearer — and the team had to learn how to build a startup around 2–3-year sales cycles and established defence primes, where the wait is long but the upside can be exceptional.

Csaba Kákosy of Day One Capital brings the investor perspective: what did they originally invest in, how did the emerging defence opportunity change the thesis, and what should investors watch out for now that yesterday’s race for SaaS has become today’s rush into defence and dual-use?

From a Bulgarian hardware startup to a full-stack space company serving 350+ organisations: EnduroSat now has 3,000+ modules in orbit, has raised a $104M round from investors including Riot Ventures, GV and Lux Capital, and built the capacity to manufacture up to two satellites per day.

CEECAT Capital backed the company before the global names arrived. Their inside story will explore:

• How EnduroSat moved from satellite components to satellites and full constellation services
• What CEECAT saw in 2023 — and how it helped prepare the company for global growth and top-tier investors
• Why mainstream investors should care about space and dual-use technologies today
• How CEE can avoid losing its deeptech champions at Series B/C
• How defence exposure changes investment, legal, regulatory and cross-border scaling considerations
• Does strategic relevance unlock more opportunities — or create new constraints?

Grow faster, reach profitability, or buy a struggling competitor? The wrong answer can drain your runway and weaken your eventual exit. Metrics, quality of growth, real moat and even no cash mergers will be on agenda.

A PE buyer, VC investor and a fast-growing scaleup corp.dev leader reveal how they judge the trade-off between speed and capital efficiency, and what CEE/SEE founders should optimize for if they want investors and buyers to compete for their company.

True dealmakers from London coming to us with 100+ deal experience to share first-hand insights about:

• How do UK acquirers actually view CEE today?
• What makes a tech company acquirable? Preparing for an exit, what to start building today?
• Revenue, EBITDA vs growth, founder and management etc.
• Software vs IT Services - Two Very Different M&A Stories

How a bootstrapped, globally distributed team cracked the American market from the outside? A little sneak peek:

• Why CEE founders keep talking themselves out of the U.S. before they've tried.
• Lessons on brand building. The actual growth operating system: finding real demand, scaling paid acquisition that stays profitable, and owning the customer relationship.
• How to run a media mix across YouTube, Meta, Google, Amazon and television, and how to read their combined effect when last-click attribution stops telling you the truth.
• Where AI fits now, from generating video creative to spinning up use-case-specific landing pages fast enough to keep acquisition costs workable.

Vesta Software Group with 60+ acquisitions in 20 countries increased activity in the CEE region. In an honest and candid discussion (Café Session) we can learn their learnings about the region, what they looked for, what was their original approach and what they expect for the next years. How does an acquisition process look like, what are the key challenges and first-hand stories, insights from a founder and managing director about the “life after being acquired” by such serial acquirer.

Every fundraising story you've heard was likely edited, focusing on the success, with the near-misses quietly removed. This Café Session is different. Zsofia Toth (co-founder & CEO, Volteum) and Martin Olczyk, the first investor in the company, sit down to take the same round apart from both sides of the table. The same meetings, challenges and numbers - described from two different perspectives.

Real figures from the process: what actually moved the decision and what turned out to be noise, what the biggest challenge was, and what changed the day there was a lead.

Most of it, they have never shared before.

No ScaleupFest without the success stories of the CEE region. Masterclass coming from the Elevenlabs growth engineering senior.

• Build vs. buy flipped: what changed, and what it means for a growth team
• A tour of what we built: keyword pipelines, brief generation, content scoring, decay detection, LLM visibility
• Bought tools as inputs and data for internal tools
• Orchestration and maintenance: what keeps internal tools alive and observable
• Security: what a vibe-coded internal tool should never touch
• Where to start if you have no growth engineer

So you think a functioning SaaS product, recurring revenue and a strong technical team automatically creates strategic value (and high multiple at exit)? If a corporate customer can recreate 60–80% of your product with AI, internal data and an integration partner, what exactly is your company’s remaining moat?

CEE/SEE is full of technical talents, but we’re - traditionally - weaker in sales and marketing. Meanwhile, it has never been easier to develop software with a handful of AI agents.

What’s left for us? What’s the future of hundreds of startups, scaleups (many VC-backed) in the region? How do these VC funds prepare for exit?

Expect uncomfortable questions, opposing views about future, exits, AI and CEE outlook.

A true CEE champion on stage with business, product and AI topic in one:

• What do you do when the SaaS growth playbook stops working, and optimization can no longer outpace the trends?
• Bolting on AI vs going AI-native.
• How do product, operations, and team structure change when you rebuild for the AI era? What worked, what broke, and what we would do differently
• Subscriptions or usage-based pricing? Who can make the switch safely, why does the answer differ by market?
• What happens to freemium and viral growth when every free user action has a real inference cost?

The systems you need at 15 people are not the systems you need at 50 or 100. Forecasting, compensation, decision rights, sales processes, middle management, internal communication. The question is which one to build first, and most companies find out only after the wrong one breaks.

We invited 2 experienced speakers having 10-15+ years of track record of building and scaling teams in the region, from small startups to real scaleups, from zero to 100M+ revenue, but also bringing corporates’ lessons.

Pressure is part of the scaleup journey, but prolonged overload can undermine decision quality, leadership and even company performance. Does work-life balance genuinely exist for founders pursuing ambitious international growth, or is the real challenge learning to manage shifting priorities and periods of extreme intensity? Bringing together an investor-backed founder, a successful VC investor and an executive coach, this session explores how to recognise dangerous patterns early, discuss difficulties honestly and build a more sustainable personal operating system for growth.

Think your company deserves a premium multiple? Have you read about SaasApocalypse? Hear directly from a US tech M&A advisor, a serial software acquirer and CEE/SEE’s most active tech M&A advisor examine how AI is reshaping buyer appetite, what drives valuation and deal conditions, and how CEE/SEE software and IT services companies can become compelling international acquisition targets.

Everyone sees posts of growth people boasting about using AI for everything from writing a sales email to grading every roof in Texas from satellite images to sell solar panels. But what actually moves revenue, and what is just productivity theatre? We invited someone from the trenches. Planning, scaling and executing GTM at UK / Silicon Valley startups to 50M+ ARR, our speakers fire up and demonstrate AI tools live and walk through the workflows high-performing revenue teams run for lead gen, revops and content. You walk away with a GitHub repo of the tools and the plays to run them at your company.