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CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE • INNOVATION
EBRD Star Venture
JUNE 9, 2026
Kikimora.io takes its name from a Slavic guardian spirit that protected homes from harm. The choice is deliberate. The company watches a client’s entire security perimeter, flagging misconfigurations and vulnerabilities before they become incidents. It is a useful metaphor for this cohort as a whole: six Bulgarian startups, none of them building for consumers, all of them solving problems that businesses pay to fix.
Bulgaria is an EU member with a Sofia tech scene that has grown steadily over the past decade. The domestic market is small, around 6.5 million people, which pushes founders to design for export from the start. The engineering workforce runs deep, trained in technical universities and now mostly writing software. Early-stage support exists through the state Innovation Fund and several EU-funded programmes. The conditions are right for product companies that can travel.
Bulgarian software talent has spent years building for other people's products. What is shifting now is the number of founders who decided to build their own. The six companies in this EBRD Star Venture cohort are all B2B, all sector-specific, and all built on proprietary technology rather than resold platforms.
The small home market is not a constraint here; it is a forcing function. A Bulgarian company selling predictive maintenance to manufacturers, or AI training tools to HR teams, cannot survive on local clients alone. The export orientation gets baked in at the product stage, not bolted on after.
The EBRD Star Venture Programme, run locally with Seedstars, works with founders at the stage when the technology is real but the business is not yet fundable: governance, hiring, investment readiness, and the introductions that turn a credible product into a scalable company.
Kikimora.io (kikimora.io) — Cybersecurity: Named after a Slavic guardian spirit that watched over households. A unified platform for vulnerability and security misconfiguration management across cloud and on-premise environments. The company pairs its software with an in-house expert consulting team for clients dealing with complex or high-stakes challenges.
PharmaWorks OOD+ (pharmaworks.bg) — HealthTech: A patient support and engagement platform serving 115,000 patients, more than 1,500 doctors, and leading clinical laboratories. It connects digital tools and service delivery across the full healthcare chain, from initial discovery through to ongoing patient management.
Predicto Ltd (predicto.app) — Industrial AI: Plug-and-play predictive maintenance for any equipment, critical or not. Zero infrastructure requirement means it can be deployed across a production floor without a dedicated IT project. The system analyses machine data and flags anomalies before they turn into failures.
True Insights Ltd (trueinsights.tech) — E-commerce AI: A SaaS platform that combines visual content analytics with self-service improvement tools. E-commerce brands can analyse the performance of their product photography and then improve it directly inside the platform, without switching tools or hiring an agency.
NOLD OOD (thenold.com) — Circular Fashion: A P2P marketplace for preloved fashion that works directly with brands. Sellers choose between 100% store credit with the brand or 85% in cash, giving brands a direct role in the resale economy for their own products.
Ethermind (ethermind.ai) — AI Corporate Training: AI-powered corporate training built around domain-specific AI personas and retrieval-augmented generation. The system adapts to each employee's role, skill gaps, and learning path across the full employment lifecycle.
The talent is real. The products are real. What is thin is the layer of capital that sits between a first paying client and a hundredth. Early-stage funding in Bulgaria is available, supported by EU instruments and a handful of local funds. The jump to growth capital is harder. Almost every company in this cohort is at seed or pre-seed.
What is missing is not engineering quality or ambition. It is the sector-specialist investors who understand B2B SaaS in healthcare, manufacturing, or circular fashion, and who can write the cheques that take a company from its first reference client to the scale that attracts international attention. That layer exists in Berlin and Amsterdam and London. It is not yet deep enough in Sofia.
