Vienna, Austria · Accelerator Founded in 2000, 3TS Capital Partners is a Vienna-based VC and growth equity firm investing EUR 5-20M at Series B and beyond in technology, media, and telecom companies across Central and Eastern Europe. The firm manages over EUR 500M and has completed 70+ investments with 30+ exits. Notable portfolio companies include SALESmanago (acquired by Bain Capital), Evrotrust, and Emarsys (acquired by SAP). 3TS focuses on profitable, scaling B2B software and digital media businesses in the DACH and CEE regions.
Vienna, Austria · Event Vienna's multi-stage innovation festival organized by ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4, bringing 10,000+ attendees across media, tech, sustainability, and politics tracks. Features a startup expo, pitch competition, and keynotes from European tech leaders. Free to EUR 99.
Vienna, Austria · Person Alexander Wrabetz is Vienna's Commissioner for AI in Media and the former long-serving Director General of ORF, Austria's public broadcasting corporation. He is a prominent figure in Austrian and European media policy, having led ORF through major digital transformation phases over multiple terms. At the 4GAMECHANGERS AI-Day 2026, he argued for cross-sector cooperation among public and private broadcasters to address economic pressures from advertising losses and accelerate AI adoption.
Vienna, Austria · Person Bernhard Albrecht is Co-CEO of ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4, Austria's leading commercial broadcaster and digital entertainment group. He drives the company's AI strategy and digital transformation agenda across its portfolio of TV and digital channels. At the 4GAMECHANGERS AI-Day 2026, he emphasized moving from AI buzzwords toward genuine practical implementations in media production and marketing.
Vienna, Austria · Person British-Canadian author, journalist and digital-rights activist, a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and prolific commentator on technology, platforms and the open internet. He is an announced speaker at the 2026 TEDAI Vienna conference.
Vienna, Austria · Event A summit at the intersection of culture, technology, and business, gathering founders, investors, and cultural institutions in Vienna. Useful for founders building at the culture-tech edge.
Munich, Germany · Event DLD Munich 2027 brings together 1,500+ pioneers from tech, business, science, and culture for three days of ideas and connections in Munich. The annual flagship conference runs immediately before the World Economic Forum in Davos, making it a key gathering point for global leaders. The 2027 edition dates are publicly announced on the official site with attendee notifications opening shortly.
Edinburgh, United Kingdom · Event The world's largest arts festival includes a significant digital-arts and creative-technology strand, with immersive installations, AI-generated art exhibitions, and creative-tech showcases. Edinburgh during August is also a magnet for informal tech-community meetups and founder dinners organized by the Scottish startup ecosystem. While not a pure tech event, it's a key cultural moment for creative-tech, content-tech, and entertainment startups looking to connect with media buyers and cultural institutions.
Kyiv, Ukraine · Event Organisator Ukrainian edition of the global Forbes business media brand, which beyond its publishing work runs a portfolio of flagship business conferences and forums in Kyiv, including the annual Forbes Entrepreneurs Forum that convenes founders, CEOs and investors for case studies and networking.
Berlin, Germany · Event Organisator Creative network and event company behind the Forward Festival series, a touring two-day conference for design, branding, motion design and creative leadership that has run since 2015 across cities including Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Zurich and Hamburg, drawing thousands of designers and agencies.
Berlin, Germany · Event Forward Festival is a two-day creative conference bringing thought leaders across design, motion design, typography, branding and art onto multiple stages with talks, workshops and networking. It draws over a thousand creatives and industry professionals from across Europe. For founders it is a strong venue for brand and design inspiration, creative talent sourcing, and connecting with agencies and studios.
Bergen, Norway · Event Media City Bergen's annual innovation week, anchored by the mcb tech conference for C-level and tech leaders, with workshops and open sessions. Relevant for media-tech and AI founders in western Norway.
Nicosia, Cyprus · Event Organisator One of Cyprus's leading business event and media organisations, running a large calendar of conferences, forums and summits across finance, technology, shipping and entrepreneurship. Its flagship gatherings include the INSPIRE entrepreneurial festival and the Digital Assets and the Future of Finance Summit.
Berlin, Germany · Startup Inkitt is a Berlin-based reader-powered book publishing platform founded in 2014 by Ali Albazaz. The platform uses AI and reader engagement data to identify commercially promising stories from independent authors and offers publishing deals to the most successful ones. Inkitt also operates GALATEA, a mobile storytelling app that has reached significant consumer traction globally. The company has raised multiple funding rounds including a Series C led by Khosla Ventures.
Amsterdam, Netherlands · Angel Investor Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, known by his online moniker Nalden, is a Dutch entrepreneur and angel investor who co-founded The Next Web (TNW), one of the world's most influential tech media platforms and conference series. Starting as a blogger in the early 2000s, Nalden built TNW into a global brand with millions of readers and an annual conference in Amsterdam attracting thousands of founders and investors. Through his media network and personal investments, Nalden has backed dozens of early-stage European startups, especially in media, creative tech, and consumer internet. He is known for investing in founders with strong brand sensibility and storytelling ability, and his network across European tech journalism and event organizing gives his portfolio companies exceptional visibility.
Vienna, Austria · Person American journalist and media executive serving as Chief Executive Officer of The Atlantic, former editor-in-chief of WIRED, and a frequent commentator on technology, AI and society. He is an announced speaker at the 2026 TEDAI Vienna conference on AI and safety.
Hamburg, Germany · Event One of Europe's largest digital marketing and technology festivals, attracting 70,000+ attendees to Hamburg Messe. Features masterclasses, expo stages, and side events covering MarTech, creator economy, D2C, and AI-powered marketing tools.
Berlin, Germany · Startup Berlin-based football media and technology platform founded in 2008, offering live scores, news, stats and streaming (OneFootball TV) across 200+ leagues to a global audience.
Copenhagen, Denmark · Startup Podimo is a Copenhagen founded subscription platform for podcasts and audiobooks, focused on local language content and creator revenue sharing. Launched in 2019, the company built exclusive catalogs in markets such as Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, and later expanded to Latin America. Podimo uses a subscription model that pays creators based on listen time, giving podcasters an alternative to advertising. The company has raised significant funding to scale its content studio and international footprint.
Vienna, Austria · Event Organisator ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 is Austria's leading commercial broadcaster and digital entertainment group, operating channels including PULS 4, PULS 24, and ATV. The company founded the 4GAMECHANGERS Festival in 2016 as its flagship social responsibility initiative, bringing together entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and innovators at Vienna's Marx Halle. ORF joined as co-organizer in 2022. In 2026, ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 organized the 4GAMECHANGERS AI-Day focused on practical AI adoption in media production.
Warsaw, Poland · Angel Investor A pioneer of Poland’s dot-com era (founder of Internet Technologies and former head of Google Campus Warsaw), Rafał has a long angel track record. He invested in one of the first Polish unicorns Milestone Systems and supported fintech and media startups. His approach blends early internet industry wisdom with a vast network of contacts. Associated startups: Past investments include travel startup iTaxi and others; as ex-Campus Warsaw head he advised countless startups.
Kyiv, Ukraine · Startup Overview: Respeecher is a cutting-edge AI voice synthesis startup that enables one person's voice to be transformed into the voice of another specific person, with uncanny realism. In other words, it's known for its voice cloning technology. Respeecher's system takes in an actor or user's speech and outputs audio that sounds like a target voice - be it a famous actor, a historical figure, or anyone for whom it has trained a model. This technology has huge applications in entertainment: filmmakers can revive voices of actors from years past, game developers can have characters speak in iconic voices, and creators can produce content where, say, a celebrity appears to narrate (with permission). What makes Respeecher stand out is the high fidelity of the cloned voices - they are nearly indistinguishable from the real person, capturing emotion and intonation accurately. Respeecher provides its tech via a software interface; typically, a voice model is trained on recordings of the target voice, and then a voice actor provides performance which is converted. Importantly, Respeecher emphasizes ethical use: it requires consent from the voice owners and has gained a reputation for an "ethics-first" approach in the emerging synthetic media field. Founding Story (2018): Respeecher was founded in February 2018 in Kyiv, Ukraine by Alex Serdiuk, Dmytro Bielievtsov, and Grant Reaber. Serdiuk and Bielievtsov are Ukrainian, and Reaber is an American speech technologist - the trio met through mutual research interests in speech processing. They realized that recent advances in deep learning could make high-quality voice conversion possible, and they set out to create a system far beyond the rudimentary voice changers of the past. In 2018-2019, they went through the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Accelerator (powered by Techstars) in the US, which gave them industry connections. Early on, Respeecher got a lucky break: it was approached to work on a high-profile but secret project - which turned out to be Lucasfilm's The Mandalorian (Season 2 finale in 2020). The task was to recreate the voice of a young Luke Skywalker as he would have sounded in the 1980s, using Mark Hamill's old recordings. Respeecher delivered successfully, astonishing Hollywood sound engineers. This successful debut put Respeecher on the map in the film industry. In subsequent months, they also worked on a Super Bowl commercial voicing Vince Lombardi (AI-cloned from archival audio). The Ukrainian team, working under NDA, built these groundbreaking demos which then led to word-of-mouth referrals in Hollywood. Product and Use Cases: Respeecher's core product is delivered as a service to content creators. A client provides audio of the target voice (e.g., recordings of a person) and Respeecher trains a custom voice model. Then the client (often a voice actor or the person themselves) provides the new dialogue, which Respeecher's system converts into the target's voice. One notable use case was the documentary short film "In Event of Moon Disaster" - Respeecher recreated President Nixon's voice to simulate him reading a speech that was written in case Apollo 11 failed, and this project won an Emmy Award in 2021 for Outstanding Interactive Media (Respeecher's team was credited for the voice work). Another big use case: Darth Vader's voice in 2022's Obi-Wan Kenobi series - James Earl Jones, aged 91, could no longer perform with the same power, so Lucasfilm used Respeecher to generate Vader's lines using Jones' archival voice data. This was done with Jones's consent (he effectively authorized the AI recreation of his iconic voice). The result was so good that audiences thought Jones had recorded the lines himself. Outside of film/TV, Respeecher has been used in video games (e.g., to recreate voices of deceased voice actors so characters can return), and in music - in 2022, it enabled artist Aloe Blacc to perform a song where his voice was converted to sound like the late Avicii's voice, as a tribute. Researchers and archivists have also shown interest in using it to restore voices for people who lost theirs (like throat cancer patients), although that's still experimental. Traction and Achievements: Though a B2B company, Respeecher gained public fame because of the high-profile nature of its projects. By 2022, virtually every Star Wars fan and many industry professionals had heard of Respeecher due to media coverage of its involvement in resurrecting Luke Skywalker's youthful voice and Darth Vader's classic tones. The company has a relatively small number of clients (dozens of studios, game companies, etc.), but each project is high value. Its technology earned it an Engineering Emmy Award in 2021, and it won TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield (audience choice) at CES in 2020. In terms of funding, Respeecher raised about $1.5M in early 2020 (around the Techstars time), and as of 2021 it had raised over $3M in total from investors including Techstars, ff Venture Capital, and Acrobator Ventures. The team remained fairly lean (under 50 people) but comprised specialized AI researchers and sound engineers. Financially, Respeecher's revenue grew with each Hollywood contract; while not public, one can infer that by 2022 it was profitable or close, given the repeat work from Disney/Lucasfilm and others. One of Respeecher's achievements is also on the ethical front: in 2023 it was one of ten companies (alongside OpenAI and TikTok) to sign the Partnership on AI's framework for responsible media, committing to practices like obtaining consent, watermarking AI content, etc. This proactive stance has made them a trusted partner in an area often seen with suspicion (deepfakes). The war in Ukraine did pose a challenge - much of Respeecher's team was Kyiv-based, and during the Russian invasion in Feb 2022, the team amazingly continued working (the Obi-Wan Kenobi Vader voice project was completed in the spring of 2022 while Kyiv was under threat). This dedication further earned them respect in the industry. Key Partnerships: Respeecher's notable partnerships are with major studios like Disney/Lucasfilm, and with game studios such as CD Projekt Red (who used Respeecher in 2023 to voice a character in Cyberpunk 2077 in Polish, whose original actor had passed away). It also collaborated with the creative team of the documentary "Val" to recreate actor Val Kilmer's voice, which he lost due to cancer (Kilmer and his son provided the training data). Each successful partnership validates the tech and leads to more clients. On the academic side, Respeecher worked with medical research to explore giving people who lost their voice (e.g., ALS patients) a chance to speak in their own reconstructed voice - a heartwarming application of the tech. Future Outlook: Respeecher sits at the forefront of AI in media. The demand for voice cloning is likely to increase - whether to dubbing movies in a star's own voice across languages, bringing historical figures' voices to life for museums, or personal uses (with permission, someone might license their voice). The company's focus will be to maintain quality leadership as big players (like Microsoft or Google) also invest in voice AI. Respeecher's Ukrainian origin is a source of pride: it shows that despite adversity, Ukrainian tech can lead globally in innovation. The founders have expressed interest in eventually developing real-time voice conversion (currently it's not instant, it takes some processing time) and making the tech more accessible perhaps in creator tools. But they tread carefully to avoid misuse. In summary, Respeecher is a Ukrainian deep-tech startup that achieved what was once sci-fi - lending voices across time and space - and has done so responsibly. By powering some of Hollywood's most iconic moments with AI, it has cemented itself as a trailblazer in synthetic audio. As long as movies and games want to push creative boundaries, Respeecher's technology will likely be in the credits, helping the impossible become possible in voice. Sources: en.wikipedia.org, failory.com, techcrunch.com, youtube.com.
Kyiv, Ukraine · Startup Restream is a Ukrainian-founded live-streaming platform that lets creators, brands, and event organizers broadcast a single video feed simultaneously to more than thirty destinations — YouTube, Twitch, Facebook Live, LinkedIn Live, X, and dozens of others — while managing a unified chat, analytics, and recording layer across all of them. Founded in 2015 by Alexander Khuda and Andrii Surzhynskyi, the product removed one of the most painful operational blockers for independent broadcasters (having to pick a single platform at the expense of every other audience) and became a go-to tool for podcasters, gamers, educators, and B2B marketers running webinars at scale. Restream raised venture funding from Insight Partners and others, and relocated its commercial operations to Texas while keeping engineering in Kyiv. It is one of the most globally adopted pieces of creator-economy infrastructure to come out of Ukraine.
Thessaloniki, Greece · Event Athens-based music-tech and creative-economy conference running alongside the Reworks Festival, with a dedicated business program covering music streaming, rights tech, AI in music production, and live-entertainment platforms. 2,000+ attendees from the European music-tech scene. Tickets EUR 150-400.
Amsterdam, Netherlands · Person Co-founder and CEO of HELLO Labs, a Web3 entertainment and media company, and a confirmed speaker at Web3 Warsaw 2026. Develops blockchain-based interactive media and content platforms.
London, United Kingdom · Event Organisator SBC Events (Sports Betting Community) is a leading organiser of international conferences and exhibitions for the sports betting and gaming industries, founded by Rasmus Sojmark in 2009 and headquartered in London. The company runs flagship events including SBC Summit Barcelona, SBC Summit Malta, SBC Summit Tbilisi, and events across the Americas and Asia, bringing together senior executives from betting, gaming, affiliates, technology, and sports media. SBC also operates media channels and advisory services, making it one of the most prominent event and media companies in the global iGaming sector.
Vienna, Austria · Person Stefan Kollinger is Chief Innovation Officer at ORF, Austria's public broadcasting corporation, where he leads innovation strategy and digital technology initiatives. He is a key executive responsible for driving ORF's transformation in the face of streaming competition and AI disruption. He participated as a speaker at the 4GAMECHANGERS AI-Day 2026, representing ORF's perspective on practical AI adoption within public media workflows.
London, United Kingdom · Person British entrepreneur, investor and author. He founded social-media marketing firm Social Chain in 2014 and later co-founded Flightstory, a media and investment company. He hosts The Diary of a CEO, one of the world's most listened-to business podcasts, and is an investor on the BBC's Dragons' Den.
London, United Kingdom · Event Inaugural European SXSW edition across Shoreditch and East London, mixing startup pitches with tech, music, and interactive media programming. Strong fit for media-tech, AR/VR, and consumer innovation teams.
London, United Kingdom · Startup Synthesia is a London-based AI video generation platform founded in 2017 by Victor Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild, and a team of AI researchers from University College London and TU Munich. The platform allows users to create professional-quality videos from text prompts using photorealistic AI avatars that speak in over 140 languages, eliminating the need for cameras, actors, or studios. Synthesia has raised over $150 million from investors including Accel, NVIDIA, and Kleiner Perkins, reaching a valuation above $2 billion. It serves over 50,000 enterprise customers including Amazon, Tiffany, and Reuters. Synthesia is one of Europe's most successful AI-native media companies.
Naples, Italy · Accelerator Founded in 2007, Vertis Ventures (formerly Vertis SGR) is a Naples-based VC bridging northern and southern Italy, managing over EUR 200M across early-stage and growth funds. The firm invests EUR 0.5-10M in media, fintech, and industrial tech, with a mandate to support innovation in Italy's Mezzogiorno region. Portfolio includes Buzzoole (influencer marketing), Optima Italia, and Mosaicoon. Vertis is notable for its focus on developing venture capital culture in southern Italy while maintaining national deal flow.
Limassol, Cyprus · Event Organisator International games-industry media and events company behind the WN Conference series and the WN Hub networking platform. It runs B2B game-development conferences worldwide, including the Cyprus edition that connects studios, publishers, service providers and investors.