Directory

Productivity startup ecosystem

We track 16 organisations in this sector across 6+ countries.

16 entries.

Amir Salihefendic

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina · Person

Amir Salihefendic is the Founder and CEO of Doist, the company behind Todoist, one of the world's most widely used task management and productivity applications with tens of millions of users globally. He founded Todoist in 2007 and built Doist into a profitable, bootstrapped, fully remote-first company without external venture capital funding. Salihefendic is a widely cited thought leader on async-first work culture, sustainable remote work practices, and building durable software businesses outside the VC model.

Christian Reber

Berlin, Germany · Angel Investor

Christian Reber is a German entrepreneur and prolific angel investor best known as the founder of Wunderlist (acquired by Microsoft in 2015) and Pitch, a collaborative presentation platform. With deep experience building productivity and design tools, Reber actively invests in early-stage SaaS, design, and developer tooling startups across Europe. His operator background gives him credibility with technical founders, and he frequently provides hands-on product and go-to-market mentorship to his portfolio companies. Reber is part of Berlin's influential network of founder-angels who reinvest their exits back into the ecosystem.

Cocon

Paris, France · Startup

Free French collaborative platform for organising interior-design and home-renovation projects. It centralises inspiration images, product selections with prices, room-by-room budget tracking and delivery management in one place — replacing the usual scatter of Pinterest boards, spreadsheets and chat threads — and lets users share the workspace with a partner or artisan.

Covve

Nicosia, Cyprus · Startup

Covve is a Nicosia-based SaaS company, founded in 2013, that provides a business card scanning and personal CRM platform for professionals and teams. The platform allows users to capture leads by scanning business cards, event badges, and digital profiles, then sync contacts to major CRM systems including Salesforce and HubSpot. Covve serves over 2 million users across 130+ countries in 16 languages. The company is headquartered at Lordou Vyronos, Nicosia.

ElixMail

Toulouse, France · Startup

Professional email platform from Toulouse-based NovaForma Studio, combining a unified inbox (Gmail OAuth plus 20+ IMAP providers), AI features (summaries, multi-tone drafting, smart categorisation, 11-language translation), a built-in CRM, email tracking and voice dictation. Positioned as a GDPR-compliant French sovereign alternative to Gmail and Outlook.

Grammarly

Kyiv, Ukraine · Startup

Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant founded in 2009 in Kyiv by Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider. The platform offers real-time grammar, spelling, clarity, tone, and style suggestions across browsers, desktop apps, mobile keyboards, and enterprise integrations. Grammarly serves over 30 million daily active users and 70,000 enterprise customers, and has raised over $400 million at a valuation of $13 billion. Now headquartered in San Francisco with continued Ukrainian engineering roots, Grammarly is one of the most successful software companies to emerge from Ukraine and a global leader in AI-assisted communication.

Krisp

Yerevan, Armenia · Startup

Krisp is an AI-powered noise cancellation and voice productivity platform founded in Yerevan that removes background noise, echo, and other audio distractions from calls and recordings in real time. The technology works as a software layer between any microphone and communication application, making it universally compatible with Zoom, Teams, and other conferencing tools. Krisp has been adopted by major enterprises and contact centers worldwide, and has expanded into meeting transcription and summarization. The company raised over $17 million and is a standout example of deep-tech AI innovation emerging from Armenia's growing engineering talent pool.

LiveBoard

Yerevan, Armenia · Startup

LiveBoard is an interactive digital whiteboard platform from Yerevan used by tutors, online schools, and distributed teams for real-time collaborative lessons. The product combines a pressure-sensitive drawing canvas with PDF annotation, live video, shared documents, and full session recording, and is optimized for both tablets (Apple Pencil, S-Pen) and desktop browsers. LiveBoard has been adopted by thousands of one-to-one tutors and boutique e-learning businesses as a lighter alternative to building custom classroom tooling on top of Zoom or Google Meet. It is a representative example of Armenia's consumer-SaaS bench: small, internationally distributed teams shipping polished, mobile-first collaboration tools into the global EdTech market.

MacPaw

Kyiv, Ukraine · Startup

MacPaw is a Kyiv-headquartered software company that built one of the largest independent Mac-only software businesses in the world, with tens of millions of users across its portfolio. Its flagship products include CleanMyMac (the most widely used macOS cleanup and maintenance utility), Setapp (a subscription bundle that gives users access to a curated catalog of more than 240 paid Mac and iOS apps for a flat monthly fee), ClearVPN, and Gemini. Founded in 2008 by Oleksandr Kosovan, the company has remained profitable and mostly bootstrapped, and has become one of the most culturally important tech employers in Ukraine — doubly so since February 2022, when MacPaw kept its Kyiv engineering organization running through the full-scale Russian invasion, set up a dedicated foundation for war relief, and used its in-house research lab (MacPaw R&D) to build open-source tools for the war effort. For the directory, MacPaw is the canonical Ukrainian consumer-software story and a reminder that not every successful European software company looks like a VC-backed SaaS rocket.

Otilus

Lille, France · Startup

A fully French project-management SaaS (published by Agence Ici) combining Kanban, the Eisenhower matrix, GTD, Gantt charts, automated task-distribution scenarios and performance indicators in one tool designed to reduce cognitive load. It targets SMEs and growing teams wanting a simpler, European-hosted alternative to Asana, Jira or Monday.

Pitch

Berlin, Germany · Startup

Pitch is a Berlin-based collaborative presentation platform founded in 2018 by Christian Reber, the creator of Wunderlist. The product enables teams to build, design, and present slide decks together in real time with built-in templates, brand controls, and analytics. Backed by investors including Index Ventures, Lakestar, and Thrive Capital, Pitch competes with Google Slides and Canva in the modern workplace productivity space and has attracted hundreds of thousands of teams worldwide.

Prezi

Budapest, Hungary · Startup

Prezi is a Budapest-founded visual communication and presentation platform that introduced a non-linear, zoomable canvas as an alternative to traditional slide-based presentations. The company has expanded beyond its original presentation product into Prezi Video, which overlays visual content alongside a speaker's live video feed for more engaging virtual presentations and meetings. With over 100 million users globally, Prezi is one of Hungary's most recognized consumer technology brands and an early example of a Central European startup building a globally adopted SaaS product. The company has raised over $70 million and continues to innovate in the visual storytelling and remote communication space.

Productboard

Prague, Czech Republic · Startup

Productboard is a Prague-founded software company building one of the defining systems of record for modern product management. The platform helps teams collect customer feedback, connect it to feature requests, prioritize product decisions, and communicate roadmaps across engineering, sales, and leadership. That matters because product work often suffers from fragmented information spread across support systems, CRM notes, internal docs, and ad hoc spreadsheets. Productboard turns that sprawl into a more structured workflow for deciding what should be built and why. In the Central and Eastern European ecosystem, it is a particularly strong reference case because it proves that category-leading B2B SaaS products can emerge from Prague and scale globally while retaining a major engineering footprint in the region. It also occupies an important position in the software operating stack of growth companies, since fast-moving startups need better ways to align customer demand with product execution. As a result, Productboard is not only a Czech success story, but also a useful link between early-stage product discipline and later-stage organizational scale.

reMarkable

Oslo, Norway · Startup

reMarkable is a Norwegian technology company based in Oslo that develops digital paper tablets designed to replicate the feel of writing on paper while reducing digital distraction. It was founded in 2013 by Magnus Haug Wanberg, who conceived the idea while studying at Harvard after finding it hard to focus on a laptop. Its first device, the reMarkable 1, began shipping in 2017, followed by the reMarkable 2 (2020) and the Paper Pro (2024). The company sells e-paper writing devices alongside a Connect subscription service offering features such as cloud storage and handwriting conversion. By May 2022 reMarkable reported it had sold over 1 million devices and reached a $1 billion valuation.

Shapr3D

Budapest, Hungary · Startup

Shapr3D is a Budapest-based developer of 3D computer-aided design (CAD) software, founded by István Csanády. The product began as an iPad-first 3D modeling app and pioneered professional CAD on the iPad Pro, later expanding to run natively on Windows, macOS, iPad and Apple Vision Pro. The software is built on the Siemens Parasolid geometric modeling kernel and offers sketching with constraints, 3D modeling, 2D drawings, physically based rendering, augmented reality and collaborative review features. It serves industrial design, product design, manufacturing, 3D printing and woodworking users, positioning itself as CAD simple enough for beginners yet powerful enough for engineers.

Viktor

Warsaw, Poland · Startup

Viktor is an AI coworker platform that lives inside Slack and Microsoft Teams and executes business workflows end-to-end rather than only suggesting text. Connected to thousands of tools, it autonomously generates reports, builds dashboards, writes code, manages ad accounts, and runs data analysis on behalf of teams, positioning itself as an "AI hire" rather than a tool. Founded in 2023 by former Meta engineers Fryderyk Wiatrowski and Peter Albert, the company is headquartered in Warsaw with a second office in Munich. After a public launch in February 2026 it reached a €12.9 million revenue run rate within 10 weeks and is used by more than 2,000 organisations. In May 2026 Viktor raised a $75 million (€64.7 million) Series A led by Accel — reported as the largest Series A ever raised by a Polish technology company — with participation from Bek Ventures, Kaya VC, Inovo VC, and Tenacity Capital, alongside angels including Slack co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson and Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli.