Novi Sad, Serbia · Startup 3Lateral is a Novi Sad-based deep-tech studio that builds some of the most advanced digital human technology in the world, including high-fidelity facial rigging, performance capture, and AI-driven character animation pipelines used across games, film, and virtual production. Founded in 2004 by Vladimir Mastilović, the company became a go-to technical partner for AAA studios pushing the boundary of believable CG faces, and was acquired by Epic Games in 2019 to anchor what would become the MetaHuman Creator — the feature inside Unreal Engine that lets any developer ship production-grade photorealistic characters in hours instead of months. Even after the acquisition, 3Lateral continues to operate out of Serbia as a core R&D center for Epic's digital-human stack, making it one of the clearest examples of world-class computer-graphics IP built entirely in the former Yugoslav space and now shipped into tools used by hundreds of thousands of developers globally.
Novi Sad, Serbia · Startup ActiveCollab is a bootstrapped project management and collaboration SaaS platform built specifically for service businesses. Founded in 2007 by Goran Radulovic and Ilija Studen in Novi Sad, it originated as an open-source tool in 2006 before moving to a commercial model. The platform provides project management, time tracking, budget tracking, client management, and invoicing in a single product available as both cloud-hosted and self-hosted deployments. Over 50,000 teams worldwide rely on ActiveCollab, including organisations at NASA, Apple, Samsung, Nike, IKEA, Adobe, BBC, and Stanford University.
Belgrade, Serbia · Event The fifth edition of TBM Group's AI Tech Summit at the Sava Center in Belgrade, one of Serbia's largest AI and enterprise-tech conferences. Founder-relevant for AI startups seeking enterprise customers and regional visibility.
Belgrade, Serbia · Event Startit's week of 25+ free AI events spanning Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Niš, drawing 1000+ attendees across 20+ partner organizations for talks, workshops, and meetups on applied AI and startups.
Belgrade, Serbia · Event A week of free AI events across Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Niš, organised by Startit. The 2025 debut drew 1,000+ attendees across 23 events with 20+ partner organisations — community-driven and explicitly founder and developer-facing.
Belgrade, Serbia · Event Southeast Europe's premier startup investment conference connecting Western Balkan founders with international VCs and corporate investors. Features curated startup pitching, investor panels, and structured 1:1 matchmaking. Attracts 500+ attendees with a high investor-to-founder ratio.
Novi Sad, Serbia · Startup CAKE.com, formerly COING, is a bootstrapped productivity software company founded in Novi Sad in 2009 by Nenad Milanovic. It is best known for Clockify, the world's most widely used free time-tracking app, launched in 2017 and now used by over 5 million users globally including HP and American Express — voted best overall time-tracking app by Forbes. The company expanded its product suite to include Pumble (team messaging) and Plaky (task management), rebranding the family of tools under the CAKE.com umbrella in 2023. The company reached $25M+ ARR entirely bootstrapped without venture capital.
Belgrade, Serbia · Event Southeast Europe's largest data science and AI conference, held in Belgrade with 1,200+ data scientists, ML engineers, and analytics leaders from across the Balkans, CEE, and Western Europe. Three days of talks, hands-on workshops, and a career fair. Content spans applied ML, LLMs in production, MLOps, and data engineering at scale. Tickets EUR 200-600.
Belgrade, Serbia · Event B2B game industry conference co-hosted by DevGAMM and the Serbian Games Association at Hilton Belgrade, with two days of talks, expo, and MeetToMatch networking for developers, publishers, and investors across the Balkans.
Novi Sad, Serbia · Venture Capital Fifth Quarter Ventures is an early-stage VC fund founded in 2023 and based in Novi Sad, investing in startups across the Western Balkans and Adriatic region. The fund is led by General Partners Tihomir Bajić and Pedja Predin, both experienced operators who aim to be the first significant institutional investor in portfolio companies, taking board seats. Investment focus spans AI, developer tools, open-source software, Industry 5.0, and crypto/Web3. The fund received co-financing through Serbia's state Innovation Fund Serbia Ventures program and manages a portfolio of 12 companies.
Belgrade, Serbia · Startup FishingBooker is a Belgrade-based online marketplace connecting recreational anglers with fishing guides and charter captains worldwide. The platform allows users to browse, compare, and book fishing trips across thousands of destinations, handling payments, reviews, and communication between guests and guides. With operations spanning the US, Caribbean, Europe, and beyond, FishingBooker has become the world's largest fishing trip booking platform. The company demonstrates how Serbian engineering talent can build globally dominant vertical marketplaces in niche travel segments that larger OTAs have underserved.
Belgrade, Serbia · Event Heapcon 2026 is the eighth edition of one of Southeast Europe's leading software-engineering conferences, held 5-6 November 2026 at the Madlenianum Opera & Theatre in Belgrade and organised by Heapspace. The 2026 theme, 'Intelligence', examines how AI tooling, autonomous systems, and automation reshape software architecture, security, quality, and product thinking. It gathers 700+ engineers, architects, and tech leaders, making it a strong hiring and technical-ecosystem touchpoint for Serbian startups.
Belgrade, Serbia · Startup Hunch is a creative ads automation platform that combines AI-driven dynamic creative assembly, product-feed data science, and real-time social media placement for performance marketers. Founded in 2018 by Igor Simovic, Sinisa Rakovic, and Nikola Milenkovic, the platform enables brands and agencies to produce and personalise thousands of image and video ads at scale across Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Hunch has delivered over a billion personalised creative assets and executed more than 50,000 personalisation campaigns. The company raised a €4M Series A in 2022 led by Catalyst Romania, with participation from 3TS Capital Partners, Euroventures, SeedBlink, and South Central Ventures.
Belgrade, Serbia · Venture Capital ICT Hub Venture is a private investment fund founded in 2017 as the capital arm of ICT Hub, one of Serbia's pioneering startup incubators. It focuses on pre-seed and seed technology startups in the SEE region, offering up to €50,000 in exchange for 5–15% equity alongside a structured development program and ecosystem access. The fund positions itself as the only private early-stage fund in the SEE region dedicated to scalable B2B and B2C tech solutions. Portfolio includes cybersecurity platform Trickest and scheduling marketplace randevu, among 15+ companies as of 2024.
Aranđelovac, Serbia · Event 41st edition of ASIT's regional ICT conference and exhibition, gathering Southeast European public-sector IT leaders and vendors around current topics in government technology, security, and digital services.
Belgrade, Serbia · Startup Joberty is a Belgrade-based workplace community and employer review platform built for the tech industry, combining a Glassdoor-style review engine with a tech jobs board and salary benchmarking data. Founded in 2019 by Nikola Mijailovic, Dusica Mijailovic, Slavko Saponjic, and Nebojsa Aradski, the platform allows developers to research companies, explore salaries, read interview experiences, and apply for tech roles. Joberty has expanded to six markets — Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, North Macedonia, and Slovenia — and won the Gitex Future Stars competition in Dubai. Its CompensationX product provides real-time salary benchmarking for IT companies across the region.
Novi Sad, Serbia · Startup Mad Head Games is an award-winning video game developer based in Novi Sad, Serbia, co-founded in 2011 by Nenad Tomic, Uros Banjasevic, and Aleksa Todorovic. From casual hidden-object games through publisher Big Fish Games to action titles for global audiences, the studio has shipped more than 60 games and was instrumental in founding the Serbian Games Association. Known for the action RPG Scars Above and the upcoming Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival developed in partnership with Saber Interactive, Mad Head Games operates as an independent studio within the Saber Interactive group, drawing on 15 years of Unreal Engine expertise.
Belgrade, Serbia · Startup Nordeus is one of Southeast Europe's most important gaming companies and the studio behind Top Eleven, a globally successful football management game. The business is notable not just for creating a hit title, but for sustaining long-term user engagement through live operations, balancing, retention design, and ongoing content updates. That makes Nordeus a strong example of European gaming as both a creative and analytical discipline, where product success depends on community management, behavioral economics, and continuous optimization as much as on launch-day design. In ecosystem terms, Nordeus helped establish Belgrade as a serious game-development center and showed that major consumer entertainment businesses can scale from the region without following the standard SaaS path. It adds a useful dimension to the directory because gaming companies often develop advanced expertise in monetization, engagement, and lifecycle management that later influences wider consumer-product thinking across tech.
Belgrade, Serbia · Venture Capital Omorika Ventures is a Belgrade-based seed and early Series A fund launched in 2024 to address the shortage of institutional early-stage capital in Serbia and the broader Balkans. The fund secured €5 million in public co-funding through the Innovation Fund of Serbia's Serbia Ventures program and is operated by three founding partners with deep roots in the regional startup ecosystem via ICT Hub. It invests in tech companies with globally ambitious Serbian founders, providing capital alongside strategic support, mentorship, and international investor introductions. Portfolio companies include cybersecurity platform Trickest and HR-tech startup OneAssessment.
Belgrade, Serbia · Person Ronny Fehling serves as Chief AI Transformation Officer at HTEC, a technology company specializing in AI-driven software engineering and digital transformation with offices across Europe and North America. In this C-suite role he is responsible for driving the company's artificial intelligence strategy and transformation programs across client engagements, and is a recognized speaker on enterprise AI adoption.
Belgrade, Serbia · Startup Saga is an AI-powered collaborative workspace for notes, docs, and tasks, designed to help teams organise knowledge in one connected interface. Founded in 2021 by Filip Stanev with Serbian roots, Saga automatically interlinks knowledge across workspaces, integrates with tools such as Google Drive and Linear, and includes a built-in AI assistant powered by the latest large language models. The platform offers real-time collaboration, Kanban task views, and public sharing. With over 40,000 users in its beta phase and hundreds of teams relying on it weekly, Saga raised $850,000 in a pre-seed round in early 2023 and competes with Notion and Obsidian in the knowledge-management space.
Belgrade, Serbia · Startup Strawberry Energy is a Belgrade-founded smart-city and clean-tech startup best known for Strawberry Tree, a solar-powered public charging and urban-data station that became one of the first widely deployed pieces of street furniture combining renewable energy, IoT sensing, and free phone charging for cities. Founded in 2011 by Miloš Milisavljević while he was still a university student, the company has placed its units across the Balkans, the UK, and the Middle East, and expanded into smart-city data platforms that feed environmental, footfall, and air-quality metrics back to municipalities. Strawberry was recognized early as a European clean-tech pioneer, winning the European Commission's 'European Champion' award and being featured in MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35. For the directory it is a strong example of physical-product clean-tech built from Serbia, a counterpoint to the region's dominant gaming and SaaS stories.
Belgrade, Serbia · Event The Belgrade edition of the global Techstars Startup Weekend, a 54-hour event where aspiring entrepreneurs form teams, validate ideas, and pitch to local judges. Supported by Serbia's Office for IT and eGovernment. Attracts 100+ participants per edition. Registration around EUR 30-50.
Belgrade, Serbia · Startup Tenderly is a Belgrade-based blockchain development platform that provides smart contract monitoring, debugging, simulation, and infrastructure tools for Web3 developers. The platform allows teams to test transactions, simulate contract interactions, and set up real-time alerting before deploying to mainnet, significantly reducing the risk and cost of bugs in decentralized applications. Tenderly has raised over $40 million from investors including Spark Capital and Accel, and is used by leading DeFi protocols and blockchain teams globally. It is one of Serbia's highest-profile venture-backed startups and a key piece of developer tooling infrastructure in the Web3 ecosystem.
Belgrade, Serbia · Startup Trickest is an offensive security automation platform built for bug bounty hunters, penetration testers, and enterprise SecOps teams. Founded in 2020 by Nenad Zaric — a former top-ranked HackerOne researcher with credits at Uber, PayPal, and Snapchat — and Mihailo Tomic, the platform provides a visual workflow builder and a large library of tool nodes for attack surface mapping, vulnerability scanning, and automated recon. Teams can compose, share, and run complex security workflows without custom scripting. Trickest raised a €1.4M seed round backed by Credo Ventures and Earlybird Digital East, with angel investors including UiPath's Daniel Dines.
Belgrade, Serbia · Venture Capital TS Ventures is the first corporate venture capital fund established in the Western Balkans, launched in 2021 by Telekom Srbija with a €25 million mandate to invest in high-tech startups across pre-seed through growth stages. Headquartered in Belgrade at Milutina Milankovića 3v, the fund backs companies in AI, biotechnology, and digital platforms, with a particular interest in transformative technologies that can scale regionally and globally. The fund has deployed approximately €2.4 million across 15+ startups, with an average ticket size of €133,000. Notable investments include AI-driven professional networking platform Connect The Dots and biotech firm LampoVet.
Belgrade, Serbia · Startup Two Desperados is an independent mobile game development studio of around 80 people based in Belgrade, Serbia. Founded in 2010 by Marija Ilic and Vojislav Milutinovic after five years building a software startup, the studio pivoted to casual gaming and created the #1 marble-shooter franchise Woka Woka and Viola's Quest, which together have attracted 30 million players worldwide. Their third title NoNo Crossing, launched in 2023, extends the portfolio beyond the marble-shooting genre. The studio is a proud alumnus of the Google for Startups accelerator program and a founding member of the Serbian Games Association.
Belgrade, Serbia · Event The official WordPress community conference for Belgrade, held over two days at Dom omladine Beograda. The 2026 edition expects more than 300 attendees across talks and hands-on workshops running in parallel halls, bringing together WordPress developers, designers, agencies and content creators.
Novi Sad, Serbia · Event IEEE Zooming Innovation in Consumer Technologies conference at University of Novi Sad, themed 'Outsmarting the Narrative: People, AI, and Technology' — applied research and industry talks on AI, trust, and consumer tech.