What is StartupFactory

Startup Factory is a Non Profit Organisation that develops the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the IT community in Bulgaria and South-Eastern Europe.

The mission of the organisation is supporting early stage startups, building key skills in demand by the market and cultivating the favourable infrastructure and environment for turning ideas into real products with potential for commercialisation.

Startup Factory functions as a centre that attracts people sharing common goals, interests and ambitions.

Startup Factory carries out activities in the following directions:

• Organizing technical events and conferences;
• Carrying out courses and trainings;
• Supporting early stage startups;
• Managing co-working space;
• Individual mentorship and consulting;
• Building skills in demand by the market;

We incentivise blockchain startups and we’re proud to be one of the first blockchain oriented startup development program in Europe.

Our most prominent member on this category is the blockchain startup ReCheck, that in 2017 was nominated for the EUTOP50 competition for most innovative European startups that took part in the European Parliament in Brussels.

Our mission behind blockchain is to help build more decentralised systems and processes and our vision is to be one of the blockchain hub center for startups worldwide.

• Blockchain know-how;
• Blockchain Developers;

Emiliyan Enev

Emiliyan Enev is a mobile technology entrepreneur and manages his own product – a blockchain startup called ReCheck that adapts itself as a ready technical solution for the needs of different businesses. Emiliyan has several online projects and digital products behind him, his strengths being related to business process management, online marketing, content creation, validation of ideas, customer engagement and monetization strategies. Among its achievements are winning the App Challenge 2.0 contest, participating in the CeBIT exhibition as a specially chosen startup, attracting business angel investment, and working with clients like UniCredit Bulbank.

Martin Panayotov

Martin Panayotov has been in the IT industry since 1997 with a major focus on web development and online marketing and he is an SEO expert. His company have built a successful social network targeting the audience from the United States and the UK. Currently he is the director & manager of the online marketing agency Weberest.

Kaloyan Tsvetkov

Kaloyan Tsvetkov has worked over the last decade on the next generation of one of the most promising e-commerce platforms. His work offers inexhaustible challenges where a cohesive and motivated team grows every year, attracting some of the best and most talented young talents in the city. Along with this, he works on his own software product (which is acquired several years later) and several open-source PHP projects, including the popular Krumo library. The past few years he has been engaged as a WordPress evangelist.

Vihren Ganev

Vihren Ganev is a software engineer and a start-up IT entrepreneur. Vihren strives to help people who are thirsty for knowledge of all ages to develop and succeed by conducting programming courses and guiding them to develop their personal projects. Among his most interesting awards are a project of Technostart, a charity and an innovative seminar, third place for the best student company. He is highly motivated and incentivized to continue with events such as Ruse Hack, where students demonstrate in-depth knowledge in IT and entrepreneurship, and more experienced people present quality and ready-to-use projects. Vihren invested effort to brand the Startup Factory as the preferred meeting place for IT people in the city. Here, during the day, work is booming, then courses, meetings, presentations of businesses and IT projects and ideas are held.

Ivaylo Sholekov

Ivaylo is an entrepreneur in the field of web-based applications. Manages several own projects as well as for different companies. After some “failures” in offline, entrepreneurship he is currently focused on the web-based applications. Ivaylo believes in that technological development will be on rise in Bulgaria and economy will thrive thanks to this technological development in the country. For this reason, he tirelessly works on web-based applications for specialized training in Information and Communication Technologies. Another major factor for technological development of the IT field in the region is the contribution of Startup Factory. Ivaylo is satisfied with good quality tools that can contribute to his success on his projects and well done job. He likes people who do not use expressions like I can’t and that can’t happen (especially if he is going to work with them). More than that, you can find on sholekov.com

Radostina Ganeva

She holds a bachelors degree of Computer Systems and Technologies at the Technical University of Varna and Masters “e-Business and e-Governance” at University of Sofia. Develops professional applications for Android devices for more than 4 years. She took part in programming and entrepreneurial competitions as a participant, mentor and jury. Currently she is working remotely from the Startup Factory co-working space. She strives to help in organizing the association and supporting co-working spaces.