VCs at Infobip Shift Told Founders Not to Raise

Central European venture investors told founders at Infobip Shift in Zadar not to take their money unless they would actually spend it. The conference ran from 13 to 15 September at the Višnjik Sports Center, and Infobip’s own recap put 3,000 attendees from more than 600 companies in the halls.

The warning came from a stage owned by Infobip, Croatia’s first unicorn, which ran for 14 years with no outside capital. Cheap coding tools now make that long path easier, and founders in the region are still chasing bigger rounds so their names land in the spotlight.

Central Europe’s VCs Told Founders to Wait

Jure Mikuž, managing partner at South Central Ventures, said a live trend across Central Europe is founders pushing for larger cheques because they want a moment in the lights, a tactic he did not recommend. David Clark, a venture partner at Estonia’s Tera Ventures, put a sharper test on the table: say who you will hire tomorrow if the money lands, and skip a raise whose only job is a place on a national top-ten list.

Clark compared venture money to rocket fuel that either reaches the moon or detonates on the pad. Founders, he said, “shouldn’t take VC money unless they are going to use it.”

THE ROOM IN ZADAR

• Headcount: Infobip counted 3,000 people on site, after 5,500 at the 2025 edition.
• The bill: More than 115 speakers from 50 countries, including names from OpenAI, Apple, and NVIDIA.
• The floor: Six stages and five halls across more than 15,000 square metres.
• The mix: Developers, founders, and investors from Croatia and the wider region, plus a larger group from the United States and northern Europe than in past years.

Mikuž, whose firm seed-stage companies from Southeast Europe out of Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Skopje, also said too many startups raise rounds that are too small for the plan they describe and only think six months ahead. Clark agreed. Wanting to be famous in a small market, in his view, is a reason to stay off the cap table.

Fourteen Years With No Venture Money

The host’s own books make the lecture sting. Silvio Kutić, Roberto Kutić, and Izabel Jelenić registered Infobip on 13 April 2006 in Vodnjan, a small Istrian town Kutić has called an odd place to start a high-tech firm. The company bootstrapped from zero to $1 billion in revenue in 14 years with no external investment, then took $200 million from New York private equity firm One Equity Partners in 2020 and became Croatia’s first unicorn, valued at more than $1 billion.

Those two billion-dollar marks are not the same thing. The operating business had already reached $1 billion of revenue by year 14; the 2020 cheque put a valuation of more than $1 billion on the shares. Infobip’s media kit later listed revenue of €1.55 billion in 2022, €1.735 billion in 2023, and €1.852 billion in 2024. The firm now employs more than 3,700 people in 70-plus offices and sits on more than 800 direct mobile-operator connections.

INFOBIP FROM VODNJAN TO A UNICORN

1. 13 April 2006: The three co-founders register Infobip in Vodnjan after earlier attempts at messaging products had failed.
2. 2009: London becomes the first international hub, and the company starts selling as a global communications platform rather than a local shop.
3. 2020: One Equity Partners invests $200 million, unicorn status follows, and Infobip buys US rival OpenMarket.
4. 13 April 2026: The firm marks 20 years and talks up an agentic-AI layer, AgentOS, on top of the same pipes.
5. 13 to 15 September 2026: Shift returns to Zadar, and the startup stage tells a new generation not to raise for show.

Jelenić, the co-founder and chief technology officer, told the conference it had mattered to work with people who like the parts of the job he does not. He also said it is hard to hand that lesson to founders now, because the era is different. Amir Salihefendić, the Todoist founder who built a widely used product without the usual venture script, was on the same speaker list, preparing remarks on the jump from writing software to running a company.

Why Founders Chase Cheques They Cannot Use

Clark’s other line was the one the room will remember. He said there has never been a better moment for Central European founders to bootstrap, because tools that write and ship code cut the cash you need before a customer pays. That is the opposite of a bigger round for a press hit.

The same cheap tools also make a demo look finished before anyone has sold it. A half-built app can now wear a production coat of paint, which is catnip for a founder who wants a headline raise and poison for one who still has no buyer.

THREE BAD REASONS TO RAISE

• The spotlight: Mikuž is seeing founders size rounds so their names land in local league tables, then live with a cap table built for theatre.
• Six months of air: A cheque that only covers the next half year, he said, is too small for the strategy on the slide.
• The top-ten list: Clark treated a place on a national ranking of raises as a reason to stay private and keep building.

Réka Hidas, who works on the early-stage team at Budapest-based Portfolion, added a fourth filter. Take money, she said, from a firm that brings something besides cash, such as introductions, and do not take “any capital” because it is on offer. Portfolion’s own site describes tickets of €500,000 to €3 million and a brief to be a first or second cheque for founders who want to build globally from day one.

A Flip Is a Product for the Acquirer

Hidas went after the other shortcut in the room: starting a company in order to sell it. In Central Europe that habit has a name, “building for a flip,” and it often shows up as a tidy feature set aimed at one likely buyer rather than a messy problem in the market.

If you kind of build specifically to be acquired, then you are solving a problem for them, not solving a problem for the market.

Réka Hidas, Portfolion, Infobip Shift in Zadar

Clark said he is not a fan of that plan either. At a very early stage, he argued, an exit is one of the smallest problems a founder will face. Mikuž wanted a blunt talk at the start of the relationship about what the company is actually trying to become, so nobody discovers the mismatch after the money is in.

That honesty cuts both ways. The same investors said they would rather back teams that want global scale than teams that cap themselves at a national prize. A founder who truly wants a local lifestyle business should not raise rocket fuel. A founder who wants a global company should not pretend a six-month round is a strategy.

The Chatbot in the Corner

Artificial intelligence was the other live wire, and the product people were as dry as the investors. Florian Binswanger, who leads startup go-to-market for Vercel in EMEA, mocked founders who put a chatbot in the right-hand corner so a deck can claim they are “doing something in AI.” Make the models part of how the product works and how customers stay, he said, and do not marry a single model vendor. Use a router, and pick the model per task.

Nina Trejos, who works with startups at Stripe, said too many teams leave usage-based AI billing as a late finance chore. If the product burns credits, that meter has to sit in the product plan, not in a spreadsheet after the raise.

The conference’s own feed kept the same note going after the doors closed. A Shift post on 24 September, built around a talk by Figma designer advocate Hugo Raymond, said AI can make a half-baked idea look production-ready, and that this might be the problem.

AI can make a half-baked idea look production-ready. And that just might be the problem… 😬

At Shift, @figma Designer Advocate @shallowveneer talked about how AI is changing the way teams prototype and why a polished prototype doesn't necessarily mean the hard decisions have… pic.twitter.com/K72PoszAm9

— Shift (@InfobipShift) September 24, 2026

That is the trap inside Clark’s bootstrap gift. Code is cheaper, so more people can ship, and more people can ship something that only looks like a company. Krešimir Končić, who runs Zagreb studio Neuralab and sat in Infobip’s first Shift Think Tank with 38 others on 15 September, described the inside of that scramble. Every team in the room was hacking on how to work with large language models, he said, and none of them was letting agents touch production code without a human in the loop. Finance, ops, and legal were already putting guardrails on token spend, which makes each setup local and hard to copy. Burnout came up a lot. So did the way AI pulls budget and attention out of every software shop that cannot stamp “AI” on the tin.

Croatia Looks Like Estonia, on Paper

Clark’s larger wager was geographic. He said Croatia now looks like Estonia a decade ago. Mikuž said the gap between Western and Central European startup scenes is closing, then added that a lot of founders in the region “have a romantic idea about the startup journey, but it’s not.”

The comparable numbers, from data firm Dealroom, show a smaller Croatian base next to a much denser Estonian one. Estonia has 1.4 million people on Dealroom’s country file and still counts more unicorns and more funded companies. Croatia is larger as a country and thinner as a venture market.

CROATIA AND ESTONIA ON DEALROOM

Across Central and Eastern Europe, CEE startups raised €2.3 billion of venture money in 2025. The recovery started in the fourth quarter at €756 million and ran into €952 million in the first quarter of 2026. Combined enterprise value hit a record €274 billion in 2026, split as €142 billion private and €132 billion listed. AI took 52% of CEE venture investment in 2025, up from 23% in 2024 and above Europe’s 34%. Deep tech rose from 17% to 37%.

Local funds still dominate the earliest cheques and fade as rounds get large. On 2021-2026 deals, CEE firms made up 90% of the ten most active pre-seed and seed investors, 40% at Series A, and 10% at Series B and beyond, so scale capital still comes from abroad. Dealroom also found the region produces 120% of the European average in enterprise value per euro of VC raised, on 40% of the European average of VC per unit of GDP. Seven new CEE unicorns have been minted since 2025.

Croatia is not empty of that later-stage money. Croatian-founded tax platform Fonoa closed a €95 million Series C in the second quarter of 2026, one of the region’s larger software rounds this cycle. Public money is in the mix too. The European Investment Fund, Croatian development bank HBOR, and the state have mobilised €270 million in public investment over eight years for about 200 Croatian firms, with a second wave of funds aimed at several hundred more.

Rocket Fuel Still Blows Things Up

Put the panel next to those figures and the advice is less anti-venture than anti-costume. Mikuž said there is no single right path, and that it depends on the industry and the stage. Clark said the tools have never been kinder to a founder who wants to wait. Hidas said the partner matters more than the headline number. All of them said they want companies that try to win globally, which is another way of saying they still want to write the big cheques, just not for a local trophy.

Infobip is the awkward proof sitting in the same town. It sold to the world from a tiny market, waited until 2020 to take outside money, and now throws a developer conference that draws OpenAI to the Adriatic. The founders in the hall can ship a product this month with a laptop and a model router. They can also slap a chatbot in the corner, raise a round that looks good in a Croatian ranking, and call that a company.

Jelenić, who has been at this since 2006, told the room he cannot easily advise the current generation, because it is a completely different era. The VCs on his stage spent that era telling founders to treat their money as fuel, or to leave it in the tank.