r/Startups_EU

Flights in one place, trains somewhere else, hotels on another website, notes in Telegram, maps separately…

Every trip somehow turns into juggling 10 different tabs and apps.

I started building a small side project to make this process feel less chaotic, mostly because I got tired of doing it manually every single time 😄

Curious how people here usually organize trips:

• spreadsheets?
• Notion?
• travel apps?
• or just embrace the chaos?

Feels strange that this still isn’t solved very well.

My co-founder and I live in different EU countries (Austria and Romania) and are both EU citizens. We’re planning to start a company and I am currently researching on how to go about it. Relocation for either of us is currently not on the table.

We’re comparing:

• Austrian FlexCo
• Romanian SRL
• Estonian OÜ via e-Residency

Estonian OÜ is something I have considered due simple and cost effective online setup, not for tax purposes. But most likely it seems that incorporating in either Austria or Romania is the best way to go about it.

My main concern is: Permanent Establishment (PE) and Place of effective management (PoEM) risk when founders actively work from different EU countries. From my research PoEM seems to be be somewhat reasonable to avoid with things like board meetings, banking and a single Managing Director (among others) in only the incorporating country.

Has anyone here dealt with a setup where founders live and work in different EU countries?

We will eventually look for someone specialized, but I would be really interested in any practical experiences around.

Hi Community!

Anyone here have experience with startup studios/accelerators in Belgium or Europe (imec.istart, Pitchdrive, Antler, bluerockstudio etc.)?

I’m building an early-stage healthcare workflow/infrastructure startup and currently exploring the ecosystem here in Belgium.

Curious about:
- how responsive these programs typically are
- what timelines usually look like after initial meetings/applications
- whether they meaningfully help at the idea/prototype stage

Would appreciate candid founder experiences.

Hey everyone,

I run an invite only digital community exclusively for European based professionals, builders, and operators. Right now, I’m opening up the doors for a few new members to join.

What the group is about: I built this group entirely around collaboration within Europea. It’s a space where senior developers, growth marketers, product designers, and founders can genuinely connect, hire each other for projects, share resources, and team up to build new businesses.

Most networking groups online are a total waste of time. I designed this group specifically to cut through the bullshit. There is no self-promotion clutter, no "guru" nonsense, no endless spam, and no low-effort pitches, just peer-level operators helping each other execute and scale.

How to join: To maintain the quality of the group and ensure everyone brings real value to the table, I personally vet every single member.

If you want an invite, please send me a DM (or leave a comment below) with a quick intro covering:

1. Where you are based in Europe.
2. What you do: What is your core profession or primary expertise?
3. What you bring to the table: What specific skills, experience, or resources do you bring to the group?

 

If it looks like a good fit for the group, I’ll drop you an invite link. Looking forward to meeting some real builders!

Some founder context for a Sunday morning. I am building a small AI company solo from Geneva, in the information-quality space. Most EU founders I have talked to over the past year took it as given that the AI Act would get watered down, postponed, or quietly ignored. I took the opposite bet. I built the whole stack as though every transparency, audit, and watermarking obligation would actually be enforced from August 2026 onwards.

A few months in, I want to be honest about what that bet has cost so far.

The infrastructure choices are the most expensive part. EU-hosted everything: VPS in Geneva, GPU inference on Scaleway in Paris, LLM provider is Mistral, vector store is self-hosted Qdrant, auth and storage on self-hosted Appwrite. Each of those is more expensive or more brittle than the US-cloud-first defaults most accelerators recommend. I have spent weekends on infra problems that would have been one-click somewhere else.

The architectural cost was the second. Every claim my product evaluates needs to produce an audit trail an end user, or in theory a regulator, can read. That ruled out the family of “let the LLM produce the verdict” architectures that most fact-checking and decision-support tools default to. The scoring lives in deterministic Python instead. Significantly more engineering work than prompting a model to rate something, and you cannot prompt your way out of a bad rule.

Then the May 7 Omnibus deal happened, and it proved both camps partly right at once. High-risk Annex III moved 16 months, to December 2027. The founders who bet on delay got their delay on that piece. But the Article 50 deployer obligations stayed at August 2 2026: deepfake labeling, chatbot disclosure, AI-generated content transparency on public interest matters. The provider watermarking obligation got pushed three months, to December 2. The political case for any further delay has been spent.

Where I land. The cost of compliance-first is real and I undersold it to myself when I started. The infra premium, the architecture rigidity, the policy reading, all paid up front. I do think it pays back, partly because retrofitting a non-compliant system after enforcement starts will be more expensive than building compliantly was, and partly because EU enterprise buyers and institutional partners are starting to ask compliance questions early rather than late. But the payback is theoretical for now. I am six months into a thirty-six month bet.

Curious if anyone else in this sub took the same direction, or if you bet the other way and are now figuring out what to retrofit. And especially: anyone with concrete contact with the supervisory authorities of their member state, would love to know how seriously they are staffing enforcement.

Solo dev. Last period I've been shipping builthere.eu, a curated launch platform, EU-first. Alternative to Product Hunt, but less complex.

Why:

1. PH's day runs on Pacific time, your launch peaks while your EU network is offline, competing with every US launch planned around US prime time.
2. PH's front page leans toward funded US startups with hunter networks. Bootstrapped EU makers without those connections get drowned out fast.
3. The current political climate is part of it too. Building something explicitly here, European-made, European-first, feels worth doing. Not anti-anything, just pro-something.

What's shipped: scheduled launches (max 4/weekday), upvotes, comments, maker profiles, launch calendar. Submissions open globally, identity stays European.

Currently in beta.

The real question: would you submit your product here?

Product is Built Here. Happy to share more in DM if anyone's interested.

Hi all!

I’m currently working on a project focused on AI education and community building, and I’m looking for technical partners or AI practitioners who are passionate about sharing knowledge and building tools.

What I bring to the table:

I handle the branding, market strategy, and community operations side.

If you’ve been thinking about building an AI-related side project or want to monetize your technical expertise through structured content, I’d love to chat.

Shoot me a DM if you're interested or have some ideas you want to bounce off!

Hey everyone, I'm Leo - history geek and programmer. My first project ever was about czech castles 

Lately I had a bit of free time and redid this project with modern design and lot of useful info for people planning trips to Czech Republic

I would not call it a startup per se (I have actual one I'm working on tho), but this is my big passion project, that some day (I hope) will grow into smth bigger

I will be happy to hear any feedback if anyone mind sharing - Stoleti.com

Hi r/Startups_EU,

Solo founder here, building SafeHabits (safehabits.eu) alongside a full-time role as security engineer.

The problem I'm trying to solve: 

In IT risk management practice, companies focus mostly on technical controls. But 60%+ of security incidents are human-related. At the same time, companies only train people annually to check a compliance box. This training is usually a boring necessary evil: an LMS that people don't enjoy and try to click through as fast as possible. So there's no clue whether the training actually had any effect on the security posture of the company.

What I'm trying to do: 

Build habit-based, Duolingo-style training that lets employees learn and internalize best practices in a non-invasive way. The data then resurfaces the effectiveness of the training, identifies human risk patterns, and lets the company connect human risk management to IT risk management. For example: where to strengthen controls based on identified weak points, or where to better train people or clarify internal processes (e.g., incident response). The final byproducts are auditable artifacts that map to NIS2, ISO 27001, and SOC 2, plus a stronger sense of security ownership across the company/security culture building.

Any comments or critiques would be really appreciated. I’d also be glad to connect with founders working on security, compliance, or similar problems!

Been meaning to write this up for a while because the recommendations floating around are mostly recycled listicles that have not actually tested anything.

The best AI headshot generator of 2026 for a founder use case is not the one with the most impressive homepage. It is the one that produces a result you can put on your LinkedIn, your pitch deck, and your company about page without someone asking why you look different in person.

The core difference between tools that work and tools that do not comes down to one thing. Personalized model training versus shared style filtering. Tools that build a fine-tuned model on your specific photos retain facial geometry, expression, and likeness across a full batch of outputs. Tools that run everyone through the same aesthetic filter produce great lighting on the wrong face.

This AI headshot tool has come up consistently in founder communities as the one that clears the likeness bar reliably. The outputs look like the actual person, which is the only thing that matters when your photo is representing you before every first impression.

For EU founders here, have you switched fully to an AI tool for professional photos or are you still booking a photographer for important moments like funding announcements and press features?

I’m building a small network for startup founders, developers, marketers, AI builders, creators, and operators across Europe.

The goal:

* meet people building useful things

* share tools, lessons, and startup problems

* exchange feedback

* find collaborators, testers, and early users

* connect with people outside the usual noisy platforms

Still early and keeping it focused on useful conversations, not promotion.

If you’re building from Europe or active in the EU startup scene, feel free to DM me. Or just discussed here whats the best way to share our thoughts.

Hi everyone, my name is Oleksandr. I’m an active serviceman in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, currently serving in the east of the country during the war with Russia. At the same time, I’m also an IT entrepreneur and startup founder. Over the past few years, together with my team, we’ve been building Drill — a defense/dual-use training platform based on real battlefield experience.
I’d be glad to join the community and connect with people who are passionate about startups, technology, training, and building meaningful products. Right now I’m especially looking for people in the EU who could potentially become partners, advisors, or even co-founders for the EU market expansion of Drill. Would really appreciate being welcomed into the community.

Genuine question from a European perspective.
It feels like prediction markets should be much bigger by now in Europe, especially considering how much interest there is in:
- politics
- macro/economics
- sports
- tech/AI
- public opinion

Yet most of the category still feels dominated by US companies (Kalshi, Polymarket, etc.), while Europe seems almost absent.

My first assumptions were:
- regulation makes it too hard
- gambling perception hurts adoption
- fragmented markets/languages in Europe
- lack of liquidity early on
- no obvious business model beyond trading fees

But I’m not fully convinced that’s the whole story.

At the same time, it feels like Europeans increasingly want:
- better signals than polls
- real-time sentiment
- smarter ways to understand uncertainty around events

So I’m curious:
Do you think prediction markets are fundamentally hard to build in Europe?

Or has no one just found the right positioning yet (media, forecasting, finance, data, etc.)?

Would love to hear thoughts from people building in fintech, media or regulated spaces.

I have geniun question that I would like to get insights from personal experience. How do you guys are surviving without having an income and focusing on you startup especially if it still in the early stages or it's 100% private comapny without external funding or clients.

This is really tough especially if you have responsibilities

week 4 of our first italy hire, she pinged me on slack asking which CCNL her role fell under and how her TFR was being handled, and i had to google both terms.

that's how i found out we'd set the whole thing up wrong.

we'd hired her as a contractor on partita IVA because we didn't want to open an italian entity for one person and we'd seen the same setup work elsewhere without issue. she invoiced us monthly and we treated it like any other contractor relationship.

the slack message sent me to an italian accountant who walked me through the setup we were sitting on.

our dev was working full time, exclusively for us, on a fixed schedule, using our laptop and reporting to our engineering lead, which under italian law is employment regardless of how you papered it.

if she (or INPS) ever flagged it we'd be looking at backdated social contributions, retroactive minimums from whichever collective bargaining agreement applied, and a severance reclassification that can run into the years.

opening an italian entity to fix it was the obvious next thought, but the math doesn't work for one hire (paid-in capital, notary, registered office, italian managing director with a local tax ID, monthly payroll filings, weeks before you can issue a compliant contract).

our german and dutch hires were already on workmotion from last year so extending to italy was the path of least resistance.

our accountant flagged one thing first, told me to check the ministry of labor's public register at ministerodellavoro. gov. it before signing anything, because the only legal code that lets a provider place employees in italy is somministrazione di lavoro, and anything else (consulting, IT services, business administration) is technically illegal staff leasing under italian law.

checked their registration, came back clean, and signed the addendum the same day.

ran the same check on a couple of the other big names afterwards, half of them failed it, which mostly made me glad we hadn't been shopping around.

anyway, keep seeing "just put them on a service invoice" come up in this sub and italy is a whole different beast from romania or poland on this front.

if your first italian hire is coming up and your plan is partita IVA, please talk to a local accountant before you sign anything.

I just started a business and wanted to get a little boost to start off with. Please DM me and I'll review you back. I'm a Local Guide with 90+ reviews. Let's help each other out.

Hi, we’re a team of AI/ML developers based in India. We’ve successfully built and delivered multiple real-world projects across different domains.

Whether you’re looking to develop a SaaS product, implement AI solutions for your business, or build complex ML-driven pipelines, we can help end-to-end.

If you think there might be an opportunity to collaborate, feel free to reach out.

we can share our portfolio in DMs

Hey guys,

I’m 33 from The Netherlands. My last position was corporate for one of the biggest hotel chains in the world (Top5)

I’m done with this bullshit and for the last month have been running a small gig that made last month \~€1000. Unfortunately this is absolutely not scalable and long term sustainable as it’s more of a physical pop-up thing that is seasonal.

So back to my hospitality background, I’m aware of a service/saas that was incredibly popular and used by some hotels in the Netherlands. It’s something I haven’t seen before and want to replicate and build a business around it.

I’m looking for a software developer to be a CTO, I have already a registered European LLC that we can use (You get half of the shares of the company) or we can establish a new one if this is something you prefer. Can’t pay you anything atm outside of essentials needed to build the thing.

My strongest position is sales and marketing, you do the technology. Would love to be someone from Europe, although I have posted this in another sub to get more options.

Drop me a message with a bit about you, and let’s do a video call!

Thanks