• How To Web Conference took place in Bucharest on October 2-3rd, 2024, and included a variety of insightful speeches, panel discussions, and the Spotlight startup competition
• FigVision, the Romanian startup that makes design seamless and effortless, won EUR 350K of investment prize
• The winner plans to use this amount for hiring new talent, as well as user acquisition through sales and marketing effort

Face Convention Center in Bucharest hosted over 3,000 founders, investors, executives, and tech talent at the 2024 edition How to Web Conference on October 2-3rd, 2024. There were representatives of 600 startups, 200 investors, and more than 100 top-tier expert speakers.

This year’s speakers lineup included such well-known names from CEE (and beyond) startup community as:

• Eva Arh, Partner at 3VC
• Jess Bartos, Principal at Salesforce Ventures
• Ivan Brezak Brkan, Director of Developer Content at Infobip
• Horia Coman, Head of Romania Engineering at Stripe
• Dan Mihai Dinu, Engineering Manager at Bolt
• Radu Georgescu, Chairman of the Advisory Board at SeedBlink
• Elena Ghiniță, Startup Community Editor at The Recursive
• Staffan Helgesson, General Partner at Creandum
• Marius Istrate, Chairman of the Board at TechAngels Romania
• Iqbal Javaid, Head of CX Solution Engineering EMEA at Zoom
• Tom McSorley, General Counsel at NATO DIANA
• Elisabeta Moraru, Country Director at Google România
• Fonz Morris, Lead Product Designer – Global Conversion & Monetization at Netflix
• Dan Oros, CEO at Creatopy
• Vojta Roček, General Partner at Presto Ventures
• Paulina Wardęga, Co-Founder at Heroify
• Monica Zara, Head of Conference at How to Web
• and many more

Startup Competition for CEE’s Most Aspiring Founders

However, arguably the biggest attraction of the How To Web Conference is the Spotlight Competition for startups that took place on the second day of the event. Out of more than 300 Eastern European startups registered, 40 participated in the Spotlight program, and 6 of them made it to the grand final of the competition for the syndicated EUR 350K investment prize from GapMinder VC, Startup Wise Guys, and Underline Ventures.

Romanian design facilitation provider FigVision managed to outrun the massive competition and won the lucrative prize.

‘It’s no secret that we live in the AI era. If you manage to build a product that is not only complimentary to these times but also brings value and thrives on scalable technology, you can differentiate your startup from others. This is what FigVision did at our Spotlight competition, making them our 2024 winners. I would also add that they have a strong team, which is always a good sign for the success of a startup,’ How To Web’s CEO Alexandru Agatinei tells ITKeyMedia.

The Big Winner

FigVision’s founding team can boast about over 30 years of joint experience in product design (10+ years of UI / UX design for Andrei Manolache, CEO, and 21 years of development and technical product management for Robert Drăguțoiu, CTO) for such companies as Oracle, Clevertech, Accenture, Bitdefender, and more. Building digital products for Fortune 500 Companies as well as startups, we understand what this process implies and how it can be streamlined or improved.

‘The need for FigVision came from us noticing how much time is wasted on repetitive design tasks, regardless of a company’s magnitude – from global corporations to design studios, and this is a major problem that we can solve using the technology that we are developing.’ Mr Manolache states.

The name ‘FigVision’ combines the name of the software that the startup’s initial solution was addressing,Figma, and the core functionality of the product – visually turning a screenshot into functional designs.

‘It takes a certain specialized view to first identify the pain points that currently exist in the product design process and a particular technical background to understand how those paint points can be solved with the current technology that is available in this space. This combination of industry best practices and technical knowledge is pretty hard to put together, coupled with the fact that the current AI trends tend to go towards solving ‘everything.’ What we are building is a specialized tool, specifically created to solve those product design problems,’ the CEO continues.

Essentially, FigVision creates the designs of an entire application or website from an image as a source of inspiration or even a simple ChatGPT-style prompt like ‘I want to create a mobile app for a food delivery service.’ What makes it important is that it lowers the knowledge gap bar for product design people and empowers them to create and iterate much faster than ever before.


The Winning Qualities

The investment-prize of EUR 350K was syndicated by renowned European investment firms, including GapMinder VC, Startup Wise Guys, and Underline Ventures.

FigVision’s vision was ambitious, but rooted in technical innovation – the team had already developed the core technology that allows them to automate most of the UX work based on text and image prompts, which is a clear value proposition for a segment of the developer market. Also, the team has the right mix of experience (UX, tech, team management, sales) to confidently assume they will be able to implement their plans.

– Bogdan Iordache, General Partner at Underline Ventures

FigVision won the 2024 How To Web Conference’s Spotlight competition thanks to a combination of these factors: the right team, the perfect product fit, a suitable market, and ideal timing. These elements came together, allowing the startup to stand out with its AI-driven design automation platform. This combination impressed us as it positions FigVision as a promising innovator in the web and mobile design space, highlighting their potential for future growth and success.

– Sergiu Roșca, Founding Partner at GapMinder VC

More Notable Finalists

‘We really liked 360Configurator and Arkensight. We chatted with them briefly throughout How to Web and we think their products are really cool and will bring a lot of value to their respective target audiences,’ Mr Manolache comments.

360Configurator is a Romanian startup that specializes in creating interactive 3D product configurators for e-commerce platforms. Their tools allow customers to personalize complex products online by offering real-time visualization and instant pricing updates, enhancing the shopping experience. This technology simplifies product customization, thus streamlining the sales process. 360Configurator’s solution helps companies enhance customer engagement and improve conversion rates by offering a more intuitive and visual shopping experience.

The Croatian startup Arkensight focuses on developing AI-driven solutions for analyzing drone-collected data. Their platform uses multimodal AI, which combines visual and other sensory data to accurately identify objects and anomalies in drone imagery. This technology is particularly valuable for sectors like infrastructure inspection, traffic monitoring, and environmental conservation, enabling faster and more precise data analysis. By tailoring AI to specific needs in real-time, Arkensight optimizes operations in various industries, including emergency response and environmental monitoring.

The Winner’s Plans

According to Mr Manolache, most of the prize money will be used for further product development and refinement of the platform’s capabilities and its AI models. Furthermore,FigVision aims at raising EUR 800K (including the Spotlight prize money) to offer their functionality to broader audiences in the product design space, by building FigVision’sown proprietary platform which will be called: DesignVerse.

The startup plans to roll out the beta version of the platform as soon as in 2025. The team promises that prospective users can also expect a handful of impactful surprises that FigVision’s developers are cooking up for them.