Earlier this year, a 15-person robotics team from Budapest closed the largest pre-seed round in Hungarian history — USD 7.2M, backed by angel investors from OpenAI and Hugging Face. They weren’t known outside a small circle of deep-tech investors six months prior. They had no brand budget, no global marketing team, and no tier-one media presence. What they had was a single sentence that made the problem undeniable: robotic AI is advancing fast, but robot bodies are still assembled by hand, piece by piece, like it’s 1980.
That company is Allonic. The reason they broke through is not that they outspent anyone. It’s because they found a framing that put the problem first and made their solution feel inevitable. That’s what global communication actually is.
Most CEE tech founders with whom I work carry the same two assumptions when they start thinking about going global: they need more funding, and they need a US or Western European office. Both assumptions are wrong, or at least in the wrong order. Capital and geography are outputs of successful positioning, not prerequisites for it. The companies that secure international funding or partnerships first almost always do the communication work in advance. They become legible to foreign audiences before anyone wired them money.
Why CEE Startups Struggle to Explain Themselves Internationally
The communication problem in CEE tech is specific. It’s not about language: most founders speak functional English. The problem is that the internal logic of a product, which makes complete sense inside a local market context, doesn’t translate to a global reader without work.
A Warsaw-based B2B SaaS company built for Polish enterprise procurement processes explains itself in terms that a Polish CFO would immediately recognise. Those same terms mean nothing to a London-based VC running a portfolio screen at 11 pm. The founder isn’t wrong to describe the product that way — they’re just describing it to the wrong audience, using the wrong entry point.
The mindset shift that makes the difference is deceptively simple: stop explaining what your product does and start explaining what problem becomes unsolvable without it. Allonic’s CEO, Benedek Tasi, doesn’t lead with the 3D Tissue Braiding technology. He leads with the gap: AI is making robots smarter faster than anyone can manufacture the bodies in which those robots could operate. That gap is a global problem. The technology is the local answer. Once you frame it that way, geography disappears.
The second pattern I see consistently is overexplaining the local context instead of skipping past it. A Romanian cybersecurity startup shouldn’t open a pitch to a German investor by explaining the state of Romanian enterprise IT. Start with the attack surface that no vendor has solved yet. That’s the conversation the German investor is already having. Join it.
There’s also a confidence issue that’s harder to name. CEE founders often write and speak about their companies with a kind of defensive precision — every claim heavily qualified, every number caveated. In a local B2B context, this reads as thorough. To a global audience, it reads as uncertain. Big tech companies don’t hedge their positioning. They state the problem, state their answer, and let the proof carry the argument. That’s not arrogance — it’s structure.
Stepan Burov is the co-founder of 8bitPR, a Budapest-based boutique tech/VC PR agency based. With 9 years of experience in PR for technology companies and venture capital — from early-stage startups to global brands — he brings a deeply focused, business-driven approach to communications. As the co-founder of an award-winning boutique agency, Stepan works with clients across the US, UK, Europe, MENA, and LatAm, helping them build credibility, raise capital, enter new markets, and gain recognition from the right media and industry stakeholders.
