CEE startup & tech weekly: new SpaceTech bets. The Recursive's weekly roundup aims to cover key tech developments across Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the growing impact of CEE-born founders on the global stage. Take a look at the latest news in funding, startup milestones, and emerging trends tied to the region's innovation potential. Deals & news. The Hungarian edtech company BOOKR has raised €6.1 million in a Series A funding round led by TCEE Fund IV, advised by 3TS Capital Partners, with participation from international and strategic investors. The transaction includes a primary investment, secondary share purchases, and the conversion of existing financial instruments. Croatian gaming-café franchise Friendly Fire has raised €4 million, led by AYMO Ventures, to fund international expansion across 11 countries. The company develops a franchise model that standardizes gaming cafés - combining physical locations with a proprietary software platform and centralized management, so each new café plugs into one network. Embedd, founded by three Ukrainian entrepreneurs whose previous hardware company was disrupted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has secured a €2.31 million pre-seed funding led by Seedcamp, with participation from Cocoa, Connect Ventures, 2100 Ventures, Vesna Capital, U.ventures, Underline Ventures, Common Magic and Roosh Ventures. Embedd builds a digital twin of the hardware, giving AI agents the context to run the integration themselves and automatically generate the code that makes each chip usable by the software layer above it. Czech venture capital firm DEPO Ventures is expanding its SpaceTech portfolio with an investment in French startup ArcSpace, leading the company's latest funding round of more than €2 million. The round was led through the DEPO Ventures One fund, with participation from SCE Freiraum Ventures, IRDI Capital Investissement, and a network of French business angels. Paris-based ArcSpace is developing technology designed to make it possible to repair, modify, and assemble satellites directly in space. Jet Ventures, the venture arm of Prague-based Jet Investment, has invested $750,000 (€644,110) into the $1.6 million round of Hermetiq, a San Francisco startup building an AI platform that diagnoses and repairs failed software builds. Hermetiq's technology brings AI into the software build process, the compiling and testing that stands between code and a working product. Other updates on CEE related ventures. Toronto-based Veeda AI, co-founded by Slovenian researchers Sanja Fidler and Bojan Vučković, has raised more than $90 million (€83.7 million) in seed funding, in one of the largest seed rounds recorded in Canada. The round was led by Khosla Ventures and will support Veeda AI's work on simulation technology designed to help AI systems learn how to operate in the physical world. The U.S. Army's 2nd Infantry Division has selected Croatian drone maker Orqa to supply its first-person view (FPV) drones following a detailed technical evaluation. The Croatian manufacturer enters a formation that actively tests competing FPV technologies, instead of introducing drones as an isolated experimental capability. This milestone follows Orqa's earlier partnership with the Red River Army Depot in Texas to scale up U.S.-based manufacturing capacity. REGENT Craft, the Rhode Island maker of Seaglider hydrofoiling wing-in-ground vessels, has closed a $240 million Series B split evenly between equity and debt, co-led by maritime investment firm Mare Liberum and AE Ventures, with the debt provided by Erebor Bank. For the region, the thread worth following is Poland: REGENT is partnering with dual-use investor Balnord to bring Seagliders to the Baltic Sea, where NATO navies want fast, distributed capability to protect ports and critical infrastructure. Balnord's Marcin Kowalik, who also participated in the deal, sees Poland's established base in boat, yacht and catamaran manufacturing as the foundation for a European hub that could build and service the craft. REGENT is pursuing parallel expansion in Greece and the UAE, and already holds an expanded US Marine Corps contract for its Viceroy platform. EnduroSat Germany to lead ESA Consortium. EnduroSat Germany has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) to lead a consortium developing a new Earth observation mission designed to strengthen Europe's ability to monitor the planet independently of daylight conditions. The project, called LLARS (Low Luminance Resilience from Space), is being developed under the first phase of ESA's European Resilience from Space for Earth Observation (ERS-EO) programme. It will serve as an in-orbit demonstration and validation mission for the programme's Earth observation component. According to the company, LLARS is intended to contribute to the EU's planned European Earth Observation Governmental Service (EOGS) and support Europe's push for more secure and independent access to Earth observation data. The initiative also aligns with the EU's Defense Readiness Roadmap 2030, which puts greater emphasis on strengthening European capabilities in security and defense.

EnduroSat to partner with the Bulgarian Government for a new space industrial base. * LinkedIn * X * Facebook The program will transform the 3 million m[2] ex-military airport in Dobroslavtsi into new space and defense R&D and production center aiming to empower the rapid build-up of large constellation fleet at a fraction of the current cost and time. Sofia, Bulgaria - 6 August 2026 - EnduroSat, a global space infrastructure builder, and the Government of the Republic of Bulgaria have signed a memorandum of understanding to turn the former military airbase Dobroslavtsi into Europe's newest space and defense R&D center. For constellation operators, governments, and defense forces, the site enables serial production and streamlined logistics for large and complex space fleets. Rarely do you get the chance to chase a truly big vision. For the past decade, the EnduroSat team has built an incredible track record: proving doubters wrong and pushing through every human and technical challenge in its way, all to make space more accessible. A few numbers to back that up. EnduroSat has built the most vertically integrated space company in the EU. EnduroSat has cut the cost of acquiring data from any mission from thousands of dollars per GB down to $1 per GB. EnduroSat has cut time to orbit from years to an average of 8 months, from idea to live in-orbit data service. EnduroSat has launched 100+ satellites in orbit, generating a huge trove of data. And EnduroSat has shipped over 200 satellites to customers worldwide (yes, the Earth is round - I can confirm). Here's the part that excites me most. I've always tried to look ahead: how do EnduroSat scale its impact, and where can my team and I make the biggest difference? I'm convinced the answer is infrastructure. Not just satellites, missions, or launchers - as exciting as those are - but the physical bottlenecks underneath every space service: brutal supply chains, constant one-off engineering, no standardization, no flexibility to build differently, and painfully slow execution - an issue its industry badly underrates. I believe the greatest value goes to whoever owns the scarce physical inputs, because that's what lets you scale and raise the barrier to entry in your domain. That's where EnduroSat is now: taking EnduroSat to the next level by solving scalability for space infrastructure - a connected infrastructure that powers progress both in space and on the ground. I'm excited to share that EnduroSat is launching a new program to build exactly that, here on Earth. On a former military airfield, EnduroSat is setting up an unprecedented center bringing together manufacturing, R&D, education, testing, and logistics. It's complex, risky, and hard - and EnduroSat is taking it on anyway. If nothing else, it'll annoy the pessimists a little more. Huge thanks to its investors, backers, and my team for standing behind me through so many challenges already. Let's take on one more, bigger one, together. I can't wait to make mistakes, learn from them, and show what this team is made of. Ad astra! Raycho Raychev Founder and CEO, EnduroSat About EnduroSat EnduroSat is a space infrastructure builder that engineers, manufactures, and operates high-performance satellites, making space universally accessible for commercial and institutional customers across the globe. EnduroSat delivers end-to-end satellite missions - from mission design and payload integration to launch and in-orbit operations - through a fixed-cost, constellation-as-a-service model.