.png)
Building a globally competitive company from Central and Eastern Europe has become an increasingly credible ambition. The region has produced founders who have scaled technology businesses internationally, investors with experience across multiple markets, and operators who understand how to build organizations capable of sustaining that growth.
The next step is to make this experience more accessible to the founders following in their footsteps.
Future Unicorns was created to connect ambitious CEE entrepreneurs with the knowledge, relationships, and international exposure they need to expand into the United States. Our work brings founders into direct conversation with people who have built, financed, and advised companies through the decisions that shape global growth: entering new markets, raising capital, developing leadership teams, navigating regulation, building enterprise sales operations, and adapting a company without losing sight of its original ambition.
The composition of our Board reflects that mission.
We are pleased to welcome Konstantin Dzhengozov, Konstantin Bezuhanov, and Diana Stefanova to the Future Unicorns Board. They join Galina Antova, Simeon Simeonov, and Pressian Karakostov, bringing together experience across company building, finance, venture capital, cybersecurity, digital identity, artificial intelligence, enterprise technology, and international expansion.
Each has approached the regional ecosystem from a different position. Together, they offer founders a much broader understanding of what it takes to build from CEE and compete internationally.
Diana Stefanova is Managing Partner at BrightCap Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in technology companies from Southeast Europe and the region’s global diaspora.
Before joining BrightCap full-time, Diana spent 16 years at VMware. She helped establish and scale the company’s Bulgarian presence into one of its strategic global R&D centers and held regional and global leadership positions related to VMware’s EMEA R&D operations and global sites strategy.
Her career spans more than 25 years across technology, finance, corporate development, business operations, venture capital, and organizational leadership. This combination gives her a clear view of both sides of the growth equation: what founders need to build inside a company and what investors examine when deciding whether that company can scale.
“Joining the Future Unicorns Board feels like a natural extension of my lifelong dedication to improving the regional business climate and ecosystem. I am eager to bring my investor and operator perspective to the Board to help actively guide the next generation of standout businesses.”
Diana’s appointment also strengthens the connection between Future Unicorns and the regional investment community. Access to capital matters, but founders also need to understand how investors assess markets, teams, competitive positioning, governance, and the capacity to build across borders.
“Startups in our region need strategic guidance, deep operational insights, and exposure to international markets. By bringing together leaders with cross-border experience, from Silicon Valley to Europe, initiatives like this provide founders with the mentorship and funding expertise required to transform regional startups into globally competitive technology leaders.”
For Diana, confidence in the region comes from the quality of its technical talent, the growing maturity of its startup ecosystem, and the increasing number of experienced leaders and diaspora founders contributing their knowledge.
“The growing number of strong leaders returning to the region and bringing global expertise, together with the remarkable community of diaspora founders, makes the next generation of founders truly unstoppable.”
Konstantin Dzhengozov is the co-founder and CFO of Payhawk, the spend management company that reached a $1 billion valuation in 2022 and became Bulgaria’s first unicorn.
Payhawk’s journey gave Konstantin direct experience with many of the challenges that emerge as an ambitious regional startup becomes an international organization. His perspective extends from financial strategy and fundraising to capital efficiency, organizational design, international expansion, and the operating discipline required to sustain rapid growth.
Joining the Future Unicorns Board is also an opportunity for him to pass that experience forward.
“I’ve been incredibly fortunate to build Payhawk alongside an exceptional team and to learn from founders, investors, customers, and mentors who were generous with their time. I believe there comes a point where you have a responsibility to give some of that back.”
Konstantin sees Future Unicorns as a way to help founders prepare for the complex decisions that accompany scale, including many that have little to do with the quality of the original product.
“As a co-founder and CFO, I have seen firsthand how many challenges are about scaling teams, raising capital, building the right operating model, expanding internationally, and making difficult decisions as the company grows. If I can help founders avoid a few mistakes, make better decisions, or simply give them confidence that the challenges they are facing are normal, that is a worthwhile investment of my time.”
His appointment carries particular significance for an ecosystem that has already seen a Bulgarian-founded company reach unicorn status. Payhawk demonstrated that a company originating in the region can earn a place in a global category. Making the knowledge behind that achievement available to other founders can help turn an exceptional outcome into the foundation for further success.
As Konstantin puts it, the question facing regional entrepreneurs is changing:
“Instead of asking, ‘Can we build a successful company from here?’ founders will hopefully start asking, ‘How do we build a category-defining global company?’ That shift in ambition changes everything.”
Konstantin Bezuhanov is the CEO of Evrotrust and an alumnus of the Future Unicorns program.
Evrotrust develops digital identity and qualified trust services for regulated organizations. The company is a Qualified Trust Service Provider under eIDAS, while its electronic identification scheme is officially notified by Bulgaria and recognized across the European Union.
Konstantin therefore brings experience from a field in which international growth depends on much more than commercial demand. It requires technological reliability, regulatory knowledge, institutional trust, and the ability to work with large organizations across different markets.
His relationship with Future Unicorns began as a founder participating in the program. Joining the Board allows him to contribute to the decisions shaping the experience of future cohorts.
“For me, joining the Board felt like closing a loop. The program genuinely changed how I thought about building Evrotrust: the mentorship, the exposure to investors, and the sense that a founder in Sofia could think in European terms, rather than only local ones.”
That progression from participant to Board member represents an important part of the community Future Unicorns is working to build. The knowledge generated through the program can continue circulating as alumni scale their companies, develop new expertise, and return to support other founders.
Konstantin also understands the practical gaps that initiatives such as Future Unicorns can address.
“Most founders here build good products but do not have easy access to the playbooks, capital relationships, or regulatory sophistication needed to compete globally from day one. The real value is giving founders a shortcut past mistakes that took people like me years to learn and connecting them to the right investors and partners much earlier than they would otherwise find them.”
His experience will be especially relevant to companies working in fintech, digital identity, enterprise technology, and other regulated or technically demanding industries. It also brings an alumnus’s understanding of how the program can remain closely connected to the decisions founders encounter after it ends.
The three new members join a Board whose existing members have already contributed extensively to the development of Future Unicorns and the founders it supports.
Galina Antova is a co-founder of Claroty, a global cybersecurity company focused on cyber-physical systems and critical infrastructure. Before co-founding Claroty, she established and led Industrial Security Services at Siemens and held leadership roles in IBM’s cloud services business.
Galina contributes experience in building a new cybersecurity category, selling to complex enterprise customers, and growing a company in an industry where technological performance, security, and trust are inseparable. She has also remained an active advocate for women founders and greater diversity in technology.
Simeon Simeonov is the co-founder and CTO of Swoop, as well as an entrepreneur, investor, and advisor with more than 25 years of experience across artificial intelligence, data, healthcare technology, and privacy-enhancing computation.
His work has placed him at the intersection of scientific and technological development, company building, and venture investment. For Future Unicorns founders, Sim brings the ability to examine difficult technical and commercial questions together and translate complex ideas into decisions that companies can act on.
Pressian Karakostov is a technology entrepreneur and investor who founded PhoneArena and co-founded PubGalaxy, which was acquired by Azerion. He is also a Board member at Endeavor Bulgaria and an active supporter of the Bulgarian entrepreneurial community.
Pressian’s experience spans digital publishing, advertising technology, company growth, investment, and ecosystem development. His belief in paying experience forward has been closely aligned with the Future Unicorns mission throughout his work with the organization.
A Board creates the greatest value when its members can examine the same company from different perspectives.
A founder preparing to enter the United States may need to reconsider the company’s market positioning, enterprise sales process, financial model, leadership structure, regulatory strategy, fundraising narrative, or product roadmap. These decisions are connected, and progress in one area can expose weaknesses in another.
The updated Board reflects this complexity.
Diana Stefanova combines venture investment with decades of enterprise leadership. Konstantin Dzhengozov brings the financial and operational experience of building Bulgaria’s first unicorn. Konstantin Bezuhanov contributes the perspective of an alumnus scaling a company in a highly regulated European market. Galina Antova understands cybersecurity, category creation, and the demands of protecting critical infrastructure. Simeon Simeonov brings deep technical, entrepreneurial, and investment experience. Pressian Karakostov contributes the judgment of a founder, investor, and long-standing ecosystem builder.
Their expertise is complementary, but their work is grounded in a shared conviction: companies from this region can compete internationally, and founders can move faster when the experience accumulated by others is available to them.
As we welcome our new Board members, we also extend our sincere gratitude to Rika Nakazawa, who has concluded her tenure on the Future Unicorns Board. Rika brought an international perspective shaped by her work across technology, innovation, investment, and corporate leadership. We are grateful for the time, judgment, and experience she contributed to the organization and for her support of our mission and community.
Changes in Board composition also represent a new stage in the development of Future Unicorns. Our organization has grown from an initiative connecting Bulgaria and Silicon Valley into a community-based program serving founders from Bulgaria and the broader CEE region as they prepare for expansion into the United States.
That evolution requires a Board capable of addressing the increasingly complex realities these companies face. It also requires a community that continues to participate after a cohort ends, with alumni, mentors, investors, partners, and experienced founders contributing to the development of those who follow.
The updated Future Unicorns Board embodies that continuity. Its members represent several generations and different parts of the company-building journey, from early investment and technical development to regulated-market expansion, enterprise growth, global leadership, and unicorn-scale execution.
We are proud to welcome Diana Stefanova, Konstantin Dzhengozov and Konstantin Bezuhanov to the Board, and grateful to Galina Antova, Simeon Simeonov, and Pressian Karakostov for continuing their work with Future Unicorns. Together, they will help us advance a mission that has become increasingly important as the region’s ambitions grow: ensuring that founders from CEE can access the experience, relationships, and informed guidance required to build companies with global relevance.
