If Charles Darwin had lived a century and half later, he would have come to very similar conclusions about startups, as he did about animal species. Much like in the evolution theory he fathered, which conclusively explained our descent from apes, it is not the strongest or smartest companies that survive, but the ones most adaptable to change.
Through the years, I’ve personally enjoyed collecting stories of founders who took their startups through complete 180-degree turns, on the path from initial idea to breakthrough product success. My favorite is still Zite, which started out as a software suite for law firms, before pivoting to an iPad news reading app, and getting acquired by CNN and Flipboard in 2014. But if you look closer, you will see that many successful companies have elements of very serious pivoting in their foundational history. And in the Vitosha portfolio, it’s becoming a more common sight as well, which we generally see as testament to the positive and promising development of our portfolio companies.
One such company is one of our most recent investments, and one of the final ones we made with Vitosha Fund I, the company HROS (pronounced as “Heroes”). With presence in Sofia, Belgrade, Warsaw, Vienna, and Budapest, HROS is a hiring platform for fast scaling tech companies and corporations.
The genesis of HROS has two parts, and is really a tale of two cities. One part of the company started 10 years ago in Vienna, under the name SpeedInvest Heroes, a spin-off of the well-known Vienna VC fund, SpeedInvest. As the fund’s portfolio grew bigger and bigger, its HR advisor Maria Baumgartner, who had originally joined the fund as a consultant, to mentor portfolio companies on hiring strategies, saw an opportunity to create a separate business that would focus solely on helping the fund’s portfolio companies to recruit and retain the best talent.
As Maria says today, “working with hundreds of quickly developing startups from the SpeedInvest portfolio, we developed a series of processes and algorithms that allowed us to seamlessly match talent to companies. I had worked in recruitment for a long time before founding the company, but it was the sheer volume and complexity of startup hiring that helped me realize that a lot of the work could be systemized.” Together with co-founder Lukas Rippitsch, Maria launched Heroes to address this opportunity, and the company quickly emerged as one of the leading tech recruitment firms in the ASG region.
The second part of today’s HROS started a few years later, in Budapest, where Zsolt Kelliár and Peter Balazsik founded a company called Talentuno, which built technology that allowed recruiters to crowdsource the acquisition of job candidates to the candidates’ personal and professional networks. According to Zsolt, “there’s nothing that advertises job opportunities better than endorsements from people you know. What we figured out with Talentuno, is how to engage people with very developed personal networks to become referral lead generators for open recruitment positions”.
By the time the two companies first heard of each other and met in 2020, both were dynamically growing and leading the recruitment innovation in their respective fields.
At Vitosha, we started talking to Talentuno in 2022, when it embarked upon a big regional expansion in Bulgaria and the region. When we learned that the two companies were planning to merge in 2023, and join forces under the HROS brand, we were hooked and started negotiating an investment in the newly merged business, which we completed in December of last year.
Today, HROS is active in Hungary, Austria, Poland, and across Southeastern Europe, with its Bulgaria and Serbia operations being the main growth focus, executed from Sofia. With a team of 70, the company serves hundreds of startups, scaleups, and corporations all across Europe, providing a unique combination of recruitment outreach and employer-employee matching, which made the two original companies that HROS was born out of outstanding in the beginning.
With Vitosha, we’re proud to have invested in HROS, not only facilitating a leading European scaleup company as it expands in the Bulgarian market and Sofia tech ecosystem, but also because of its remarkable founding story, and the relentless grit, dedication, and adaptability of the founding team of Maria, Zsolt, Lukas, and Peter.