The first Startup Revolution AI Summit proved why Skopje is becoming a regional hotspot for founders working at the intersection of innovation and real-world problem-solving. The event brought together builders, investors, educators, and community leaders. BRULZ has supported the summit before, during the summit and after.
Launching an AI Startup on a Budget – Moderating the AMA session
As Balkan Digital reported, this session was “one of the most practical and high-energy discussions at the summit was the AMA session focused on a question every early-stage founder asks: “How do I actually start an AI company without burning a fortune?”
How do you build serious AI without serious money? That question drove one of the liveliest sessions at the Startup Revolution Summit. On 28 November 2025, three founders took the Startup Stage for a fast, founder-to-founder AMA. The rule was no slides and no long speeches. The moderator kept a physical bell on stage and rang it whenever an answer started to sound like a keynote.
Started with a Speed Round
The session opened with rapid-fire questions, and each founder had about 15 seconds to answer. How do they actually split their time between product, sales and administration? What was the cheapest experiment that gave them real market validation? What was their most expensive mistake so far? The founders also named one thing early AI teams overspend on and one thing they should always invest in. They shared the AI tools that save their teams hours every week and said what they would build first if they had to start again with just €5,000. To keep it human, each also named the TV show or movie that inspired them as a child.
Going Deeper
Next came questions aimed at each founder’s own experience. Svetlana weighed the pros and cons of taking investment early. She also explained how to train computer vision models on a startup budget without losing accuracy, and how to build and label datasets cost-effectively. Dime talked about meeting strict fintech compliance requirements on a small budget and gathering financial data without high acquisition costs. He also named the first feature that proved FinqUP’s value. Dimitar covered the early tech choices that kept Factum’s development costs low while scaling. He described how the company won its first enterprise clients without a big sales budget, and which automation use cases founders wrongly assume are expensive.
The session ended with one question for all three founders: what is the one expensive mistake every early AI founder should avoid?
The takeaway for anyone building in AI is that a small budget isn’t a disadvantage in itself. It pushes you to test ideas cheaply, choose your tools carefully and put every euro where it counts.
Meet the Founders
Dimitar Chukovski, CEO of Factum, has built an AI platform that is reshaping the legal industry, and he credits scrappy product decisions for keeping it competitive. Dime Galapchev, CEO of FinqUP, created an AI-powered operating system for asset managers after seeing the industry’s inefficiencies from the inside. Svetlana Kordumova, CEO of Pixyle.ai, brings more than 14 years of AI research and startup experience. She has shown that deep tech can launch lean and still grow into a global retail-tech solution.
Moderated by Vasko guided the conversation with real, no-nonsense questions—covering what tools to use, what not to build from scratch, and how to move forward when resources are tight. The panelists shared tactics around validation, quick MVPs, smart data usage, automation-first thinking, and building traction before raising money.
Don’t miss the 2nd edition of the Startup Revolution AI Summit, 1-4 October 2026, in Skopje.
