What Is How to Web and Why Does It Matter Here?

If you haven't come across How to Web before, here's the short version: it's the leading startup and technology conference in Eastern Europe, happening each October in Bucharest. Think 3,000+ attendees, 500+ founders, 250+ investors, and three full days of building, pitching, and connecting with the people shaping the region's next chapter.

Demo Nights is their multi-city warm-up series, a format that takes the conference's energy and distills it into a single evening across different cities. The first edition in Sofia was at Barter Community Hub and Puzl was the ecosystem partner of the event. During the fascinating evening each startup gets five minutes on stage to demo their product live, followed by five sharp minutes of jury Q&A. Then networking. That's it - simple, fast, very, very nurturing for the ecosystem.

Sofia was Edition #2, right after Bucharest. Budapest followed two days later. We joined as Ecosystem Partners because the most important part for us has always been the community. And we are always ready to support the ecosystem, because we know that we can do small efforts together and reach great results faster and more sustainable.

The Stage Was Set at Barter

Barter Community Hub was the Location Partner for the evening. It's the kind of space where a conversation that starts on stage can continue over a drink two metres away.

The jury for the Sofia edition brought serious weight: Nikola Yanev (Co-Founder, Fundraise Ready), Elina Halatcheva (Managing Partner, BrightCap Ventures), and Raya Yunakova (Principal, LAUNCHub Ventures). The three of them know what early traction looks like and they weren't shy about probing for it.

And then there was the on-stage conversation between Max Gurvits and Teodor Antonio Georgiev. It became a no-filter fireside that gave the room something to think about beyond the pitches - exactly the kind of moment these evenings are made for. 🔥

A big thank you to the How to Web team - Carmelina Lungu and Alexandru Agatinei for building a format where founders get a real shot, not just a polished conference experience.

The Five Who Took the Stage

This is the part we really want to spotlight. Because every team that pitched that evening is building something worth paying attention to. We want to make sure this moment doesn't just live in the memories of the people who were in the room.

🏆 ESTEL Platform — The Winner

ESTEL Platform took home the How to Web Demo Nights trophy that evening. What does ESTEL actually do? It's an AI-native tech talent revenue platform, built specifically for the tech staffing and recruitment market. The problem it's solving is that sales teams at tech staffing companies spend hours every day drowning in job boards, tab-switching between tools, and chasing leads they can't verify. ESTEL changes that by surfacing verified demand, ranking leads by fit, and landing the right buyers in front of you - every day.

The platform has a Demand Confidence Score that scans thousands of opportunities and surfaces only what's genuinely worth pursuing, combined with lead cards that give you the company brief, the decision-maker profile, and a personalized outreach draft all in one place. Teams using it are saving over four hours a day on sourcing alone.

The team - Yusuf Berki Yazıcıoğlu, Ivo Michorov and Bogdan Stavrev, are already working with staffing teams across London, Amsterdam and Berlin. Winning in Sofia was just the spark. 

Next stop for ESTEL: the How to Web main stage in Bucharest, October 6–8. 🚀 We'll be cheering from the first row!

VihraAI — The AI That Actually Picks Up the Phone

VihraAI is building voice AI for the businesses that live and die by phone calls - hospitality, eCommerce, recruitment. The pitch is refreshingly direct: Vihra handles your inbound and outbound calls, 24/7, with less than 5% escalation to a human team.

What makes it more than a chatbot with a voice? The system is trained on each business's specific playbook, interacts using proven sales methods, and saves every interaction - contacts, intent, summaries, and insights. That means no more lost leads, no more missed calls during peak hours, and no more burnt-out customer service teams.

The numbers are already making noise: 21,000 minutes handled per month, 174% year-on-year growth, and a customer base that includes solid regional brands like Therme, JobTiger, and dress4less. The team - Angel Velikov and Preslav Hadzhitsanev, are building something regional businesses genuinely need. 👏 

xHeal — 360° Healthcare, Built From a Personal Crisis

The best products are often born from personal pain. xHeal is one of those stories.

In 2019, one of the founders - Trifon Getsov spent years navigating a health crisis that nine rounds of antibiotics couldn't solve. He saw countless doctors in Bulgaria and abroad. No one found the root cause. He eventually discovered it himself - a disrupted gut microbiome fuelling chronic inflammation. After years of reading mountains of medical literature.

That journey became xHeal: a 360° healthcare platform that brings together data from wearables, health apps, dietary information, and medical reports into a single AI-native interface. The platform builds what they describe as a digital health twin. А system that learns from you over time, spots patterns, and flags what your data is telling you before you feel it.

During beta testing, xHeal made a predictive suggestion that caught early-stage insulin resistance in a user who had no idea. The team, comprised of Trifon alongside Kristiyan Nikolov (Co-Founder & CTO), Kalin Stoev (Co-Founder & Head of Engineering) and Nikolay Kolibarov (Co-Founder & Head of AI), have since launched v2 across the EU and USA, hit their first 1,000 users, and joined the AWS startup credits programme. The founding team is based between Sofia and Miami, and they're building in reality what we've seen only in movies up until now.

RadiometriCa — AI Meets Medical Imaging

RadiometriCa is an AI-driven radiomics initiative working at the intersection of medical imaging, research, and innovation. What makes radiomics interesting is the premise: AI can extract far more information from a medical image than the human eye alone — information that may be crucial for early diagnosis, treatment decisions, and research outcomes.

RadiometriCa is building that capability through genuine multidisciplinary collaboration, bringing together clinicians, researchers, and technology professionals. Vesela Asparuhova, Healthcare AI & Radiomics Innovation Lead, was on stage representing the initiative and she made a compelling case for why this sits at exactly the right intersection of deep tech and real clinical impact. It's the kind of work that takes time to get right, but matters enormously when it does. 

4A — The Web, Treated as an API 

The product is a web scraping API with smart proxy rotation, anti-bot resilience and real-time monitoring built in. One API call, any website, no manual maintenance. But what makes 4A interesting isn't just what it does today, it's who it's being built for next.

The fastest-growing customer segment in web scraping right now isn't eCommerce companies or market researchers. It's AI agent developers. Agents need data on demand, from pages they've never visited before, in formats they've never seen and they don't debug HTTP errors when something breaks. That means the infrastructure underneath needs to be fast, universal and bulletproof. That's exactly the gap 4A is filling.

The team behind it: Chavdar Kopoev and Angel Hadjiev are building from Bulgaria, and if Demo Nights is where they chose to show up first, the ecosystem should be paying attention. 👀

Why We Showed Up as Ecosystem Partners

This isn't the first time we've put our weight behind something that brings the ecosystem together and it won't be the last.

Barter and Puzl are home to a growing stack of recurring initiatives built by and for our community. Anonymous AI-coholics, Morning UX Roundtable, Puzl Soft Skills Academy, Pathwise Academy and many many more. 

These aren't side events. They're the texture of a community that takes itself seriously.

Partnering with How to Web for Demo Nights was the same instinct: you show up for the builders, consistently, before it's easy. Strong ecosystems aren't built at the big annual conference. They're built through repeated exposure to ideas, feedback and people willing to challenge each other. 

The winning team earns three startup tickets to How to Web Conference 2026, a free half-day booth at the conference, and fast-track access to Spotlight 2026. Not bad, right? But we all know the truth: the connections made in that room after the demos are the real price .

See You in Bucharest 🧡

The How to Web Conference is happening October 6–8 in Bucharest. If you're a founder, investor, or just someone who wants a sharper read on where tech in Eastern Europe is heading — it's worth the trip.

And if you're building something and want a home base in the ecosystem: you know where to find us. 

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