However, slowly but surely, the South East Europe region has been catching up. In 2018, the robotics start-up UiPath became Romania’s first unicorn. In 2020, Croatia gave another unicorn to the region with InfoBip, a company offering a messaging platform to institutions such as banks and mobile operators. This year, Romania got its second unicorn with Elrond, a blockchain start-up. Slovenia has also joined the unicorn club in the shape of Outfit 7, the game studio behind the popular My Talking Tom series of kid-friendly mobile games, which was acquired for one billion US dollars by a Chinese tech company. “South East Europe is now receiving the recognition it deserves on the global tech stage. The likes of Bolt and UiPath are examples of very successful, innovative companies which are putting the region in the spotlight. This is also helped by regional investment going from strength to strength – in 2020 private equity investment in Central and Eastern Europe rose by 15 per cent, breaking the five-year average by 46 per cent,” explains Russ Shaw, founder of Tech London Advocates and Global Tech Advocates.