When Ominimo became Serbia’s first unicorn, pushing the company’s valuation to $1.6 billion, the greatest significance of the news was not just in the figure. For the first time, an innovative company originated in Serbia to join the club of private firms valued at over a billion dollars, providing the domestic tech sector with proof that a globally scalable product can emerge outside the largest start-up hubs.
Is Ominimo an exception, or the beginning of a new wave of companies capable of making a similar leap? Industry insiders assess that the second Serbian unicorn likely will not be a carbon copy of Ominimo, but it could emerge from a similar formula: originating from a traditional industry, driven by a deep understanding of sector-specific challenges, and powered by artificial intelligence (AI), data, and advanced models.
Are there already front-runners tipped to become Serbia’s second unicorn? There certainly are, but speculating on names is generally a thankless task.
“I won’t name companies – not because I don’t have candidates in mind, but because it would be unfair to both the founders and the readers. It places an expectation on the founders’ shoulders that doesn’t help their business in the slightest, and any name mentioned by an investor sounds like an endorsement, which it shouldn’t be,” says Zoran Vasiljev, CEO and General Partner at Forty.5 Ventures.
However, according to Vasiljev, the profile of the next unicorn can already be described quite accurately. Firstly, it likely already exists, he notes. “It’s not in a garage – it’s most likely between Series A and Series B, generating real revenue, and already operating outside Serbia.” Secondly, it is probably incorporated abroad while keeping its engineering team in Belgrade, Novi Sad, or Niš – which, after all, was also the case with Ominimo.
Vasiljev adds that, logically, it was founded by people who were already “on the inside” – either within a global corporation or in the very industry they are now targetting. In short, these are serial founders and experienced professionals on their first attempt, rather than university students. He also adds that for such a team, Serbia is definitely not a market, but a base. “The domestic market does not factor into its growth plan.”
Kosta Andrić, CEO and Partner at ICT Hub, similarly refrains from speculating on specific names for the future unicorn, noting that a company’s valuation depends on much more than product quality alone.
“I wouldn’t speculate on specific names. Unicorn status today depends on many factors that extend far beyond product quality. These include the state of the venture capital market, the speed of international expansion, and the company’s ability to pull off major investment rounds,” Andrić states.
New companies won’t necessarily invent new markets
Instead, Andrić considers the blueprint demonstrated by Ominimo to be more telling. The company did not spring from a desire to build “just another tech product”, but from a deep domain expertise in the industry it set out to transform. “Their founders didn’t start with the idea of building just any random company. They spent over a decade building careers alongside Europe’s largest insurance firms. They had a profound understanding of the industry, its processes, and its pain points, and then leveraged technology to build a significantly better solution. Hats off to them.”
It is precisely this fusion of industry expertise and technical capability that could prove crucial for the next generation of successful companies.
“The next unicorn will likely emerge from a major industry such as finance, healthcare, logistics, energy, or manufacturing. However, it won’t be defined by the industry itself, but by the fact that the founders will possess an exceptionally deep grasp of the problems they are solving and will use AI to fundamentally transform the business,” he adds.
Vasiljev shares a similar view. “When it comes to sectors, I see three main pools. AI in regulated, high-cash-flow industries like insurance, lending, logistics, and energy, where mathematics is a core advantage rather than a cosmetic add-on. Then there are developer tools and data infrastructure, as well as gaming, real-time 3D, and simulations – areas where a generation of people with experience in global products and successful exits already exists. As a wild card, I would add bioinformatics, health data, and deep-tech hardware.”
He adds that a vital ripple effect of the first unicorn could be the creation of a new generation of founders. “The second unicorn usually emerges from the ‘mafia’ of the first,” he says, hinting that people working at Ominimo today could be founding their own companies in three to four years – with the distinct advantage of already knowing what a major funding round looks like and how to break into the global market.
The idea that the biggest tech opportunities today lie in transforming traditional industries is gaining traction among investors. In Andrić’s view, AI will not primarily create entirely new sectors, but rather reinvent existing ones.
“That’s why I think we’ll see more and more companies taking on traditional sectors and using AI, data, and automation to tackle problems that have persisted for decades. That is often a far larger business opportunity than trying to invent an entirely new product category,” he says.
Ominimo didn’t digitise insurance – It shifted the unit economics
While transforming traditional industries through AI, data, and automation is currently the most promising path to building massive new tech companies, Vasiljev points to the cleverly laid foundations of Serbia’s first unicorn. “Ominimo didn’t just ‘digitise insurance’. Digitisation is cheap today, and everyone is doing it. What they did was attack the most expensive element of the business model – risk assessment and pricing. That is where money is truly made or lost in insurance,” he notes.
Vasiljev believes the winning formula combines a massive traditional industry with room for margin expansion, a team with a strong competitive edge in mathematics and data, and the company’s capability to scale rapidly through a sustainable business model and capital efficiency. “Our comparative advantage is quantitative – mathematics, physics, engineering, Olympiad generations. It’s not brand building, consumer marketing, or distribution. Categories where the superior model wins will naturally come easier to us than categories where the bigger marketing budget wins.”
Vasiljev believes traditional industries now have an opportunity to accelerate their transformation by partnering with start-ups that deeply understand their pain points, rather than spending years building tech capabilities in-house. In his assessment, the essential ingredients for success are global vision, battle-tested leadership, and a management team that already knows how to scale a company for the international market.
Building entirely new technology from scratch is theoretically a second possible route. However, while he notes the country has the talent for such ambitious projects, that model is currently slower and riskier, requiring significantly more capital and time to find product-market fit.
He views a third – and perhaps most vital – variation as one where the company isn’t merely a tech vendor to an industry, but becomes an active player within it. “Ominimo didn’t sell a tool to insurers – it entered the insurance business itself. That is vastly more difficult and requires a completely different approach to regulation and capital, but that is precisely why we talk about valuations in the billions rather than tens of millions,” Vasiljev concludes.
A unicorn shifts Serbia’s perception, but the work has only just begun
The impact of Ominimo’s success extends far beyond the company’s valuation, industry observers note. Although it is a Serbian-Hungarian firm, the contribution of its Serbian co-founders and the maturity of the local tech ecosystem that enabled the assembly of such a team form a crucial part of the story. Serbia’s first unicorn signals to international investors that world-class companies capable of global scale and massive value creation can originate here, while simultaneously raising the bar for domestic founders.
(Bloomberg Adria, 04.08.2026)