Media startup ecosystem
We track 41 organisations in this sector across 6+ countries.
Showing 21–40 of 41Media
Countries in this sector
Sectors alongside this one
Media results
OMR Festival 2026
One of Europe's largest digital marketing and technology festivals, attracting 70,000+ attendees to Hamburg Messe. Features masterclasses, expo stages, and side events covering MarTech, creator economy, D2C, and AI-powered marketing tools.
OMR Festival 2027
OMR27 is confirmed for 3-5 May 2027 in Hamburg, with Super Early Bird tickets already on sale. One of Europe's largest digital marketing and technology festivals, it draws 70,000+ attendees to Hamburg Messe for MarTech, creator economy, D2C, and AI-powered marketing content.
OneFootball
Berlin-based football media and technology platform founded in 2008, offering live scores, news, stats and streaming (OneFootball TV) across 200+ leagues to a global audience.
Pepermint
Pepermint d.o.o. is the Zagreb company behind Weekend Media Festival, the largest gathering of the communications, media, marketing and technology industries in Southeast Europe, which reached its 19th edition in 2026. The festival draws several thousand delegates to Rovinj each September for panels, workshops and networking across advertising, media, digital business and startups. Pepermint is registered at Republike Austrije 27 in Zagreb.
Podimo
Podimo is a Copenhagen founded subscription platform for podcasts and audiobooks, focused on local language content and creator revenue sharing. Launched in 2019, the company built exclusive catalogs in markets such as Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, and later expanded to Latin America. Podimo uses a subscription model that pays creators based on listen time, giving podcasters an alternative to advertising. The company has raised significant funding to scale its content studio and international footprint.
ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4
ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 is Austria's leading commercial broadcaster and digital entertainment group, operating channels including PULS 4, PULS 24, and ATV. The company founded the 4GAMECHANGERS Festival in 2016 as its flagship social responsibility initiative, bringing together entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and innovators at Vienna's Marx Halle. ORF joined as co-organizer in 2022. In 2026, ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 organized the 4GAMECHANGERS AI-Day focused on practical AI adoption in media production.
Quivertree Media
Andorran inflight entertainment and advertising company based at Santa Coloma in the parish of Andorra la Vella. It provides end-to-end IFE and content service provider work along with advertising for airlines, delivering onboard entertainment and premium campaigns to millions of passengers, and appears on the national map of innovative companies.
Rafał Plutecki
A pioneer of Poland’s dot-com era (founder of Internet Technologies and former head of Google Campus Warsaw), Rafał has a long angel track record. He invested in one of the first Polish unicorns Milestone Systems and supported fintech and media startups. His approach blends early internet industry wisdom with a vast network of contacts. Associated startups: Past investments include travel startup iTaxi and others; as ex-Campus Warsaw head he advised countless startups.
Respeecher
Overview: Respeecher is a cutting-edge AI voice synthesis startup that enables one person's voice to be transformed into the voice of another specific person, with uncanny realism. In other words, it's known for its voice cloning technology. Respeecher's system takes in an actor or user's speech and outputs audio that sounds like a target voice - be it a famous actor, a historical figure, or anyone for whom it has trained a model. This technology has huge applications in entertainment: filmmakers can revive voices of actors from years past, game developers can have characters speak in iconic voices, and creators can produce content where, say, a celebrity appears to narrate (with permission). What makes Respeecher stand out is the high fidelity of the cloned voices - they are nearly indistinguishable from the real person, capturing emotion and intonation accurately. Respeecher provides its tech via a software interface; typically, a voice model is trained on recordings of the target voice, and then a voice actor provides performance which is converted. Importantly, Respeecher emphasizes ethical use: it requires consent from the voice owners and has gained a reputation for an "ethics-first" approach in the emerging synthetic media field. Founding Story (2018): Respeecher was founded in February 2018 in Kyiv, Ukraine by Alex Serdiuk, Dmytro Bielievtsov, and Grant Reaber. Serdiuk and Bielievtsov are Ukrainian, and Reaber is an American speech technologist - the trio met through mutual research interests in speech processing. They realized that recent advances in deep learning could make high-quality voice conversion possible, and they set out to create a system far beyond the rudimentary voice changers of the past. In 2018-2019, they went through the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Accelerator (powered by Techstars) in the US, which gave them industry connections. Early on, Respeecher got a lucky break: it was approached to work on a high-profile but secret project - which turned out to be Lucasfilm's The Mandalorian (Season 2 finale in 2020). The task was to recreate the voice of a young Luke Skywalker as he would have sounded in the 1980s, using Mark Hamill's old recordings. Respeecher delivered successfully, astonishing Hollywood sound engineers. This successful debut put Respeecher on the map in the film industry. In subsequent months, they also worked on a Super Bowl commercial voicing Vince Lombardi (AI-cloned from archival audio). The Ukrainian team, working under NDA, built these groundbreaking demos which then led to word-of-mouth referrals in Hollywood. Product and Use Cases: Respeecher's core product is delivered as a service to content creators. A client provides audio of the target voice (e.g., recordings of a person) and Respeecher trains a custom voice model. Then the client (often a voice actor or the person themselves) provides the new dialogue, which Respeecher's system converts into the target's voice. One notable use case was the documentary short film "In Event of Moon Disaster" - Respeecher recreated President Nixon's voice to simulate him reading a speech that was written in case Apollo 11 failed, and this project won an Emmy Award in 2021 for Outstanding Interactive Media (Respeecher's team was credited for the voice work). Another big use case: Darth Vader's voice in 2022's Obi-Wan Kenobi series - James Earl Jones, aged 91, could no longer perform with the same power, so Lucasfilm used Respeecher to generate Vader's lines using Jones' archival voice data. This was done with Jones's consent (he effectively authorized the AI recreation of his iconic voice). The result was so good that audiences thought Jones had recorded the lines himself. Outside of film/TV, Respeecher has been used in video games (e.g., to recreate voices of deceased voice actors so characters can return), and in music - in 2022, it enabled artist Aloe Blacc to perform a song where his voice was converted to sound like the late Avicii's voice, as a tribute. Researchers and archivists have also shown interest in using it to restore voices for people who lost theirs (like throat cancer patients), although that's still experimental. Traction and Achievements: Though a B2B company, Respeecher gained public fame because of the high-profile nature of its projects. By 2022, virtually every Star Wars fan and many industry professionals had heard of Respeecher due to media coverage of its involvement in resurrecting Luke Skywalker's youthful voice and Darth Vader's classic tones. The company has a relatively small number of clients (dozens of studios, game companies, etc.), but each project is high value. Its technology earned it an Engineering Emmy Award in 2021, and it won TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield (audience choice) at CES in 2020. In terms of funding, Respeecher raised about $1.5M in early 2020 (around the Techstars time), and as of 2021 it had raised over $3M in total from investors including Techstars, ff Venture Capital, and Acrobator Ventures. The team remained fairly lean (under 50 people) but comprised specialized AI researchers and sound engineers. Financially, Respeecher's revenue grew with each Hollywood contract; while not public, one can infer that by 2022 it was profitable or close, given the repeat work from Disney/Lucasfilm and others. One of Respeecher's achievements is also on the ethical front: in 2023 it was one of ten companies (alongside OpenAI and TikTok) to sign the Partnership on AI's framework for responsible media, committing to practices like obtaining consent, watermarking AI content, etc. This proactive stance has made them a trusted partner in an area often seen with suspicion (deepfakes). The war in Ukraine did pose a challenge - much of Respeecher's team was Kyiv-based, and during the Russian invasion in Feb 2022, the team amazingly continued working (the Obi-Wan Kenobi Vader voice project was completed in the spring of 2022 while Kyiv was under threat). This dedication further earned them respect in the industry. Key Partnerships: Respeecher's notable partnerships are with major studios like Disney/Lucasfilm, and with game studios such as CD Projekt Red (who used Respeecher in 2023 to voice a character in Cyberpunk 2077 in Polish, whose original actor had passed away). It also collaborated with the creative team of the documentary "Val" to recreate actor Val Kilmer's voice, which he lost due to cancer (Kilmer and his son provided the training data). Each successful partnership validates the tech and leads to more clients. On the academic side, Respeecher worked with medical research to explore giving people who lost their voice (e.g., ALS patients) a chance to speak in their own reconstructed voice - a heartwarming application of the tech. Future Outlook: Respeecher sits at the forefront of AI in media. The demand for voice cloning is likely to increase - whether to dubbing movies in a star's own voice across languages, bringing historical figures' voices to life for museums, or personal uses (with permission, someone might license their voice). The company's focus will be to maintain quality leadership as big players (like Microsoft or Google) also invest in voice AI. Respeecher's Ukrainian origin is a source of pride: it shows that despite adversity, Ukrainian tech can lead globally in innovation. The founders have expressed interest in eventually developing real-time voice conversion (currently it's not instant, it takes some processing time) and making the tech more accessible perhaps in creator tools. But they tread carefully to avoid misuse. In summary, Respeecher is a Ukrainian deep-tech startup that achieved what was once sci-fi - lending voices across time and space - and has done so responsibly. By powering some of Hollywood's most iconic moments with AI, it has cemented itself as a trailblazer in synthetic audio. As long as movies and games want to push creative boundaries, Respeecher's technology will likely be in the credits, helping the impossible become possible in voice. Sources: en.wikipedia.org, failory.com, techcrunch.com, youtube.com.
Restream
Restream is a Ukrainian-founded live-streaming platform that lets creators, brands, and event organizers broadcast a single video feed simultaneously to more than thirty destinations — YouTube, Twitch, Facebook Live, LinkedIn Live, X, and dozens of others — while managing a unified chat, analytics, and recording layer across all of them. Founded in 2015 by Alexander Khuda and Andrii Surzhynskyi, the product removed one of the most painful operational blockers for independent broadcasters (having to pick a single platform at the expense of every other audience) and became a go-to tool for podcasters, gamers, educators, and B2B marketers running webinars at scale. Restream raised venture funding from Insight Partners and others, and relocated its commercial operations to Texas while keeping engineering in Kyiv. It is one of the most globally adopted pieces of creator-economy infrastructure to come out of Ukraine.
Reworks Agora 2026
Athens-based music-tech and creative-economy conference running alongside the Reworks Festival, with a dedicated business program covering music streaming, rights tech, AI in music production, and live-entertainment platforms. 2,000+ attendees from the European music-tech scene. Tickets EUR 150-400.
Sander Görtjes
Co-founder and CEO of HELLO Labs, a Web3 entertainment and media company, and a confirmed speaker at Web3 Warsaw 2026. Develops blockchain-based interactive media and content platforms.
SBC Events
SBC Events (Sports Betting Community) is a leading organiser of international conferences and exhibitions for the sports betting and gaming industries, founded by Rasmus Sojmark in 2009 and headquartered in London. The company runs flagship events including SBC Summit Barcelona, SBC Summit Malta, SBC Summit Tbilisi, and events across the Americas and Asia, bringing together senior executives from betting, gaming, affiliates, technology, and sports media. SBC also operates media channels and advisory services, making it one of the most prominent event and media companies in the global iGaming sector.
Steel Media
Steel Media Ltd is a Bath-based games-industry media and events company, part of Enthusiast Gaming, that publishes PocketGamer.biz and runs the Pocket Gamer Connects conference series. PGC events gather mobile and games developers, publishers, platform holders and investors in cities including Helsinki, Barcelona, Malmo, London and Toronto, each pairing a multi-track conference with a dealmaking floor and an indie showcase.
Stefan Kollinger
Stefan Kollinger is Chief Innovation Officer at ORF, Austria's public broadcasting corporation, where he leads innovation strategy and digital technology initiatives. He is a key executive responsible for driving ORF's transformation in the face of streaming competition and AI disruption. He participated as a speaker at the 4GAMECHANGERS AI-Day 2026, representing ORF's perspective on practical AI adoption within public media workflows.
Steven Bartlett
British entrepreneur, investor and author. He founded social-media marketing firm Social Chain in 2014 and later co-founded Flightstory, a media and investment company. He hosts The Diary of a CEO, one of the world's most listened-to business podcasts, and is an investor on the BBC's Dragons' Den.
SXSW London 2026
Inaugural European SXSW edition across Shoreditch and East London, mixing startup pitches with tech, music, and interactive media programming. Strong fit for media-tech, AR/VR, and consumer innovation teams.
Synthesia
Synthesia is a London-based AI video generation platform founded in 2017 by Victor Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild, and a team of AI researchers from University College London and TU Munich. The platform allows users to create professional-quality videos from text prompts using photorealistic AI avatars that speak in over 140 languages, eliminating the need for cameras, actors, or studios. Synthesia has raised over $150 million from investors including Accel, NVIDIA, and Kleiner Perkins, reaching a valuation above $2 billion. It serves over 50,000 enterprise customers including Amazon, Tiffany, and Reuters. Synthesia is one of Europe's most successful AI-native media companies.
Unsquare Studio
Multimedia production facility in central Andorra la Vella spanning more than 1,500 square metres and able to hold up to 200 people. It handles event coverage, live streaming, podcast production and audio engineering, and operates a twelve by four metre high-resolution LED screen along with what it describes as Andorra s first chroma key studio for photorealistic virtual environments.
Vertis Ventures
Founded in 2007, Vertis Ventures (formerly Vertis SGR) is a Naples-based VC bridging northern and southern Italy, managing over EUR 200M across early-stage and growth funds. The firm invests EUR 0.5-10M in media, fintech, and industrial tech, with a mandate to support innovation in Italy's Mezzogiorno region. Portfolio includes Buzzoole (influencer marketing), Optima Italia, and Mosaicoon. Vertis is notable for its focus on developing venture capital culture in southern Italy while maintaining national deal flow.
