Publish date: 22 January, 2024At the beginning of 2024 we take stock of the past year and analyze which are the new companies for the Bulgarian IT market. The data used is from H512.com’s Job Board as of the beginning of January 2024, and includes the companies that have opened an office in Bulgaria in 2023, sizzling with a career profile on H512.com.
A total of 25 new Bulgarian and foreign companies have entered Bulgaria in the economically and politically challenging year of 2023. The global crisis processes are also having their impact on the Bulgarian IT sector, which is particularly visible in the entry and creation of new players – compared to previous years, the number of newly established companies is decreasing.
Activity
The majority of all new companies (52%) have mixed activities – product, service, software systems implementation and/or IT consulting at the same time. 36% are strictly product companies, 10% are pure service, and the rest have indicated only software systems implementation as their main activity. Compared to the previous year, the dynamics of the predominance of product companies over those with other types of activity is maintained.
Bulgarian vs. foreign companies
60% of the new companies for our IT sector are foreign (headquartered outside Bulgaria) and the remaining 40% are Bulgarian.
the “oldest” of the new IT players on the Bulgarian market is the English Mach5 Technology, established in 1995 in London, which last year opened an office in Sofia. The most recently established are the English Years with its core business – a revolution in pet nutrition and the Romanian DreamGF with their innovative project in AI Girlfriend technology to generate the perfect mate through artificial intelligence.
Among the largest global companies new to the country for 2023 are US-based RingCentral, which has over 8,000 employees across all its offices, and Orion Innovation with 7,000 employees globally. The next global giants entering the country during the year are SOFTSWISS (Belarus), a company specialising in iGaming software and the first online gambling software company to start working with cryptocurrencies. Last but not least is Mach5 Technology (UK) with a core business of providing data, training and certifications for B2B and B2C clients in a variety of industries.
The Bulgarian new players are also making a bid for serious activity in the coming years. The joint venture between Bulgarian company CleverPine and international group Lufthansa Technik – ViTech Development, established in 2023 with an office in Sofia and core business in software solutions for aviation, also has the largest IT department among Bulgarian new companies.
The Pavel Andreev Charitable Foundation, with its core business of creating crowdfunding software (SaaS) and organizing charity campaigns, has opened an office in Varna.
The Plovdiv-based WebThree is engaged in development and consulting in the field of blockchain and DLT. The innovators from Zimoti are aiming to make the Bulgarian real estate market a more transparent and easy-to-navigate place with their platform for buying, selling and renting. Bulgarian DENSHI, develops core business development and implementation of specialized software for different economic sectors.
Sofia
HybridDistribution by city
The largest number of newly opened locations is in Sofia – 18 offices, while in other major IT destinations the number of offices is significantly smaller – 2 offices have been opened in Plovdiv, 3 in Varna and 1 in Burgas. The trend of concentration of newly opened offices mainly in the capital and large cities is maintained.
Size of companies*
*H512.com’s Job board divides companies according to the number of employees in their IT departments into: micro (less than 10 IT employees), small (10-30 IT employees), medium (31-70 IT employees) and large (70 IT employees).
Micro companies are the most numerous among new IT companies in the country (60%), small companies make up 32% of the total, and the remaining 8% are the big players. This kind of distribution is already traditional for the Bulgarian IT market and 2023 is no different from the previous 3 years.
Open positions
New companies entering the country in 2023 have a total of 37 open positions on H512.com’s Job Board to date. RingCentral, one of the world’s leading providers of cloud-based business communications solutions, is the leader in the number of open positions in a variety of fields. Their IT team in the country numbers about 120 people, and the company is actively looking for new employees. ViTech Development and Mach5 Technology are the next most advertised companies.
The past year has not been easy economically both globally and in our country. We witnessed the entry of global companies into the Bulgarian IT sphere, head-turning investments in Bulgarian companies, deals happened that moved the layers of the market in 2023, and what 2024 will bring for the development of the sector and the companies in it – we are yet to follow.
