At PODIM 2026, Future 500 founder Stjepan Orešković brought a big question to our stage: how can Europe turn more of its ambitious companies into global champions? A few months later in Bled, the conversation moved from ambition to execution.
Europe does not lack talent, ideas or ambitious entrepreneurs.
The challenge is what happens next.
How do we identify companies with genuine potential to scale globally — and then connect them with the capital, markets, talent, business partners and support they need to get there?
That is the challenge behind Future 500, a European initiative created to identify, connect and help scale high-potential companies that could become the global leaders of tomorrow.
And it is a challenge closely connected to what we are building at PODIM.
From a conversation at PODIM to action in Bled
At PODIM 2026, Stjepan Orešković, founder of the Future 500 initiative, introduced the vision to the PODIM community.
The message was clear: Europe needs to get better not only at creating innovative companies, but at helping its strongest companies scale.
On 31 August, the next chapter unfolded in Bled.
Held alongside the Bled Strategic Forum, the Future 500 Forum 2026 brought together founders, investors, business leaders, policymakers and ecosystem builders around one central challenge: moving from selection to execution.
Rather than another discussion about Europe’s competitiveness gap, the forum was designed as a working session focused on what can actually be done about it.
203,000+ companies screened. 100 revealed.
One of the key moments in Bled was the first public reveal of Future 100 Slovenia — the first national implementation of the Future 500 methodology.
More than 203,000 Slovenian companies were screened, 603 scale-ups were assessed across seven weighted dimensions and 19 indicators, and 100 companies were identified.
The objective was not simply to produce another ranking of Slovenia’s biggest companies.
Future 500 describes it as a way of mapping where the capacity to scale already exists.
And Slovenia is only the beginning.
Future 500’s broader ambition is to identify and support high-potential companies across Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe and the wider EU, helping more of them develop into globally competitive leaders.
From identifying potential to helping it scale
PODIM CEO Matej Rus was also part of the work in Bled.
He joined the session “New Regions: Selection to Deployment” alongside representatives of the European Innovation Council, Silicon Gardens, UNIDO and the Three Seas Business Council.
The discussion focused on a question especially relevant for our part of Europe:
How can cross-border collaboration, industrial partnerships, access to capital and coordinated support turn the region’s most promising innovators into global champions?
For PODIM, this is not an abstract question.
It is closely connected to why we bring founders, investors, business leaders and ecosystem builders from across CEE together every year.
🔎 Discover ambitious companies early.
🤝 Connect them with the right people.
🌍 Help them go further than they could alone.
Start here. Scale from here.
Our region has no shortage of ambitious founders.
What we need is an increasingly connected ecosystem capable of supporting them through the next stages — from startup to scale-up and, for the very best, to global leadership.
No conference, investor, corporation, government or ecosystem organization can build that alone.
But together, we can create a region where great companies don’t just start. They scale. They compete. And they win globally.
That’s why we’re proud to have Future 500 as a PODIM partner — and why we’re excited to continue building this story together.
Let’s make more global success stories start here. 🔥
