Success Stories from Sofia and Sofia’s business environment
Sofia-based startup for unmanned cargo drones Dronamics has announced the first of several strategic partnerships aimed at international expansion in delivering shipments with Black Swan drones. Dronamics is partnering with the German logistics company Hellmann Worldwide Logistics. It will start delivering on the territory of continental Europe, where the regulatory environment allows operations throughout the European Union. The aim is to achieve faster deliveries at a competitive price, including short distances and the transfer of goods, which does not depend on long supply chains and the problems of potential blocking of shipments. The Sofia-based company’s big goal is to become the first to receive an operating permit for international drones throughout Europe. Days after announcing the partnership with Hellmann, Dronamics also announced they had signed a contract with a fourth airport in Germany – Bodensee-Airport Friedrichshafen (IATA: FDH). Thus, through the drone ports in these four airports, the startup can deliver shipments weighing up to 350 kg. to 14 million people at locations within 1 hour away of these destinations.
The Transpress transport and logistics company begins the construction of a new logistics center in the Sofia-Bozhurishte Industrial Park with an investment of BGN 10 million. The building is expected to be operational in 2022 and create 100 new jobs. The base will be 40 decares and will have a platform for handling goods, a zone for distribution of goods and supplies, 60 pumps, and an office area. The warehouse will be equipped with the latest generation of highly efficient and “green” lifting machines. Following the trends for transport development, charging power plants will be built, the company announced. The new center will perform transport and logistics activities for clients in the country and for international forwarding.
A year and a half after entering Sofia, the German Commerzbank doubled the team in its technology center and is now looking for another 150 specialists with Java, React, ABAP, others, business analysts, a team manager, and HR specialists, among others. Commerzbank is a leading international commercial bank with services for small, medium, and corporate clients. The experts here are responsible for digitalizing the entire banking structure of Commerzbank and for the development of applications for complete digitalization of the business processes for servicing the bank’s millions of customers.
In Bulgaria, the company is positioned not as a banking institution but as a technology company, and Sofia is its engineering center. A year ago, the company announced that it was renting over 3,500 square meters of office space in the Advance Business Center II building in Business Park Sofia, where it would house its team and expand its IT hub in our capital.
DIGITALL is the new company’s name formed after the merger of the Bulgarian technology company BULPROS and the German-based ec4u in March. In their official announcements, the long-standing partners with already merged businesses announced that the company now has 1,400 employees in 25 offices in 11 countries worldwide. Their teams work across the full range of cloud solutions for cybersecurity, migration, and managed services for critical business processes in the areas of marketing, sales, service, and e-commerce. Bulpros in Sofia has been part of the Bulgarian technology sector for over ten years. It has entered prestigious rankings several times for the fastest growing companies in the region and Europe – in Deloitte’s “Technology Fast 50 in CE”, in FT 1000 Europe’s Financial Times, and in a report by the international consulting company McKinsey & Company.
The Discoverer supercomputer in Sofia Tech Park took 91st place in the world’s The supercomputer in Sofia Tech Park Discoverer took 91st place in the world’s TOP 500 most powerful computers. In the tests, the machine exceeded the planned production power of 4.44 petaflops and reached 4,518.9 petaflops, and the reported peak performance reached 6,006.37 petaflops, at a preliminary set performance of 6 petaflops. Following the results, the management of the technology park submitted the documents necessary for the supercomputer’s inclusion in the ranking. The most powerful computer is in Japan, and the next two most powerful systems are located in the United States. You can see the full ranking here, and read more about the supercomputer in Sofia on Sofia Tech Park’s website here.
