Bulgaria
Sopharma
Ownership: Listed on Bulgarian Stock Exchange
Known for: Sofia-headquartered, founded 1933. Bulgaria's largest pharma group — generics, biosimilars, plus consumer health (Tabex smoking-cessation, Carsil liver-support). Bulgaria's home-grown pharma champion. Tabex (cytisine) for smoking cessation has been a quietly important Bulgarian export for decades — cheaper and arguably as effective as varenicline.
https://www.sopharma.bg
Sirma AI
Ownership: Listed on Bulgarian Stock Exchange)
Pricing: Enterprise services and platform licensing.
Known for: Sofia-headquartered, part of Sirma Group (Bulgarian software holding listed on Bulgarian Stock Exchange). Enterprise AI services — knowledge graphs, NLP for European languages, computer vision. Plus the Ontotext semantic-data platform. Bulgaria's veteran AI/knowledge-graph operator. Ontotext's GraphDB platform is one of the few European semantic-database engines with serious enterprise traction.
https://sirma.ai
Imaga
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: Enterprise services / SaaS pricing.
Known for: Sofia-based AI software engineering company. AI-driven document processing, computer vision, and enterprise NLP applications. Smaller Bulgarian AI consultancy with strong document-processing expertise. Particularly active in financial services and government.
https://imaga.bg
VMZ Sopot
Ownership: State-controlled (Bulgarian Ministry of Defence holds via Kintex / DCAF holding)
Known for: Sopot-based, founded 1936 (Vazovski Mashinostroitelni Zavodi). Major artillery-ammunition producer for NATO and partner armies. Has been operating at maximum capacity since 2022 supplying Ukraine. One of NATO's structurally important post-Soviet ammunition producers. Bulgaria's VMZ plus Czechia's Sellier & Bellot and STV Group have been quietly critical to keeping European ammunition supplies flowing.
https://www.vmz.bg
Arsenal
Ownership: Privately held since 1999 (Tanevi family)
Known for: Kazanlak-based, founded 1878. Bulgaria's oldest small-arms manufacturer — AK-47 derivatives (AR-M series), pistols, RPG-7 production, plus civilian sport firearms. Family-owned Bulgarian firearms manufacturer with serious Kalashnikov-platform manufacturing depth. Major NATO and partner exporter, including to Ukraine since 2022.
https://www.arsenal-bg.com
Telerik
Ownership: Acquired by Progress Software (US — caveat) in 2014 for $263M
Pricing: Component-suite licences $1,000-$3,000/dev/year. Enterprise tiers higher.
Known for: Sofia-founded in 2002 by Vassil Terziev, Svetozar Georgiev, Hristo Kosev and Boyko Iaramov. UI component libraries — Kendo UI (Angular/React/Vue), UI for ASP.NET/Blazor, plus reporting and testing tools. Sofia operations and engineering team remain. Bulgaria's first big tech success — Telerik components are still standard kit for ASP.NET and Angular development. American corporate parent since 2014 but Sofia engineering continues.
https://www.telerik.com
Chaos Group (V-Ray)
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: V-Ray subscriptions ~€80/month/seat for individual designers. Enterprise tiers custom.
Known for: Sofia-headquartered, founded 1997 by Vladimir Koylazov and Peter Mitev. V-Ray photorealistic 3D rendering engine — used by film studios (ILM, Weta, Framestore), architecture firms (Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid), and game studios. Merged with Italian Enscape (2022). Bulgaria's most consequential creative-software company. V-Ray has been the global architecture-visualisation standard for two decades. Sofia-engineered, Sofia-headquartered, privately held.
https://www.chaos.com
ScaleFocus
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: B2B services pricing.
Known for: Sofia-headquartered, founded 2012. Software engineering services — full-stack development, cloud, data engineering. ~1,500 engineers. Strong on European banking, healthcare, and energy customers. Sofia-based software services firm with serious Western European customer base. The European answer to the Indian IT-services majors — closer time zone, GDPR-aware by default.
https://www.scalefocus.com
