Conference Description:

EMERGE is one of the biggest international tech conferences which annually unites the growing startups, tech talent, investors and ecosystems players from Eastern Europe, CIS countries, Baltics, Central Asia and the Balkans.


The conference has been founded by two young entrepreneurs - Margo Lazarenkova and Alina Nilsson, started in Minsk in 2018. Since then it becomes a hub of uniting great minds in tech in the region. Due to the restrictions caused by the pandemic, EMERGE 2021 will take place online. In 2020, the conference kicked off online for the first time, and it attracted over 4300 participants from more than 100 countries.


The official language is English. The conference program includes keynote talks, panel discussions, roundtables, workshops, startup pitching competitions, mentorship sessions, jobs fair and CV screening, 1-on-1 networking, matchmaking, and the like. In 2020 more than 100 mentors spent around 200 hours of mentorship sessions for startups participating in EMERGE.

Among those who spoke at EMERGE - Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper, Supermodel & angel-investor Natalya Vodianova, famous yoga teacher Eddie Stern, the former editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review Gideon Lichfield. We also had such companies as Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Nike, Sifted, Farfetch, MIT Technology Review, and Tesla (etc.) among speakers of the previous years. Among mentors and jury of our startup competition, we had Atomico, Notion Capital, The Untitled Ventures, Northzone, M12 from Microsoft, Techstars and others.

Annually we host our own startup pitching competition EMERGE CHALLENGE. The lucky winner will get €10,000 cash prize. The competition participants will be awarded within certain categories. EMERGE CHALLENGE brings the mission to connect the early-stage entrepreneurs with investors and key ecosystem players, and also help startups at their early stages to scale their products globally.

EMERGE hosts a series of seide events for startups and entrepreneurs, such as EMERGE U: ACCEPTED - a free online bootcamp for startups. About other side-events & activities please follow our webpage dedicated to startups.