Building Elevon: A Founder’s Story About Building a Million-Euro Startup From a Simple Realisation

By Martin Horváth, Founder & CEO, Elevon.io

The Beginning That Didn’t Feel Like a Beginning

When I think about how Elevon began, it still surprises me how quietly the idea took shape. There was no dramatic moment that pushed me out of a corporate role and into entrepreneurship. No lightning-bolt clarity or sleepless night full of visions. The truth is much simpler: Elevon emerged slowly from years of seeing how work was being done inside large corporations, and how much potential was being lost every single day.

My career exposed me to environments full of smart and disciplined people. But over time, I began to notice a pattern that repeated itself almost everywhere I went. People weren't limited by their skills. They were limited by the system around them. Not because they didn’t work hard, but because their days were filled with tasks that seemed designed to drain the very energy needed for meaningful work. The more responsibility I held, the more I realised how deeply this affected entire organisations.

What We Saw Inside Corporations

When I started discussing these observations with Lukáš Stašák and Martin Kadlec, who later became my co-founders, it was immediately clear that the three of us were looking at the same problem from different angles.

Lukáš had seen engineers in companies spending more time navigating complicated internal tools than actually building technology. He once told me:

“The more systems we added, the slower everything got. We were solving problems by creating new ones.”

Martin, described something just as striking:

“Analysts were preparing data for meetings all week. By the time the meeting happened, half of the work was already outdated.”

These weren’t occasional frustrations. They were symptoms of a structural issue. Corporate environments had accumulated so many tools, processes and reporting cycles that people spent more time coordinating than creating.

And digital transformation, in its traditional form, wasn’t fixing the problem.It was making it more complicated.

The Moment We Decided to Build Something Ourselves

Our decision to build Elevon was not driven by the fantasy of a startup. It came from a sense of responsibility.

We saw clearly that AI would only make sense in corporations if it truly worked where the work happens - inside Jira, Confluence, email, reporting tools, documents, legacy systems, cross-department workflows and the operational core of the enterprise.

We never discussed building a chatbot or an interface.We discussed building something that acts, decides and coordinates.

Something that behaves like a reliable team member.Something that understands context.Something that removes the administrative burden that chips away at the margins of corporate productivity.

That idea became the foundation of Elevon.

The Early Months: Shaped by Discipline, Not Hype

Those first months were perhaps the most demanding and formative period in my professional life. There were no investors waiting for updates. There were no articles being written about us.There was no audience.

There was only work.

We were building a platform that had to function inside one of the toughest environments on the planet: the corporate enterprise infrastructure. Banks, telcos, insurers. Places where nothing is allowed to fail and everything is audited.

Because of that, we spent months rewriting and restructuring core features. Integrations that looked simple on paper turned out to be far more complex. Some workflows took weeks longer than expected. We had deals that fell through and long stretches where managing cashflow was an almost daily exercise.

But each challenge taught us something important. It taught us discipline. It taught us patience. It taught us to rely on one another with complete trust.

I have always believed that you do not understand your co-founders when things are easy. You understand them when things go wrong. And in those tough moments, Lukáš and Martin both demonstrated a stability and clarity that shaped the whole DNA of our company.

The First Signs That Elevon Really Mattered

One memory stays with me vividly.We were demonstrating an early version of our AI Agents to a corporate team. These agents logged directly into the company’s tools, analysed tasks, drafted summaries, validated data, prepared cross-team updates and coordinated the next steps.

Nothing about it looked like a typical AI demo.There were no fancy animations.No marketing phrases.Just work getting done.

And when it was over, the room went quiet in a way that felt different. Eventually, someone said:

“This isn’t another tool. This is the colleague we always needed.”

That sentence was the moment I understood that Elevon could scale beyond anything we originally imagined. It wasn’t a local problem we were solving. It was a global one.

Becoming a Million-Euro Startup

Today, Elevon has become a million-euro startup, but I view that milestone with calm rather than celebration. It does not make us special. It does not change our behaviour. It simply confirms that the years of quiet work were worth the effort.

Most importantly, it validates the belief we had from the beginning: corporations do not need more tools - they need an intelligence layer that connects everything they already have.

This milestone is a foundation. Not a finish line.

It signals that organisations trust us.And it gives us responsibility to scale thoughtfully and globally.

Why Our Vision Is Global

Slovakia is our home. But Elevon has never been a Slovak product. It was built for the world. The problems we address exist in corporate environments from Munich to Singapore, from Dubai to Toronto. Every enterprise eventually runs into the same structural barrier: tool fragmentation, inconsistent processes, information asymmetry and slow decision pathways.

Our platform was built for corporations. For teams of hundreds or thousands. For environments where reliability is not negotiable. It is designed to operate inside the real constraints of enterprise infrastructure – security, compliance, legacy systems, strict auditability and controlled data flows. Elevon is not an experimental tool. It is an enterprise-ready partner trusted to run critical workflows, adapt to regulated conditions and deliver consistent, dependable performance at scale.

Europe, especially, is ready for this shift. European companies value structure and responsibility. They need AI that is dependable, explainable and deeply integrated into existing workflows.

We see Elevon’s mission as global because the future of enterprise work is global.

What I Believe Now

If this journey has taught me anything, it is this:

The next evolution of work will not be driven by automation, but by autonomy.

People shouldn’t spend their days maintaining systems. They should spend their days doing what only people can do: thinking, deciding, creating, improving.

AI should not overwhelm.It should relieve.

It should return time. It should restore clarity. It should make work meaningful again.

This is what Elevon exists to build: a new layer of intelligence for the world’s corporations.

And while we have grown a lot, I know we are still at the beginning of what we can become.

Our ambition is global.

Our foundation is discipline.

Our purpose is to build AI that supports people in meaningful, productive and intelligent ways – so they can focus on the work that truly requires them.

Martin HorváthFounder & CEO, Elevon.io