The kickoff of Frontier Fellowship brought together researchers, engineers, aspiring founders, and ecosystem experts at Turbine for an evening exploring what it takes to build a globally successful TechBio company from Budapest.

As the first of three open events leading up to Startup Hungary’s new Frontier Fellowship programme, the evening focused on making the deep tech founder journey more visible and accessible. How does someone with a scientific or technical background become a startup founder? What does it take to turn research into a venture-scale business? And how different can the paths to entrepreneurship look?

The panel brought together three of Turbine’s founders: Szabolcs Nagy (CEO), Daniel Veres (CSO), and Kristóf Szalay (CTO), alongside Ramzi Rizk, General Partner at Work In Progress Capital and founder of Project Escape Velocity. Drawing on their different backgrounds and experiences, the discussion explored the decisions, challenges, and opportunities involved in building a global TechBio company from Hungary.

A central theme was that there is no single path to becoming a founder. Turbine's founding team came from different disciplines before joining forces to build a company at the intersection of biology, technology, and artificial intelligence. Their experiences offered a perspective on how scientific expertise, technical capabilities, and entrepreneurial thinking can come together to create a venture-scale business.

Following the panel, participants joined smaller expert-led discussions, choosing between four topics: TechBio trends and the importance of the killer experiment, founding team dynamics, why talented researchers often remain in academia, and product thinking for hardware and medical technology. The latter was led by Gergő Bagaméry from Mediso Medical Imaging Systems.

These discussions created an opportunity to move beyond the founder stories and explore some of the practical questions facing researchers and engineers considering entrepreneurship. From identifying commercially promising research to building complementary teams and developing products for real-world markets, the conversations highlighted the different challenges involved in translating technical expertise into a startup.

The event also marked the beginning of a broader initiative. Frontier Fellowship is a 12-week programme launching in January 2027, designed to help researchers and engineers explore how to turn deep tech ideas into startups. Two additional open events will follow, continuing the conversation around entrepreneurship in science and technology.

Huge thanks to Szabolcs Nagy, Daniel Veres, Kristóf Szalay, and the entire Turbine team for hosting us, to Ramzi Rizk and Gergő Bagaméry for sharing their perspectives, and to everyone who joined us and contributed to the discussions.

We look forward to seeing you at the next Frontier Fellowship event!

Learn more about the programme and apply: https://frontier.startuphungary.io/

This event is part of the Frontier Fellowship program, implemented with the support of the Ministry of Science and Technology of Hungary from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund.

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