AI in finance, launching a startup, engineering talent: Croatian execs discuss

At a conference in Rovinj, Croatian founders and finance leaders spent a lot of time on one question: what AI is actually doing to finance teams, and what it’s doing to the people inside them. The answer from the panel was blunt. AI can help. It can also make people lazy if they let it do the job too well.

Luka Mijatović, co-founder and CFO of Farseer, said younger finance professionals will need real willpower if they want to climb the ladder. His point was simple: don’t let a prompt replace understanding. If you skip the basics and lean on AI for everything, that may feel efficient now, but it can stall career growth later.

Matija Kovačević, CFO at Hrvatski Telekom, said AI will change finance teams rather than replace them. His company is already using it to find “ghost payments” — payments flagged by mistakes such as a wrong reference number — and he said that work is about 90 per cent more efficient than the old human-led process. For him, the bigger shift is in data collection, with the value moving away from production and toward interpretation.

He also said AI is currently raising costs inside Hrvatski because the technology is still in an experimental phase. Over time, though, he expects it to become revenue-generating if it is deployed better. Bogdan Jelić of Comtrade System Integration took a similar line, arguing that every department has its own specialism and finance is no exception, even if AI can automate some of the routine work.

The longer view on finance in 2030 was not apocalypse, just compression. Kovačević expects smaller teams with a more analytical role, focused on checking AI-generated data rather than grinding through it. Léa Raiche-Marsden, VP of Finance at Leanspace, made a related point in her keynote: finance people can’t afford to go quiet just because they want to be liked. Her advice was to stay the objective voice in the room and build allies across the business.

The event also put a spotlight on Farseer itself. Co-founder and CEO Matija Nakić said the company’s recent $7.2m Series A, led by Aymo Ventures with SQ Capital and Apertu Capital, was “pretty easy” to raise. Farseer has now taken in more than $8m in total, has customers in 15 European countries, and is using the new money to expand across Europe and the US. It’s also lining up a free version for technical teams later in 2026.