Ivan Livić is the co-founder of VendueTech and the brain behind Bidsale.ai®, a platform that brings Europe’s distressed real estate auction data into one place. After more than a decade building startups across Southeast Asia, he relocated to Zagreb and became part of BIRD Incubator in 2023–2024. Today, he and the team are live in beta and building toward becoming the go-to data platform for banks, funds, and investors across the EU.
1. What’s the name of your company? What problem are you solving, and what’s your long-term vision?
Our platform is Bidsale.ai®, built by VendueTech.
Europe has roughly 300,000 distressed and judicial real estate auctions every year, spread across more than 40 jurisdictions. The challenge is that this data comes from an enormous range of institutions: commercial courts, bankruptcy courts, banks, municipalities, public notaries, each with its own language, format, and legal process. For a bank offloading non-performing loans, a fund hunting for assets, or an insolvency practitioner, that data is almost impossible to see in one place. Today, people stitch it together manually, source by source.
We aggregate and structure all of it into a single platform; think of it as the Bloomberg Terminal for European distressed real estate. Our pilot is already live at beta.bidsale.eu. Long term, our vision is to be the default data infrastructure layer the whole sector runs on: the place banks, NPL servicers, funds, and family offices go to find, value, and act on distressed assets across the EU.
2. You’ve hit some impressive milestones! Can you share how much funding you’ve raised, the size of your team, and what’s on the horizon?
We’ve built a strong non-dilutive foundation before going for our big equity raise. We hold a Horizon Europe Seal of Excellence, an active Eurostars grant that scored 90.7% across three Eureka panels with co-financing confirmed through HAMAG-BICRO, and a €700K DIGIT project backed by the Croatian Ministry of Science.
On the product side, our pilot serves two sides of the market: beta.bidsale.eu for retail and institutional investors looking for opportunities in public real estate auctions, and beta.bidsale.eu/partners for Bidsale® Partners managing their own client base and properties, the layer that lets the platform scale through our partner network.
The team is two full-time staff in Zagreb, working alongside a dozen-plus international contractors across product, data, engineering, and BD. On the horizon, we’re submitting to the EIC Accelerator in July, a €2.5M request to fund the next stage of scaling our data pipeline and AI stack across all 40+ markets.
3. Every startup has a defining moment. What’s one challenge or turning point that fundamentally shifted your direction?
For a long stretch, we funded R&D out of our own pockets, which is a precarious way to build something this ambitious. The Eurostars grant was the real turning point, our first external funding, and the first time we had genuine stability. It validated that someone beyond us believed in the science.
What came next was equally important. Getting the Seal of Excellence but no funding, purely because the call was oversubscribed, could have felt like a dead end. Instead, it confirmed our work had been validated at the EU level and pushed us to take the same thesis to the EIC Accelerator, where the ambition and ticket size actually match what we’re building. It reframed a “no” as proof we were ready for a bigger stage.
4. How has BIRD Incubator shaped your journey? What’s been the most valuable part?
The timing mattered as much as anything. We’d just moved the company from Singapore back to Zagreb after more than a decade in Southeast Asia, which meant starting almost from zero on the ground here. BIRD gave us a real home base from day one: office space when we needed somewhere to actually build, and introductions into the local startup and institutional ecosystem that would have taken months to make cold. Landing in a new market is a soft cost most people underestimate. BIRD absorbed a lot of that friction, so we could focus on the product.
5. What’s one insight or mindset shift that’s been most critical to getting where you are?
After bootstrapping five startups across Southeast Asia, the USA, and Europe, the biggest shift was learning to build something genuinely defensible rather than just fast. In a market like distressed real estate data, the moat isn’t speed or features that anyone can copy. It’s the hard, compounding work of structuring data nobody else wants to touch, and protecting the IP around how you do it. Patience on the hard problem beats cleverness on the easy one.
6. Where do you see the company in 3–5 years?
In three to five years, Bidsale.ai® is the default data infrastructure layer for European distressed real estate, which institutional players check before any acquisition or disposal decision. That means full, reliable coverage across all 40+ EU markets, our neuro-symbolic AI patents granted and in production, and a customer base spanning major banks, NPL servicers, and funds. A big part of getting there is growing our Bidsale® Partner network, which lets the platform scale beyond what we could reach alone, opening the door to international users who want to participate in public real estate auctions across borders. The path is clear: grow the partner network, deepen coverage country by country, close the EIC round, and turn our data advantage into analytics products our customers can’t run their business without.
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