28 MAY 2026 – IMPETUS Capital managing partner Viktor Manev was among the featured speakers at the TGS EMEA annual meeting in Sofia, setting out the firm’s cross-over investment approach to a room of senior accounting, tax and advisory professionals from across the region and beyond. TGS is a global network of independent accounting and advisory firms, and Sofia hosted this year’s regional gathering.
In a session attendees singled out as a highlight, Manev traced the journey behind IMPETUS’s flagship holding, Shelly Group (formerly Allterco). First backed by the firm in 2015, the Bulgarian technology company listed in Sofia, dual-listed in Frankfurt, and this year joined Germany’s SDAX index – becoming Central and Eastern Europe’s first publicly traded unicorn. Manev framed the arc around what IMPETUS calls building champions in the capital markets: entrepreneurial vision paired with disciplined, staged financing and international scaling, achieved without the backing of a bulge-bracket investment bank.
The reception was pointed. Andreas Kratzer, a German corporate-finance advisor and certified auditor, said Manev impressed him more than any other speaker, describing a transformation built on real entrepreneurship, clear decision-making and years of consistent execution rather than financial-engineering glamour.
Builders will always be more impressive than talkers.
– Andreas Kratzer, corporate-finance advisor & certified auditor
In his own account of the meeting, TGS’s Andrew Menzies likewise highlighted Manev’s session, noting how it showed a family business from Bulgaria becoming a listed international player.
For IMPETUS, the response is another marker of growing international interest in Emerging Europe’s private-to-public story – the case that public markets can be a repeatable growth engine for the region’s scale-ups, not merely an exit. The TGS network next convenes for its global conference in Paris in November.
