Once, they each had a dream to change the world with IT. Now, they're working on it together. Technology and entrepreneurship fans Roman Prytkov and Tolga Varol met at the EIT Digital Master School, then jointly sowed the seeds for their startup DriveTrust during the Summer School. Before they had finished their master's, they had already raised €1.5 million in funding when their Summer School project had become an EIT Digital Innovation Activity, seeing them partnering with big European companies.
Varol’s entrepreneurial drive started in Turkey. After his bachelor’s in electronics and telecommunications engineering, he began developing the startup KitchConn in the field of portable smart home systems. “Due to economic uncertainty and political changes in 2016, at that time Turkey was too volatile for starting up.” When an ad for the EIT Digital Master School mentioning blended Innovation & Entrepreneurship education and participating universities caught his eye, he took action to switch paths and successfully enrolled in the Embedded Systems programme. He spent his first year at the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) and his final year at KTH in Sweden. “I made the right choice.”
Prytkov, who was born in Russia and raised in Germany, had also been dreaming about starting a tech company. “My love for tech is to bring new innovations to market and make people's lives better.” Hence, to him it was quite logical that after his bachelor’s in industrial engineering and management in Karlsruhe, he should enter the EIT Digital Master School programme Internet Technology & Architecture. In the first-year of his master's at the TUB, he did meet Varol occasionally, but they never really talked to each other.
