It’s an annual tradition they call the “Winter Classic.” There are no corporate sponsors, no PR cameras, and no polished arenas—just cold air, a local rink, and the same childhood friends who grew up on the exact same housing estate street, keeping a lifelong connection alive with family and the local community.
But long before the winter ice, there was the summer asphalt. Growing up, they spent their days playing ball hockey on the “basketko”—a concrete neighborhood playground situated literally next to their high-rise apartment blocks. They would play late into the evenings, trading skin for concrete, running until their parents finally had to come out into the dusk to drag them home for dinner.
Today, those three kids from the neighborhood lead a highly specialized, international team running an AI-embedded tech platform. They just closed a €2.5 million seed round led by J&T Ventures, with Seed Starter ČS and Slovak Investment Holding backing their play. They are managing tens of millions of euros in technology procurement infrastructure for leading European banking groups and global Fortune 500 consulting organizations.
Along with the fresh capital, the team has announced a total rebranding from Nordics to Definic, signaling their evolution into a sophisticated global data layer. While the engineering engine scales out of Central Europe, the company is establishing its footprint directly in NYC’s Financial District (FiDi) to launch its next chapter across North America.
But if you ask the team how they got here, they won’t give you a sterile, overly polished pitch about synergy or disruption. They will tell you about a lifelong partnership built on execution, moving from a neighborhood playground to a sophisticated global AI pivot.
The Beer Delivery Dilemma and the Long, Dark Grind
“We didn’t know we were doing a startup straight away,” Robert Dečman says, with the kind of grounded honesty that defines the team’s culture. “We just wanted to do something. We wanted to build something together, as a team.”
Before any company structure was mapped or a single operational framework built, Robert spent his downtime binging the television show Silicon Valley. He wasn’t a programmer, and the show was obviously a brutal, cynical parody of how ridiculous the tech scene can be—but watching that fictional chaos unfold before they launched their own venture served as a funny, strangely therapeutic warning. It didn’t provide a business manual, but it was a great comedy check: a reminder that if you’re going to step into the tech trenches and deal with the inevitable madness of building a company, you’d better do it with a team whose chemistry is completely unbreakable.
With that mindset, the trio sat down and looked at their options. The list of potential businesses wasn’t born in a high-tech incubator. It was a list of three highly pragmatic, slightly chaotic ideas:
- Launch a local beer delivery company.
- Build a hyper-niche localized service business.
- Bridge a massive structural gap in IT procurement between CEE and the Nordics.
The beer delivery company was tempting, but the third option had teeth.
Lukáš Řezanina had just returned to Slovakia after completing university IT studies in the Czech Republic, which included intensive academic and professional stints in Finland and Sweden. It was during his time immersed in Scandinavian working models that Lukáš noticed a glaring, painful market inefficiency. Enterprises in the Nordics were desperate for top-tier software engineering talent, and CEE was overflowing with it.
But they knew exactly what they didn’t want to build. They had no interest in creating another classic HR tool, a freelance marketplace, or a body-leasing agency.
“We saw platforms like Toptal or Fiverr, and we knew that wasn’t the answer for enterprise procurement,” Lukáš Řezanina explains. “We didn’t want to trade in individual resumes or freelance contracts. We wanted a strict, company-to-company ecosystem. The goal was to connect established software vendors directly with enterprise clients—trusted organizations doing business with trusted organizations. We wanted something closer to Airbnb for software companies than another freelance marketplace.”
The friends saw the gap. Robert, drawing on his natural commercial instinct, coined the name: Nordics.
But recognizing a gap and building a bridge across it are two completely different things. What followed was an extended period of intense bootstrapping. For a long time, the trio operated with zero outside capital, grinding through the raw realities of building a business from scratch with empty pockets.
“Looking back, we were crazy,” Robert admits candidly. “Deluded, even. We had no money, no safety net, just a stubborn belief that we could force this into existence. It was extremely tough. But we just kept going.”
The Blind Chemistry of the Playground
To understand why the company survived those lean, exhausting years, you have to understand the specific psychological makeup of the team. They weren’t just tech builders; they were competitive athletes.
Lukáš had channeled his focus into elite, professional sports, rising to become the captain of the Slovak National Floorball Team. He understood deep tactical discipline, pressure management, and how to command a locker room when everything was on the line.
Robert was cut from the exact same cloth. He grew up splitting his focus between hockey and football, supplemented by high-intensity pro-gaming, grinding ranked matches in Call of Duty and FIFA. He was an aggressive, high-energy athlete who decided very early in life that losing was an unacceptable outcome. When he entered the traditional world of banking, he lasted roughly two minutes at a secure desk before pivoting to high-stakes, fast-paced operations at hyper-growth giants like Uber.
Michal Mušinka completed the core trio as the third co-founder, anchoring their early infrastructure when they had nothing else to rely on. A literal marathoner, Michal approaches the grueling daily operations of the startup world with the same relentless stamina—he’s the execution engine who will simply outlast the room, doing whatever is humanly necessary to keep the team moving forward.
In the company’s earliest months, Robert’s brother Roland Dečman also joined the journey. At a time when the company had an early product and no stable revenue, Roland played a key role in securing the team’s first customer – an important validation that their idea had a real place in the market. The company was operating entirely from its own resources and funding remained a constant challenge. By the end of 2023, Roland decided to pursue opportunities outside the company. The founders still consider his contribution to those early commercial milestones an important part of the Definic story.
That chemistry wasn’t manufactured in a team-building seminar; it was forged back on the asphalt of the “basketko”. When they played ball hockey together as kids, Robert and Lukáš shared the kind of telepathic link you only find in competitors who have spent thousands of hours in the trenches. They played with a collective tunnel vision—stringing together blind, no-look passes and seamless, instinctual combinations. They didn’t need to look up to see where the other was going; they just knew.
It sounds like a sports movie cliché, but it became their greatest enterprise asset. The early tech years threw an onslaught of dire, project-threatening situations at them—the kind of sudden, chaotic market pressures that routinely tear apart most early-stage founding teams. But because they could execute blindly as a single unit, they didn’t just survive the crises; they read each other’s moves in real time and navigated through them.
Of course, it wasn’t a frictionless fairytale. When you put two intensely competitive leaders in the same room, friction is inevitable. Robert and Lukáš hit plenty of tense, high-stakes crossroads where the pressure threatened to boil over. But because of their lifelong foundation, they always found a way to filter out the noise, cut through the ego, and come to a definitive agreement—a rare dynamic of mutual alignment, grit, and respect that both Robert and Lukáš remain deeply grateful for to this day.
The ultimate test of that playground chemistry came when the founders entered the Red Bull Urban Buly—Slovakia’s premier, notoriously grueling 3-on-3 street hockey tournament. Competing against 46 ruthless teams across the nation, the team fought their way to the regional finals, finishing as runners-up.
The validation of that grit came in waves. The company was named a Top 50 Startup at Slush Helsinki, but a massive turning point arrived when they won the Slovak Startup Awards (SASK) in 2024. That victory earned them a highly competitive trip to San Francisco—an opportunity that gave the team a much-needed strategic lift, opened their eyes to global scale, and for which they remain deeply thankful.
At the same time, the relationships that would eventually fund the next chapter were taking shape. “I first met Martin at Vodafone Nápad Roku back in 2023. Having J&T Ventures lead this round is a real reflection of the trust they’ve placed in us and what we’ve built. This raise gives us the platform to take Definic global,” says Robert Dečman.
Today, that core DNA has attracted a world-class, 15-person team. The company’s technology organization is led by CTO Martin, who helped build the product and data foundations behind the platform. Artificial intelligence and data capabilities are developed by a team led by Andrii, with specialists in AI and data infrastructure, including talent with experience from global technology companies such as Yahoo. Commercial growth is led by Ondrej, who helps build new partnerships and expand the company’s presence across European markets. Definic’s visual identity and brand are led by Marek, who helped transform Nordics into a globally ambitious brand prepared for its next phase of growth.
The geographic footprint is scaling just as fast, bridging networks across Finland and Poland to build a truly international perspective. And they aren’t stopping here; with the fresh investment capital locked down, the team is actively hiring for a range of new roles to accelerate their global roadmap.
The AI Transformation: Mastering the IT-Procurement Intersection
From day one, the founders had been preaching the same gospel to the world: IT services procurement was broken because it sat at a highly dysfunctional intersection. On one side, you have the IT teams, who care deeply about specialized domain capability, delivery depth, and modern tech stacks. On the other side, you have the procurement teams, who are tasked with risk mitigation, vendor lock-in prevention, and budget optimization.
Too often, these two internal forces speak completely different languages. Procurement teams are forced to evaluate highly complex technical engineering vendors based on keyword searches on resumes, unverified CVs, and lagging brand reputations.
The goal was simple: find vendors that already understand a client’s problem because they have solved similar challenges before. Domain expertise matters. In the long run, better alignment between project requirements and delivery experience leads to better outcomes, lower costs, and less project risk – regardless of where the vendor is located.
Then, the AI boom hit, and the world finally shifted underneath their feet. Advanced artificial intelligence didn’t just accelerate their roadmap—it made their ultimate vision entirely possible, triggering the massive, €2.5M-backed pivot to Definic.
“The industry has an Achilles’ heel: reputation lag. It takes years for a failed project to dent a big vendor’s brand, but only months to drain an enterprise’s budget. AI is raising the bar on what delivery capability actually means, and enterprises are starting to demand proof, not pitch decks,” says Robert Dečman, who leads Definic’s North American expansion.
Definic has developed its own highly sophisticated, proprietary ontology of IT systems and domain matching. It is an engineering achievement the team classifies as genuine state-of-the-art infrastructure—and they do not use that term lightly.
Instead of just acting as an external marketplace to find new agencies, Definic’s technology hooks directly into an enterprise client’s existing, fragmented internal vendor network. The AI-driven ontology maps, benchmarks, and analyzes the deep historical delivery data and past project successes of their current IT suppliers. By translating technical capability into hard procurement analytics, it instantly tells corporate teams mathematically which vendor organization in their system is best equipped for a highly specific digital transformation.
Real Metrics: How Definic Helped a Leading European Bank Streamline Procurement and Save €1.2M
The true potential of the platform is best demonstrated through results achieved in large enterprises. In a recent deployment at one of Europe’s leading banking groups, Definic helped transform the bank’s IT services procurement process. The platform improved visibility into market opportunities, increased internal transparency, and created a more competitive supplier ecosystem.
Through Definic’s data layer, the bank gained a comprehensive overview of its network of 116 technology suppliers across 12 countries, along with an intuitive tool for managing external IT procurement. Greater transparency immediately translated into greater speed. The average procurement cycle was reduced from six weeks to just two, accelerating the entire process of sourcing external IT consultants by more than 67%.
Equally important, the platform enabled the bank to move toward a more open and competitive procurement model. The share of contracts awarded directly without competition dropped to just 3.6%.
The most significant impact was reflected in financial performance. During the first five months of 2026, the bank conducted 60 tenders through the platform with a total value exceeding €10 million. Contracts worth €5.4 million had already been awarded and signed. Based on historical rates and the bank’s internal benchmarks, the same scope of services would have cost approximately €6.6 million.
As a result, Definic delivered verified savings of €1.2 million within just five months. An additional €900,000 in potential savings is currently tied to ongoing tenders and evaluation processes. These results demonstrate that enterprise-grade Vendor Intelligence can generate annual savings measured in millions of euros. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, we expect this impact to grow even further.
Backed by a €2.5 million investment, the company is accelerating its growth. Lukáš leads the global data strategy from Europe, Michal oversees operations, and Robert is preparing to expand the business across North America. At the same time, the entire team remains focused on further international expansion.
Despite the investment, rapid growth, and ambitions in the U.S. market, the company’s core remains unchanged. It is still built on a friendship that began years ago on a neighborhood playground between apartment blocks in Košice.
“We’re still the same guys,” says Robert. “We’re just playing on a much bigger field now.”
