1996 → today · founder timeline
From Commodore 64 and teenage game development to company exits, Silicon Valley, Exevio and a satellite in orbit.
Exevio keeps building ventures that outgrow it: NiMote, QckPay and LogBook already left, PassWork is onboarding first clients, DCMS is warming up on the launchpad. Plus real estate (WestNest, Ultimate Living) and two actual bars. Already cooking the next one.
The game studio where everything started gets revived as a hobby-with-plans: Raklem, War on Earth, receives a Windows 11 update 24 years after release. Some codebases never die, they just wait.
Primorje-Gorski Kotar County recognizes Edi as one of its awarded innovators for PlugTurn Signal. Selected among 31 submitted innovations, the project receives third-prize recognition and €2,300 in support in the County's 30th year of backing local innovation.
The first Croatian satellite lifts off from Vandenberg with Exevio as an official mission partner: components on board, the official tracking app in both stores, and a 10 cm cube passing over Rijeka a few times a day at 510 km.
The local daily profiles Exevio as an example among Rijeka's businesses: from a one-man venture to 350 m² of office and a team past thirty, with EU programmes (3.48M€ secured) fuelling the venture pipeline.
Back home in Rijeka, everything learned in games, hosting and Silicon Valley merges into one company. It starts as client work (enterprise software, mobile apps, AR/VR, ML) and every euro earned gets reinvested into products. Eleven years later it's a venture builder with its own small constellation.
WhoAPI co-organizes a two-day hackathon in Rijeka with Step-Ri, supported by the U.S. Embassy, VIPnet and Netokracija. (Also: "I learn something new each time I attend a hackathon" - the blog, same year.)
Dave McClure's Geeks On a Plane tour lands in Croatia; WhoAPI wins the pitch in front of 30+ foreign investors and 500 Startups invests. Goran and Edi move to Mountain View for the accelerator: six months of Silicon Valley at full speed, $200k+ raised, and side quests like Bouxtie (gift cards) and Branchub ("LinkedIn for retail").
The hosting years surface a real problem: domain data is a mess. WhoAPI turns whois, DNS, SSL and screenshot checks into clean APIs. Two friends from Rijeka, one API, investors incoming.
The web & hosting studio built with Goran (bootstrapped from zero to ~500 clients) gets acquired by Avalon, the largest Croatian hosting company of the era. First exit: unlocked. The proceeds and the lessons go straight into the next thing.
Games taught us computers; GEM Studio turned it into a business: web design, game servers and hosting for Croatian clients. The blog you can still read on this site starts in this era: hosting promotions, client launches, iPhone 3G hype and all.
The studio's biggest year: first commercial retail release (a platformer with huge levels), an award-winning find-five-differences game, and as much work done as in all previous years combined. Some games hit tens of thousands of downloads.
The most noticed Generation Stars game gets covered in Croatian gaming press. Two teenagers from Rijeka, one shareware scene, zero budget, and reviews in actual print.
The crew formalizes into a game dev group and ships its first game. Fifteen more follow over the years: platformers, shooters, puzzlers: the complete education in shipping software, disguised as fun.
Two kids in Rijeka discover they share the same computer obsession. Every company on this page traces back to this commit.
10 PRINT "EDI" · 20 GOTO 10. The career starts on a breadbox with 64 KB of RAM. Everything since has been an upgrade path.