From Winning Tenders to Building Synterios | Mateja's Journey

Mateja holds an MBA with Distinction from the University of Westminster and brings a background that spans finance, sales, project management, and co-founding a software company. Before launching Synterios, he spent several years at Electus d.o.o., progressing from finance and sales intern to Project Manager, where he personally led the preparation of government tenders with an 11 out of 12 win rate, generating over £1.1 million in revenue. He then co-founded Snooze Tech, gaining direct experience running a UK-registered company, negotiating client contracts, and delivering a hotel booking platform. Synterios is his most ambitious step yet: a B2B SaaS business targeting enterprises, SMEs, and government institutions across the UK and internationally.

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WHAT WAS THE KEY TRIGGER FOR APPLYING FOR A VISA?

The trigger was Synterios itself. Once Maxim and I had developed the concept for our product and mapped out the problem it solves: the costly, risky fragmentation of document and compliance tools across organisations, it was obvious the business had real legs. We had already been running Snooze Tech for 2 years in the UK, so we understood the market and the regulatory environment. Synterios felt like the next level: a product business with genuine international potential. At that point, formalising my right to build it in the UK was not optional. It was the only logical next step.

WHY DID THIS PARTICULAR VISA SEEM THE MOST SUITABLE?

I was not looking for a route that would let me work for someone else in the UK. I was already here, already building, already leading a company. The Innovator Founder visa is specifically designed for people in that position, founders with a credible, scalable business idea who are ready to commit to building it in the UK. The criteria around innovation, viability, and scalability matched exactly what we were doing with our product. No other route fits.

WHAT DOUBTS OR FEARS DID YOU HAVE BEFORE THE PROCESS BEGAN?

My concern was not about the quality of what we had built — I was confident in the business and the product. My worry was about how to present a business that is genuinely complex to an audience that would need to assess it quickly. Our product consists of five interoperable modules: document management, contract tracking, financial control, digital archiving, and a data lake, plus a physical hardware security key. Communicating that clearly, compellingly, and concisely in a visa application felt like a real challenge. I was also aware that being pre-revenue made the viability argument harder, and I was not sure how much weight would be given to our commercial traction to date from Snooze Tech versus the forward-looking plan for Synterios.

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WHAT ACCOMPLISHMENTS DID YOU CONSIDER MOST RELEVANT?

My government tender work at Electus was the cornerstone of my application. Winning 11 out of 12 tenders, generating £1.1 million in revenue, and leading the most profitable projects with an average margin of 37% — that is a track record that speaks directly to commercial judgement, stakeholder management, and the ability to operate in complex institutional environments. Government procurement is not easy. Clients are demanding, documentation is exhaustive, and the competition is real. Doing that consistently, across different types of projects, showed that I knew how to close and how to deliver.

Co-founding Snooze Tech was also important. It demonstrated that I had already operated a UK company, set up governance, managed legal contracts, executed a go-to-market strategy, and delivered a product for a real client. Synterios was not a first attempt at entrepreneurship. It was a deliberate next chapter.

WERE THERE ANY CAREER MILESTONES THAT UNEXPECTEDLY PLAYED A BIG ROLE?

My time as a Finance and Accounting Intern earlier in my career turned out to matter more than I expected. At the time, it felt like a foundational, unglamorous role. But it gave me genuine fluency in financial planning and analysis, cost tracking, and revenue recognition — skills that became directly relevant when building the Financial Management and Control module of our platform. I could speak to that module's purpose from lived experience, not just theory. That credibility came through in the narrative.

HOW DID YOU STRUCTURE YOUR PROFILE GIVEN THE DIVERSITY OF YOUR EXPERIENCE?

The thread I built around was the word evidence. Every role I have held — finance intern, sales intern, project manager, and co-founder — has involved either creating evidence of performance or helping organisations manage information about their operations. Our product is fundamentally a platform for making truth auditable and decisions defensible. Once I saw that connection, the diversity of my background stopped being a complication and became a coherent story about someone who has seen the problem from every angle: financial, commercial, operational, and technical.

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HOW DID YOU PREPARE?

We prepared in parallel. On the business side, we finalised the Synterios business plan, which required preparing product documentation in significant technical and commercial depth: five modules, a hardware component, a pricing model, and a go-to-market strategy. I led the commercial and strategic sections while Maxim led the technical architecture. On the narrative side, I worked to build a personal profile that connected my career history to the specific role I would play in Synterios — commercial lead, go-to-market strategist, legal and governance owner. We also had to present our shared history with Snooze Tech in a way that demonstrated that this partnership had already been tested in the real world.

WHAT WAS THE MOST DIFFICULT PART?

Distilling everything into a coherent, readable narrative without losing the substance was the real challenge. The business plan is genuinely detailed — there's real technical depth behind every module, and the pricing model and market segmentation are both carefully constructed. The risk was oversimplifying it and losing credibility, or going too deep and losing the reader. Getting the balance right took several drafts and an outside perspective to sanity-check.

WHAT MOMENTS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED YOU?

I was surprised by how compelling the government tender track record turned out to be. I had thought it might be seen as specific to the Serbian market and therefore less relevant. Instead, it became one of the strongest parts of my profile — it showed structured, high-stakes, institutional sales capability in an environment where documentation, compliance, and precision matter. That translated directly to our target customer base.

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Tech Nomads understood that Maxim and I were applying together as co-founders of one business, and they helped us present that in a way that was coherent rather than duplicated. Each of us had a clearly defined lane – mine being commercial, operational, and strategic – and the team helped sharpen that distinction so the application read as two complementary profiles rather than two people saying similar things.

WHERE EXACTLY DID EXPERT SUPPORT PLAY A DECISIVE ROLE?

The viability argument. Presenting a pre-revenue SaaS business as commercially viable requires a specific kind of logic: you need to show that the pricing model is grounded, the market is real and sized, the go-to-market is credible, and the team can execute. Tech Nomads had experience structuring that argument and pushed us to be more specific in places where we had been vague. That rigour made the submission considerably stronger.

WAS THERE ANYTHING YOU DEFINITELY COULD NOT HAVE DONE ALONE?

I could have written a business plan and a personal statement. What I could not have done alone is understand how those documents would be read by an endorsing body — what they would weigh, what they would question, and where the gaps were. That external perspective was essential. You cannot see your own blind spots, and in a high-stakes application, blind spots are expensive.

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HOW DID YOU FEEL AT DIFFERENT STAGES?

At the start, I felt a mixture of clarity and anxiety. Clarity because I knew what we were building and why it mattered. Anxiety because the process was outside my control in a way that business decisions usually are not. During preparation, the anxiety shifted into focus — there was work to do, and I am at my best when there is work to do. The wait after submission was the hardest part emotionally. You have done everything you can, and then you wait. When the decision came through, the feeling was less euphoria and more a deep, quiet relief. And then immediately, the focus shifted to what comes next.

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO PROFESSIONALS WHO DOUBT WHETHER THEY HAVE ENOUGH ACHIEVEMENTS?

Look at the outcomes you have actually generated for other people and organisations, not at your job title or your industry. I was a project manager at a Serbian software company before I was a UK co-founder. That does not sound like Innovator Founder material on the surface. But the outcomes — £1.1 million in revenue, an 11 out of 12 tender win rate, leading the most profitable projects in the company; those are concrete, verifiable, and compelling regardless of context. If your work has produced real results, that is what matters. The task is to articulate it clearly, not to wait until your CV looks a certain way.

IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY IF YOU WERE STARTING OVER?

I would document milestones and client outcomes more consistently from the beginning of my career. Reconstructing evidence of impact: revenue figures, win rates, project margins from memory, and scattered records adds unnecessary stress to an already demanding process. I would also start the narrative work earlier. The personal story that connects your career to your business idea does not write itself overnight.

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NEXT STEPS

HOW HAVE YOUR LIFE AND CAREER PLANS CHANGED SINCE RECEIVING THE VISA?

The visa gave me permanence in the thing I am building. Before, there was always a background uncertainty — not enough to stop me, but enough to limit how far ahead I would plan. That constraint is gone. I can recruit, commit to long-term client relationships, and make investment decisions without a horizon attached to them.

WHAT OPPORTUNITIES OPENED UP IMMEDIATELY?

We moved faster on formalising Synterios's commercial structure and began having more substantive conversations with potential early-adopter clients in the UK public sector. The endorsement also signals credibility to those clients — they are dealing with a company that an independent body has assessed and found to be a viable, scalable, innovative proposition. In government procurement environments, that kind of credibility matters.

WHAT ARE YOUR EXPECTATIONS FOR THIS NEW STAGE — PERSONALLY AND PROFESSIONALLY?

Professionally, the priority is getting our product into the hands of its first paying clients, generating real-world case studies, and building the evidence base that supports broader commercial growth. I want to demonstrate that the platform delivers what it promises. Personally, I want to build something I am genuinely proud of. A platform that helps organisations manage their information with integrity, that reduces the risk of data chaos causing real operational harm, and that proves a small founding team with the right combination of skills can build enterprise-grade software that competes internationally.