Flowwow executive joins EU-Startups Summit 2026 speaker line-up
Ekaterina Gorbacheva, Global Expansion Director at Flowwow, is set to speak at the EU-Startups Summit 2026, taking place May 7–8 in Malta. Organisers said her session will focus on the challenges of maintaining a consistent customer experience while expanding across borders—an increasingly urgent topic for marketplace and consumer platforms scaling internationally.
Flowwow, founded in 2014, operates a global gifting marketplace designed to simplify gift-giving by connecting customers with local merchants. The company says its network includes more than 18,000 local shops serving consumers in 40-plus countries, enabling orders ranging from flowers and gifts to curated experiences. The model positions local businesses as fulfilment partners while the platform provides discovery, ordering, and customer support infrastructure at international scale.
What Ekaterina Gorbacheva will cover: culture, behaviour, and AI
At the summit, Gorbacheva will present a talk titled “Scaling Customer Experience Across Markets: Culture, Behaviour, and the Role of AI.” Her session is expected to examine why customer experience playbooks that succeed in one country can underperform elsewhere, particularly when customer expectations around communication style, speed of resolution, refunds, and service tone vary significantly by market.
According to the event programme description, the talk will also address how startups and scale-ups can use AI to expand support and service operations without eroding quality, empathy, or trust—three factors that can be difficult to preserve when organisations move from a single-market approach to multi-market operations.
Localisation as a growth lever for marketplaces
Marketplace businesses often face a dual challenge: scaling supply (merchant partners) and demand (customers) while ensuring the operational layer—support, logistics coordination, quality control, and dispute resolution—keeps pace. In Flowwow’s case, the company attributes its multi-country footprint to a combination of localisation, technology, and operational execution.
As Global Expansion Director, Ekaterina Gorbacheva leads the firm’s international growth strategy, overseeing expansion across dozens of markets. Her remit includes adapting product flows, customer support practices, and operational processes to fit different cultural contexts. That work typically requires balancing global consistency with local relevance—maintaining a unified brand experience while respecting market-specific expectations and behavioural norms.
Why customer experience strategies break across borders
Customer experience is often treated as a set of universal best practices, but cross-border scaling can expose assumptions embedded in everything from interface design to escalation policies. A response time considered fast in one market may be seen as slow in another; a direct tone that reads as efficient in one culture may be interpreted as abrupt elsewhere.
The summit session description suggests Gorbacheva will focus on these friction points and provide practical guidance for building customer-centric products that work internationally. For founders and operators, the topic is particularly relevant as European startups increasingly expand beyond their home markets earlier in their lifecycle, driven by competitive pressure and the search for larger addressable markets.
Event context: Malta hosts Europe’s startup community
The EU-Startups Summit 2026 will be held in Malta, a location organisers describe as a hub for entrepreneurs and investors. The event typically brings together founders, investors, and corporate leaders for talks, networking, and programming focused on scaling companies in Europe and beyond.
Sponsors highlight investment and infrastructure themes
Event organisers also highlighted several sponsors supporting the summit. Malta Enterprise, the country’s economic development agency, promotes investment and innovation through support services for local and foreign businesses establishing operations in Malta. The agency is positioned as a key contributor to the local startup ecosystem through incentives and tailored programmes.
M. Demajo Group, a longstanding Maltese business group, was also listed among sponsors. The company traces its history back more than a century and operates across multiple sectors, citing long-term growth through organic expansion, acquisitions, partnerships, and startup activity.
In addition, the IONOS Cloud Start-up Program is offering early-stage companies up to €100,000 in cloud credits for up to five years after founding. The programme emphasises “sovereign” infrastructure and GDPR compliance, positioning data residency and legal certainty as competitive advantages for startups building in regulated environments.
What attendees can expect
For attendees, Gorbacheva’s session is positioned as a practical guide to scaling customer experience across markets—covering cultural variation, behavioural differences, and how AI can support global growth without undermining trust. For marketplace founders in particular, the talk aligns with a central operational reality: the customer experience is only as strong as the platform’s ability to deliver consistent outcomes through local partners at scale.
The EU-Startups Summit 2026 runs May 7–8 in Malta.
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