HVCA Equity Thursday x Interactive Venture Partners: Where the Moat Lives: Building Defensible Companies in an Age of Easy Replication
In a market where capital is more disciplined, technology cycles move faster, and software advantages are easier to copy, founders and investors are returning to a fundamental question: what actually creates durable competitive advantage?
This HVCA Equity Thursday, hosted with Interactive Venture Partners, will explore how the next generation of venture-backed companies can build real moats — through distribution, ecosystem position, proprietary data, embedded workflows, technical depth, brand trust, and customer switching costs.
The discussion will move beyond generic narratives about innovation and focus on what defensibility looks like in practice: how companies earn the right to scale, how investors evaluate durability, and why some advantages compound while others disappear.
Speakers and Perspectives:
Aurel Pasztor, Deligo — representing an AI-powered checkout company where real-world deployment, customer workflows, and computer vision create defensibility beyond software alone. Deligo’s kiosks use AI and computer vision to instantly recognize food and retail items in canteens and micro-markets.
Gábor Kiss-Vámosi, LVGL — founder of a leading open-source embedded UI framework, showing how developer adoption, ecosystem integration, and standards can become a powerful moat.
Jared Schrieber — bringing a broader operator and market-building perspective on how companies create category leadership and lasting advantage.
Moderator: Laszlo Czirjak — Interactive Venture Partners.
Why Attend:
This event will offer a rigorous, practical conversation on:
What “moat” really means in today’s venture market
Why software alone is often no longer enough
How distribution, standards, data, and embedded workflows create durable advantage
What investors look for when assessing defensibility
Why CEE founders can build globally relevant companies from deep technical and operational strengths
Interactive Venture Partners brings a US-standard, high-conviction venture perspective from Budapest, focused on ambitious Hungarian and CEE founders building with global ambition.
Join us for a conversation on where lasting company value is created — and how founders can build advantages that compound over time.