Sofia Tech Park — Bulgaria's First Science and Technology Park

Sofia Tech Park, a Bulgarian state-owned company, was officially inaugurated on 11 December 2015 by President Rosen Plevneliev, with Slovak President Andrej Kiska, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, Bavarian Minister-President Horst Seehofer and European Regional Policy Commissioner Corina Crețu in attendance — a project co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. Per the European Commission's own regional-policy project database, total investment was EUR 42,688,354, of which EUR 36,285,101 came from the ERDF (2007-2013 programming period); the park opened with 40,000 m² of research, incubation and public-engagement space, on a site independently reported as spanning over 30 hectares with up to 1.5 million m² of planned office space.

The park focuses on information and communication technologies, life sciences and green energy, combining applied research laboratories, a business incubator and an interactive science centre intended to bridge academia, business, government and civil society. One of its buildings, the Innovation Forum, is named after Bulgarian-American computer pioneer John Atanasoff.

A decade after opening, Sofia Tech Park and the Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT) were selected in 2025 for a EUR 90 million EU-backed 'AI factory' project (BRAIN++), one of six such factories across the EU alongside Austria, France, Germany, Poland and Slovenia, under the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking; construction is due to begin in 2026, with 50% national co-funding committed by the Bulgarian government from that year.

Evidence caveats: investment and EU co-financing figures are independently corroborated by the European Commission's own project database, separate from the park's own site; however, no independently audited data on the number of resident companies, jobs created, or ongoing operating revenue could be located, so those impact dimensions remain undemonstrated.

Read the full analysis: https://www.bulgarianproperties.com/Bulgaria_articles/Bulgaria-first-science-and-technology-park-officially-inaugurated_6569.html