The “E-Business” course has been part of the curriculum of the Bachelor’s degree program in Business Administration since the 2016/2017 academic year. Within the course, students learn through experimentation and hands-on experience by developing digital products and services, creating online stores, validating business ideas, and designing market strategies.

In the latest edition of the course, the team led by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Todor Yalamov, together with part-time teaching assistants Zhanet Naydenova, Executive Director of the Bulgarian E-Commerce Association, and Emilia Hristova, Product Director at FITE, integrated the AI-based platform Icanpreneur into the learning process. The platform supports startup idea development, validation, product strategy, and market strategy. Icanpreneur Ltd. was founded in 2021 by Veselin Kolev, a team of colleagues, and subsequent investors from the Telerik/Progress ecosystem.

“With the advancement of AI, the speed of creation has become much faster than the speed of making market-based decisions. As a result, markets are becoming flooded with products created with little or no market validation. Through Icanpreneur, we provide students with a structure for continuous validation, allowing their ideas to become competitive even before they begin to evolve into real products”, says Mr. Kolev.

Iva is Icanpreneur’s artificial intelligence mentor, guiding users through the process of creating a company or launching a new product line within an existing business—from developing a value proposition to creating a launch-ready website. The platform leverages dynamic customer personas, business model canvases, sales strategies, and other entrepreneurial tools. Iva communicates in 57 languages and has already assisted entrepreneurs from numerous countries around the world.

As part of the E-Business course, more than 80 students worked on their own startup, consulting, and innovation projects through a structured process covering idea generation, customer research, validation, and the development of clear product and market strategies. They used the platform as a strategic AI partner for evidence-based decision-making. Acting as early adopters of Icanpreneur, students gained first-hand insight into the crucial role that early customers play in the success of a startup.

Icanpreneur’s mission is to make the entrepreneurial process radically faster and more effective while creating more successful entrepreneurs worldwide. The platform achieves this by automating a number of business steps and activities that traditionally remain confined to textbooks, hackathons, and entrepreneurship competitions. It is no coincidence that some of the startup’s first clients include accelerators such as the 787 Foundation from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The partnership with Sofia University builds upon a proven European example. A similar model has already been implemented in Germany, where the Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt (THWS) has integrated Icanpreneur into its master’s program as a “24/7 learning laboratory” for startup development. This reflects a growing trend among innovative universities to adopt AI not as an add-on, but as core infrastructure for developing practical entrepreneurial skills.