Day 3 was full of more company visits. We started off at EGIS which is a pharmaceutical company in Budapest. They had an amazing array of machines and have partnered with French firms in order to become a major player in the pharma industry.

After that, we went to Graphisoft. Graphisoft is the maker of Archicad 14 and a direct competitor of AutoCad. We had the pleasure of meeting with Graphisoft Founder and CEO Gábor Bojá.

Gábor has an amazing story. He started Graphisoft while communism was still prevalent in Hungary. Personal PCs were banned from being imported into Hungary and therefore Gabor created a version of Archicad to be used on a Texas Instruments calculator. The company today owns 10% of the architecture software market.

If you’re interested in his story, you can buy his autobiography from Amazon.

The final company we met with was Thales Nano. In their own words “ThalesNano and Mettler Toledo are collaborating on combining their existing market leading technologies to offer flow reactor technology with real time reaction monitoring for faster reaction optimization and improved continuous process production.”

Prior to going to the reception for the night, we went to Citadel Hill for some stunning views of Budapest.

That night we had a reception at the home of the Commercial Officer for the US Embassy and were able to meet a lot of the business leaders in Budapest. There truly is an entrepreneurial spirit in Budapest.