From Startup Weekend to Founder Catalyst: The Story of Relic

Plenty of startups trace their roots to a single big idea. Relic traces its roots to a 54-hour weekend in Sarajevo, a Formula 1 race, and a mentor who wasn’t afraid to tell three engineers what they needed to hear.

Co-founders Sara Kordić (CEO), Imran Čengić (COO), and Haris Kordić (CTO) recently shared the full story on the Relic blog. It’s a story the Techstars community will recognize, because it started at a Techstars event and led them right back into the Techstars network.

A Weekend, a Grand Prix, and a Mentor

The three founders first crossed paths at Techstars Startup Weekend Sarajevo. Imran and Sara were on the same team, while Haris was working on a different project across the room. What brought them together had little to do with pitching. They bonded over a Formula 1 race, and Bojan Lazic, the event’s organizer, joined in.

“Lesson one: never underestimate the networking power of a Grand Prix,” Imran writes.

That weekend didn’t produce a company. After it ended, each founder went off to build a startup of their own, and over the following months, none of those ideas took off. The connections from that weekend held, though, and so did the relationship with Bojan.

Round Two

About six months later, the three came back for a second Startup Weekend Sarajevo, this time with a proptech theme. Together they built Aperio, an app that lets people unlock doors with their phones. They took validation seriously, heading into local handyman stores to interview potential customers face to face.

The work was real, and so was the conclusion they reached. Aperio sat outside their expertise, and they knew it. Rather than force the idea forward, they looked for a problem they understood from the inside.

They found one in their own habits. All three were constantly saving articles, PDFs, links, and notes, then losing track of them when they actually needed them. That shared frustration became the seed of a “second brain.”

“Crying With Bojan”

Like a lot of engineering-minded teams, the founders’ first instinct was to build features. Bojan, now their mentor, pushed them in a different direction. His feedback was direct and frequent, and it kept bringing them back to the same question of what customers truly needed.

The team affectionately nicknamed these meetings “Crying with Bojan.” The sessions sent them back into customer discovery, and that discipline narrowed a sprawling idea into a focused MVP. It’s the kind of mentorship Techstars was built on, an experienced operator giving his time and candor to founders early, with no expectation of anything in return.

Meet Relic

The product that came out of that process is an AI knowledge base that helps people collect, connect, and rediscover information scattered across browser tabs, notes, documents, and links. Users save anything useful, Relic organizes it, and users can ask questions across everything they’ve saved. Instead of digging through bookmarks, folders, and screenshots, people get one place to capture what they find and a way to actually use it later.

Relic launched its beta on October 12, 2026, and beta access is free. Interested users can sign up at relic-app.com.

Back to Techstars

Today, Relic represents Sarajevo in the Techstars Founder Catalyst Global Fall 2026 cohort, one of 27 startups from Istanbul, Sarajevo, Omaha, Uzbekistan, and Belfast. The Sarajevo community is supported by partner 38x Ventures.

Founder Catalyst is a free, part-time, fully virtual pre-accelerator for early-stage founders. Over 10 weeks, from September 22 to November 27, participants get masterclasses, workshops, fireside chats with unicorn founders, mentorship from Techstars mentors, operators, investors, and alumni, and a global peer community, all without giving up equity or relocating. The cohort will present at a virtual Global Showcase on December 3, 2026.

For Sara, Imran, and Haris, it’s a full-circle moment. A story that began at a Techstars Startup Weekend in Sarajevo has brought them back into the network that helped spark it.

“Every step taught us something,” the team writes. And as they put it at the close of their post, “This is only the beginning.”

Read the founders' full story on the Relic blog.