Two Bratislava-founded startups that once fought over the same pitches are now one company, as European content moderation consolidates ahead of tightening regulation.
TrollWall AI has acquired competitor Elv.ai for an undisclosed sum. Both were founded in 2022 in response to the wave of hate speech and hoaxes that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and both sold automated comment moderation to media outlets and public institutions.
Elv.ai began as a volunteer project called Elfovia.sk inside the New School Communications agency, cleaning discussions by hand before adding AI in late 2022. It spun out as a standalone company in 2023 and went on to process more than 80 million comments. Its clients now migrate to the TrollWall platform.
TrollWall AI was founded by Tomas Halasz, Filip Strycko, Tomas Koctur and Pavol Bujnak. Halasz built the first version after deleting thousands of hateful comments by hand while managing social media for a European Parliament vice president.
The combined company claims clients in 16 countries across Europe, North America and Australia, including political parties, heads of state, and sports organisations such as the International Ice Hockey Federation and AC Sparta Prague.
The regulatory backdrop is doing a lot of the work here. The EU’s Digital Services Act has turned comment moderation from a nice-to-have into a compliance line item for platforms and publishers alike, and enforcement has pushed organisations toward vendors that can show an audit trail.
The strategic logic is language coverage. Both firms built for Slovak and Czech, markets too small for global trust and safety vendors to prioritise, and that neglected niche became a defensible base for expansion.
Consolidation in European applied AI has mostly been large firms buying small ones. A regional player absorbing its closest rival is a rarer signal, and worth watching as a template.
