Albanian software company behind Publer makes international debut at Web Summit 2026

After 15 years of bootstrapped growth, Albanian software company Kalemi will make its first international event appearance at Web Summit 2026 in Lisbon this November.

Best known as the company behind social media management platform Publer, Kalemi has grown from a one-person project started in 2011 into a team of 20 building three products: Publer, Linkie, and Kibo.

Publer now has more than 500,000 active users and reached $5 million in annual recurring revenue in 2026, all without outside investment.

Web Summit will be the first time we bring Kalemi and our products to an international event.

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From Tirana to the world

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Kalemi's story started in 2011, when our founder and CEO, Ervin Kalemi, began building Facebook apps while studying computer science.

Publer followed in late 2012.

What started as a small social media scheduling tool has since grown into a platform used by businesses, creators, and agencies around the world.

Publer crossed borders a long time ago. The company behind it stayed in Tirana.

We built our team here, opened our first office here in 2017, and kept building for customers thousands of kilometers away.

“Our products became international long before we did. We've spent 15 years building from Albania for the world. Web Summit will be the first time we take Kalemi abroad and show up in front of that world ourselves.”
— Ervin Kalemi, Founder & CEO

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The company behind Publer

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For most of our history, Kalemi and Publer were practically the same thing.

Publer was our main product, and for many people, it was the only name they knew us by.

That's changing.

Today, Kalemi is the company behind three products:

• Publer helps businesses, creators, and agencies create, schedule, and manage their social media from one place.
• Linkie is our take on the link-in-bio space, giving creators and businesses a customizable home for everything they create, sell, and share online.
• And Kibo is what we're building next: one inbox for customer conversations across email, live chat, social media messages, comments, mentions, and reviews.

At Web Summit, we'll be bringing all three together under the Kalemi name.

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15 years, still bootstrapped

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Our first international appearance also happens to come in our 15th year.

And those 15 years haven't exactly followed the typical startup story.

We've never raised outside investment.

There was no big funding round behind our growth. We grew with the revenue our products generated and reinvested it back into the company.

It hasn't always been a straight line.

We've built products that worked and others that didn't. We nearly lost Publer after Facebook's platform changes in 2018. We reached break-even in 2021, became profitable, and had to adapt again when Twitter changed its API pricing in 2023.

Today, we're a team of 20 in Tirana, still building for customers around the world.

And we're still bootstrapped.

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Why Web Summit?

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Most of our growth has happened online.

We've acquired customers online, supported them online, and built relationships with people we've never met in person.

Web Summit gives us a chance to change that for a few days.

We'll be there to demo Publer and Linkie, give visitors an early look at what we're building with Kibo, meet some of our existing customers, and introduce Kalemi to people who may know Publer without knowing the company behind it.

It's also a chance to put Albania on the map in our own small way.

We've spent 15 years building from Albania for the world.

Now it's time to show up in it.

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Bringing Albania with us

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We're not going to Lisbon alone.

As a Web Summit partner, we received a number of tickets for this year's event. Instead of keeping all of them for ourselves, we decided to give 25 tickets to members of Albania's startup community.

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More than 160 people applied.

Twenty-five of them will be joining us in Lisbon, with the chance to meet founders, investors, and people from around the world—and hopefully bring some of those connections and ideas back home.

For us, that's a pretty good way to make our first international appearance.

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Meet us in Lisbon

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We'll be at Web Summit 2026 in Lisbon from November 9–12.

We'll share more about our stand and what we have planned as we get closer to the event.

If you're attending, we'd love to meet you.

See you in Lisbon.

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Media inquiries

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For interviews or more information about Kalemi, Publer, Linkie, or Kibo, contact [email protected].