The Operator Who Refused to Stay in One Lane

David Horvath describes his parents as entrepreneurs. He does not describe them as successful ones. What he describes is the reality he grew up inside: constant uncertainty, clients who needed managing, finances that never quite settled, and the grind of providing a service while wondering whether tomorrow would bring another paying customer. That was the education he received before he ever held a job title.

Horvath says, "I was raised in this environment where there was always a huge uncertainty. You had to manage clients, the financials of the business, and provide the service for the client."

That grounding shaped something that would define his career more than any single company: a refusal to be contained by a role. Horvath is not a serial founder in the glossy, aspirational sense. He is an operator who learned early that entrepreneurship is mostly problem-solving under pressure, and who has spent the years since building systems that do not depend on him being in the room.

Horvath trained as a mechanical engineer but shifted his attention to IT, becoming what he calls a self-trained professional. His last stop was corporate, where he experienced what it meant to work inside a large organization and what those organizations expected from the people who served them. It was there that he realized he wanted to be his own boss, and not in a narrow way. He was interested in engineering and IT broadly, not in spending his days inside one slice of the stack. In 2016, he jumped.

But the groundwork came earlier. In 2012, Horvath approached a mentor who then led a startup initiative in Budapest and offered to help him for free just to learn. That experience gave him a first taste of what raising money looked like, how startups spent it, and how value was supposed to be created. He did not like everything he saw. Hungary's startup culture, in his assessment, was roughly two decades behind the United States, so he chose a model that did not require much capital. He started selling services, hired his first employees, sold more, built more, and repeated. That company, Lexunit, grew to 15 or 16 engineers, Horvath says, and remains the most established of his ventures, even if it is the smallest in ambition relative to what came next.

Through Lexunit's work for a Hungarian branch of a global insurance carrier, Horvath spotted a different opportunity. He built a SaaS platform with the capability and resources of his first company and sold it as a digital tool to the carrier. That became DigitalSurance, his main business today. It runs on five-year contracts in Europe, gradually increasing in value.

The third company, TracePass, came from a conversation with a friend in the United States who worked for a metals refinery. Horvath saw a geopolitical problem: tensions between the US and China meant companies needed to prove the origin of materials. The technology he had built for insurance claims, a remote investigation tool used by experts to assess damage and collect data, could be repurposed to track materials and verify their provenance.

"That's how they ended up founding the company called TracePass," Horvath says. "They're using this technology from my second company."

Horvath is now CTO of TracePass. He says, "The company is raising a seed round in the $1 million to $10 million range." He is careful not to disclose too much. He is also candid about the limits of the venture. TracePass is early, still proving itself, while DigitalSurance is the stable engine.

Horvath does not present his path as a series of clean wins. He made a decision early on, sharing a large stake in his first company with partners.

He says, "It was a learning opportunity for me as I cannot make sole decisions within the company."

That lesson pushed him toward a different structure. He now builds companies around foundations rather than around himself. The point is not to be absent. It is to be there when needed, while the company can function without him constantly overseeing everything. That bandwidth is what allows him to look at the bigger picture, to find other opportunities, and to build other businesses.

Horvath's approach to teams follows from the same logic. He does not hire for titles or experience. He hires for character and hunger, for people who want to develop themselves and who do not carry limiting beliefs about what they can become.

"It was important for me to find the character, not the experience and the titles," he says.

He looks for people who see work not as an unnecessary evil but as a way to establish themselves and grow. That philosophy is what gave him the room to step back from day-to-day operations without the companies collapsing.

Horvath's ambitions do not end with the current portfolio. He wants a significant exit, and he wants to experience taking a company public at some point. DigitalSurance is his candidate for European expansion first, with discussions already underway in Spain and Italy, before eventually entering the US market, where the absence of language barriers makes scaling different. He also has a fourth entity, a personal holding company through which he invests and manages a portfolio. It is not part of the businesses, but it is part of the long-term vision: gathering everything under one structure.

The through-line is not any single company. It is the pattern Horvath has followed since watching his parents navigate uncertainty: build systems that can run without constant management, find people who want to grow, and keep looking outside a single lane.