Two BME alumni make this year's Forbes list of the most successful young Hungarians

Two BME graduates are on the latest 30/30 list of Forbes' Hungarian edition. The publication lists successful under-30s who have "changed a market, a cultural or scientific segment in Hungary or around the world" in five categories - namely, business, arts, science, media and other.

Ádám Kertai, 29, is responsible for coordinating the work of 120 people at the Vienna-based non-profit organisation RailNetEurope, 

developing Europe's new competitive rail capacity management process.

He was already fascinated by Thomas the Tank Engine at the age of 3 and served on the Budapest Children’s Railway at the age of 10. In his last year of high school, he worked for the Hungarian Railway Company (MÁV) as a traffic manager, and after university he returned to the Children's Railway as stationmaster. "It was nice to be able to go back and give back to my first job, as it all started here," Forbes quotes Ádám, who graduated in Economics and Management. He got his Master's degree in Leadership and Organisation also at the GTK (receiving the Faculty's Outstanding Student Award in 2020), but also studied at the Danish Technical University in parallel.

Bálint Pásztor, 28, is the founder, together with Roland Pintér, of DiffuseDrive, a company that teaches robots to see. Their startup has been propelled to Silicon Valley by the artificial intelligence revolution and has already raised over a million dollars in investment.

DiffuseDrive, used for teaching AI software, is active in the self-driving car market, but is also opening up to the defence industry, with customers including giant companies.

You can read about their history in this Forbes article frim last year (in Hungarian). Bálint finished his studies, originally started at the University of Edinburgh, at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in 2021.

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