398 million euro, 109 deals, and what that means from Belgrade

The How to Web data for 2025 puts venture capital investment across Southeast Europe at 398.3 million euro, spread over 109 transactions, up by nearly 40 percent on the previous year. It is a good headline and it deserves a second read, because the shape of the number matters more than the growth rate.

Divide it out and the average deal is under 4 million euro. That is a region operating almost entirely at pre seed, seed and small Series A. Growth capital is not the story here yet, and any founder building a plan that assumes a local 20 million euro round is planning against numbers that do not exist in this dataset.

Put Serbia next to it. Publicly available estimates and ecosystem studies count over 700 startups at various stages, and the Startup Scanner data indicated that 56 percent of them were founded between 2021 and 2023. So the majority of the country's startups are young, which explains a lot: a cohort that recent is still producing its first exits, its first experienced operators, and its first angel investors who made their money locally.

That combination, many young companies and small cheques, tells you what is scarce. It is not ideas and it is not engineers. It is the layer between an idea and an investable company: distribution, a first paying customer outside the region, and someone who has done the go to market motion before and will sit in on the calls.

This is exactly the work I do, so treat me as biased and check the reasoning anyway. When a founder here says fundraising is hard, the binding constraint is usually not the pitch. It is that there is no proof the product sells outside a small home market, and no local cheque large enough to buy the time to find that proof. Programs that help mostly help by compressing the time to that first external customer.

Two things I would not conclude from the 40 percent rise. Not that the region has turned a corner, because a single year on a base this small moves easily on two or three larger deals. And not that capital is now available to the median founder, because concentration is the norm in every small market: a handful of companies take most of the money and the distribution stays lopsided.

What I would conclude is more practical. Build for a market bigger than the one you can drive to. Assume your round is smaller and slower than the equivalent round in Berlin, and design the plan so that is survivable. Get revenue earlier than feels comfortable, because in a market with 4 million euro deals, revenue is the only thing that reliably moves valuation. And use the ecosystem for what it is actually good at right now, which is people who have done it once before, not capital.

The optimistic reading is real too. A region that just moved 398 million euro across 109 companies has ten times the deal activity it had a decade ago, and the operators from those companies are the investors and mentors of the next cycle. That is how ecosystems compound. It just takes longer than a funding headline suggests.

If you are raising here now, I am curious which part is hardest: the first external customer, the local cheque, or the story that connects them. Tell me and I will write about that next.