One in three Serbian startups made no revenue at all

The Digital Serbia Initiative published the sixth edition of its Startup Scanner research this year, and the revenue picture in it is the most useful thing anyone has written about our ecosystem in a while. For every three startups in Serbia, one generated no revenue at all last year, and another recorded annual revenue of up to 50,000 euro. Startups with revenue above one million euro are, in the report's framing, close to a statistical margin of error.

Alongside that sits an ambition number: about a quarter of domestic startups are aiming for investment rounds above one million euro. Read the two together and you get the actual problem in one line. A large part of the ecosystem is planning a million euro raise from a base of either zero revenue or the price of a used car.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a joke about founders. It is not their fault alone, and the ambition is not the flaw. Most of these companies are young: earlier ecosystem data put Serbia above 700 startups with the majority founded between 2021 and 2023, so a lot of what the survey captures is genuinely pre revenue by age rather than by failure.

Still, the gap between the revenue distribution and the funding ambition tells you what most local companies are missing, and it is not capital. It is a repeatable sale. A company with 30,000 euro of revenue from four customers it can explain is in a far better fundraising position than a company with zero revenue and a beautiful roadmap, and investors in this region will tell you the same thing in blunter language.

What I would take from the report as a founder, concretely. First, treat any revenue at all as a milestone worth optimising for this quarter, even small and unscalable revenue, because it moves you out of the largest and least distinguishable group in the market. Second, stop benchmarking your raise against headlines from Berlin or Tel Aviv: with local rounds this size, a million euro ask needs traction that would justify a much bigger round elsewhere. Third, if you are in the up to 50,000 euro band, the interesting question is not how to raise, it is which single customer segment you could take from four customers to twenty with the product you already have.

There is an ecosystem level reading too, and it is the part I work on. Where this market loses companies is between an idea and a first external customer. We have programs, we have mentors, we have events. What we have much less of is people who have personally closed a business to business deal outside Serbia and will sit on the call with a founder while they try. That skill, not capital, is the scarce input the revenue distribution is describing.

Two honest caveats about the numbers. Survey based ecosystem research skews toward companies that are visible and willing to answer, and self reported revenue bands are approximate. Also, plenty of profitable small software companies here would never call themselves startups, so the picture is grimmer than the wider tech economy actually is.

The headline I would write from this data is not that Serbian startups are failing. It is that most of them have not yet had the conversation where a stranger pays them money, and everything else in the ecosystem, including the funding ambition, is downstream of that one conversation.

If you are one of the companies in that first third, I am interested in what has kept the first sale away: the product, the market, or the fact that nobody in the team wants to do sales. That last answer is more common than people admit.