AB(B)A in a financial way

All entities strive for consolidation or consolidation. People, companies, countries. This gives rise to families, mergers, or mergers, and gatherings of different countries into specific organizations. Individualism undoubtedly brings many benefits, but consolidation has at least one more. Starting from this, the hypothesis of merging to achieve more significant economic benefits does not seem romantic. Mergers in these areas have been most pronounced in the last 100 years. At this moment, the most famous regional union happened in sports. The well-known regional basketball league, the ABA League, gathers all the most prominent clubs from the former Yugoslavia. The reason - creating and combining larger financial and competitive capacities. This is the best model that brings together countries from this area - economic interest, without involving religion, entities, language, or culture.

A little statistics: regionally, in 2020, Croatian startups raised 13, while Romanian startups raised ten times more investments compared to Serbian ones. In Serbia, over half of startups are funded by their funds.

Self-financing, or so-called Angel financing, is not an exception present only in our startup ecosystem; it is a regularity, but it is impractical if the entire system is based on it. Currently, in Serbia, there are about 300-400 startups, which, in the early (pre-seed) stage, collect 90% less funds than the global average. If we start from the fact that in the world, but also with us, pre-seed stage investments are predominantly financed by Angel investors (personal funds, family, friends), such statistics are not unusual, given the deviations in GDP per capita between Serbia and the global average. However, let's leave aside the analogy between Angel funding and GDP per capita and think about financing models for later stages of startup development in our country and the region.

Startups in their growth and development stages (pre-seed, seed, Series A, B, C) raise money in various ways. Distrust and high investment risk are the main reasons for problematic financing in the early stages of a startup's existence. For the early stages of startup development (pre-seed and seed), for which global practice has shown that the optimum investment is $25-100,000, there are several alternatives in Serbia, and a lot has been done on their development in recent years. However, how do you raise additional capital in the later stages of startup development? The main problem is financing the following steps: when startups become companies and when they start to achieve what they have envisioned. For the next stage, Series A, where up to $2 million is raised on average, significant VC funds are included.

The Baltic countries have been establishing their VC funds in the process of developing their markets, and over time, they came up with the idea of creating a regional BIF (Baltic Innovation Fund) in the form of a Fund of funds, which involves mixed financing (public and private).

If we define the region as a set of countries outside the former SFRY (Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania), we get great potential for developing the startup community. Some of the mentioned countries have their VC funds, some do not, and recently, Serbia also has its first VC fund, but why stop there, especially if we notice increasingly frequent discussions of globalization vs. localization? Roughly, superficially, and in terms of population, the Balkans can be considered local as one market because its area and number of inhabitants are smaller than France. However, this is only theoretical. In practice, all Balkan countries are sovereign with all their uniqueness. But what indeed remains undisputed is the possibility of mutual economic strengthening through a joint fund. Moreover, there are much larger foundations and aspirations for the so-called "Three Seas" initiative, yet there is one within the EU.

Based on the initially presented statistics on the size of investments here and in the region, the question arises as to why Croatia or Romania would want to participate in creating a regional VC fund. We can agree that there are similarities between the ABA League and the VC fund, but this is not a match in which some would win and others would lose. On the contrary, everyone would win. The benefits are joint - more investment opportunities, more money raised, the creation of regional startup incubators, more organized student attractions, and more organized hackathons. Obstacles exist, primarily of a regulatory nature, but practice has shown that forming a regional investment fund is possible. Just don't let there be a monopoly. That's what AB(B)A teaches us!