The European tech scene as a whole has made incredible progress and has the potential to produce world-leading tech giants. The entrepreneurial spirit is strong in Europe, and founders are encouraged to think bigger and stay persistent in their pursuit of innovation. In the early 2000s, European tech faced skepticism and a lack of funding, with many believing that success was only possible in Silicon Valley. However, the founders of companies like Skype, Booking.com, and Spotify persevered and proved that global tech companies could be built in Europe. And they were followed by many other companies born in Eastern Europe, as mentioned in the foreword section above.

Contributing to the progress made by the whole European ecosystem, Eastern Europe shows better and better alignment on most of the fundamental layers, setting companies on track for success—talent, grit, resilience, and nowadays more and more funding opportunities coming from within region as well as from European-level and international players.

Eastern Europe is home to a highly skilled workforce, thanks to strong technical education and a loyal employee base. This talent pool has been crucial to the success of companies like Bolt, Infobip, UiPath, and more.

Eastern Europe’s diverse markets, languages, and regulatory environment, while presenting challenges, have ultimately fostered resilient and adaptable companies. This “fragmentation” is viewed as an advantage for companies seeking global expansion.

Eastern Europe has abundant talent and a strong research base, positioning it well to lead in the AI revolution. Companies like ElevenLabs, Veridion, and more others are pushing the boundaries of engineering and technology in general with deep tech, dual use, and defense as some of the key pillars on which Eastern European startups focus.

Enjoy reading and join Eastern Europe’s journey of completing Europe’s must-haves in becoming one of the world’s startup powerhouses—and making the region called The Brave New Eastern Europe.

1,307 venture deals added up to a total volume of €3.76B

Top countries with investment volumes of more than €100M (8 in total, in descending order): Turkey, Greece, Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania

Out of the entire Eastern European block, 8 countries’ venture deals made up over 90% of the total investment volume in Eastern Europe, reaching €3.4B out of the total volume of €3.76B:

• Turkey: €1,012.2M
• Greece: €536.6M
• Poland: €462.9M
• Czech Republic: €426M
• Lithuania: €367M
• Estonia: €342.3M
• Slovakia: €129.8M
• Romania: €128.6M

The total volume recorded by the Romanian venture deals decreased slightly, reaching €128.6M in 2024 from €129.6M in 2023.

We’ve kept a session dedicated to Romanian venture deals where you can deep dive into a more complex analysis of its dynamic: Deep dive—Romanian venture deals.

For Romanian deals, 2024 was the fourth consecutive year when the investment volume broke the €100M mark.

Late-stage investments (especially series A to C) made up north of 62.8% of the total investment volume, €2.36B

2024 was a good year in Eastern Europe for late-stage investments. Thus, series A to C led the way with €651.7M that went to series A, €596.0M to series B, and €1,112.3M to series C. One possible explanation for this trend is the nearly complete integration of Eastern Europe into the European venture market. Nowadays, all notable European and international-level investors have Eastern European companies in their dealflow. Meanwhile, the total volume of seed stage investments surpassed that of series A deals in terms of total volume, reaching €655.5M. Both seed and series (A-C) stage investments recorded a slight increase in 2024 compared to 2023’s levels.

Pre-seed investments are still suffering, reaching just €103.7M. Pre-seed investments in 2024 showed a slight recovery, reaching €103.7M, up from €99.8M in 2023 but still significantly below 2022 levels, €140M, respectively. While investor caution remains high, funding appears to be stabilizing rather than continuing its decline. The market is still stabilizing, with pre-seed investments increasingly favoring startups that demonstrate clear traction and validation as investors adopt a more cautious approach. Economic factors continue to shape investment decisions, restraining early-stage funding and making it harder for unproven ideas to secure capital. Although not a full rebound, 2024 signals a potential turning point, suggesting that investor confidence in early-stage startups may be slowly returning.

Investment volume distribution by country and investment type

Distributing the investment volume per country and by type, we can observe that some ecosystems had a varied dealflow in 2024 with deals ranging from pre-seed to series A and even beyond that—Turkey, Poland, Greece, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Romania, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, Ukraine, and Latvia. At the same time, there were countries where deals mostly came from pre-seed and/or seed rounds—Serbia, North Macedonia, Moldova, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Albania.

Some of the most significant rounds were raised by the existing leaders, such as Poland’s ElevenLabs with its €160M+ series C tripling its valuation to €3B+ and many others.

Follow-on rounds represented over 90% of the total investment volume. Turkey, Greece, Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania contributed the most to this evolution

Reaching just a bit over €3.4B, follow-on rounds made up 92.8% of the total investment volume.

Follow-on deals involving startups from Turkey, Greece, Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania accounted for 92.7% of the total investment volume in follow-on rounds, totaling €3.22 billion. The breakdown of these investments is as follows:

• Turkey (€916.5M)
• Greece (€535.9M)
• Poland (€462.0M)
• Czech Republic (€399.4M)
• Lithuania (€358.9M)
• Estonia (€317.9M)
• Slovakia (€125.5M)
• Romania (€104.0M)

Among the companies that secured follow-on rounds in 2024, the top performers—highlighted in the section “Top 20 Companies Raising the Largest Venture Deals in Eastern Europe”—collectively raised over half of the total investment volume for the year.

1st rounds vs follow-ons: 10 countries contributed more than 90% to the total investment volume in the 1st rounds

The first rounds’ volume reached an investment volume of €272M, representing 7.2% of the total investment volume for the year.

92.1% of the volume of first-round deals involved startups from 10 countries. Here are the 10 out of the 22 Eastern European countries we tracked deals from that performed the best in terms of first rounds: Turkey, Romania, Czech Republic, Estonia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia. The full breakdown of volume by country is presented below.

During the year, 20 companies raised rounds (either single rounds or multiple rounds) that turned out to represent almost half of the total investment volume of 2024, more precisely 49.8%, reaching just over €1.8B.

These 20 deals were raised by the following companies: Vorpen AI (€270M, Lithuania), Getir (€225M, Turkey), Insider (€225M, Turkey), Rohlik (€160M, Czech Republic), D-Orbit (€150M, Greece), ICEYE (€110.6M, Poland), Mews (€101.4M, Czech Republic), Starship Technologies (€90M, Estonia), Axelera AI (€68M, Greece), Colendi (€58.5M, Turkey), FintechOS (€54M, Romania), Dgpays (€45.5M, Turkey), Spyke Games (€45M, Turkey), Stargate Hydrogen (€42M, Estonia), Kontakt.io (€41.8M, Poland), Midas (€40.5M, Turkey), Picus Security (€40.5M, Turkey), Blueground (€40.3M, Greece), Plan-S (€36M, Turkey) and Hellas Direct (€30.0M, Greece).

This year’s leaders are Turkey, Greece, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic, which together represent a significant majority of the capital raised in the top deals. Collectively, these countries account for over 81.9% of the total investment volume in the top 20 deals, showcasing their dominant role in the venture landscape. Poland, Estonia, and Romania also made notable contributions, further emphasizing the dynamic nature of venture capital in the region.

These funding rounds included companies from a variety of industries, with Finance, E-commerce, Marketing, and Aerospace being the most prominent. Collectively, these sectors have played a crucial role in shaping this year’s investment landscape. Remarkably, highly technical fields such as Aerospace, Deeptech, Cybersecurity, Energy, and Big Data represent nearly 25% of the total capital raised, underscoring their increasing significance. Additionally, sectors like Gaming and Telecommunications also contributed meaningfully, highlighting the diverse and dynamic venture capital environment in the region.

In this chapter, we’re showcasing a selection of standout deals involving startups from each country. As we explore these transactions, time will tell whether these companies will face challenges in their growth or emerge as the next wave of industry leaders. It’s evident that Eastern Europe has a strong community of builders and innovators, highlighting the region’s significant potential for fostering successful ventures. This diversity of talent and ambition truly reflects the essence of a plethora of builders making their mark on the tech landscape.

Find these deals below grouped by the origin country and by the size of the deals, in descending order.

Over the past two years, we’ve redesigned our Romanian Report to more effectively address the increasing interest in the investment landscape throughout Eastern Europe.

This initiative, known as the Venture in Eastern Europe Report, is complemented by an annual event held in Bucharest, scheduled for September 30, just before our How to Web Conference—the Venture in Eastern Europe Event.

Meanwhile, we’ve maintained a special focus on Romanian venture deals. Despite a relatively low capital per capita, the Romanian venture market has shown growth for the fourth consecutive year, drawing increasing interest from international investors.

4th consecutive year breaking the €100M mark of the total investment volume

With a total volume of €128.6M, Romanian deals broke the €100M mark for the 4th consecutive year. Compared to the previous year, we recorded only a slight 0.77% decrease in the total volume despite a significant 27.8% increase in the number of transactions—from 61 transactions in 2023 to 78 transactions in 2024.

This isn’t just good news. The data shows that FintechOS’ €54M series C represents 50%, half of the total investment volume of 2024.

Although it’s not the only time late-stage investment rounds take place, this comes both as a reason to celebrate such a milestone as well as evidence of the power law in the venture capital industry—only a tiny fraction of companies get to mark an exit event, be it an IPO or an acquisition of some sort. By luck, if not by design, almost every year for the past 3+ years, there were a few companies that managed to break through the “messy middle” and make their way out of the pre-product/market fit era of their companies and raise substantial subsequent funding in 2023: FlowX (€35M), DRUID (€30M), Creatopy (€9M), Veridion (€5.4M), Sienna (€4.2M), Sera (€3.2M), Arcanna (€3.2M); in 2022: DRUID (€14.1M), Digital (€10.3M), Bware Labs (€6M), Bunnyshell (€3.8M), Machinations (€3.2M), NeuroLabs (€3M), Cyscale (€3M); and in 2021 again FintechOS (€51M) to name a few.

Maintaining 16x growth of the investment volume in 2024 compared to 2017

To put things into perspective, the total investment volume of 2024 grew by 16x compared to 2017’s €8.2M.

Heavy lifters FintechOS, BibleChat, and dotLumen’s rounds made up north of 66% of the total investment volume

These types of funding rounds are becoming more common, so they shouldn’t be considered outliers.

2024 was another of the years when a few of Romania’s darlings raised their (subsequent) rounds, with FintechOS as the headliner now reaching series C with its €54M. BibleChat’s rocketship journey, becoming the fastest-growing early-stage startup in Europe over the past 12 months, showed that the path for even more Romania-born companies toward the scaling stage is not just a trail. This section’s subchapter presents a plethora of builders from Romania.

Follow-on rounds’ volume remained steady, and so did the first rounds’ volume

The number of follow-on transactions decreased by 27.7% from 36 transactions in 2023 to only 26 transactions in 2024, whereas the volume slightly increased, reaching €104M compared to €96.8M recorded in the previous year.

While the number of first rounds doubled, growing by 108%, the volume of first-round deals remained very similar to the previous year, reaching €24.6M compared to €32.8M recorded in 2023, recording a 25.4% decrease.

Pre-seed rounds received show signs of a revival

The number of pre-seed transactions nearly doubled in 2024, growing by 76.5% and reaching 30 transactions compared to the previous year’s 17 transactions. The volume of pre-seed transactions in 2024 reached €7.2M, 4.6% higher than in 2023.

Despite the notable achievements of Bitdefender, eMAG, and the more recent UiPath or FintechOS, which have shown the world the potential of Romanian startup teams in establishing global businesses, they cannot and will not compensate for the top-of-the-funnel issue, meaning the pre-seed and seed stages.

The last significant big leap was recorded between 2017 and 2018 when it tripled from 8 to 25. But that was ages ago in a startup’s lifetime. The number of pre-seed transactions then held steady for around 6 years, only now showing signs of recovery.

Romania-born startups get in more and more of the regional and international VCs’ portfolios—nearly a 10% growth rate of the mixed-level capital in 2024 compared to 2023

The total volume of investments made in 2024 by a mix of local, regional, or international VCs in Romanian-born startups reached €91.4 million, growing by 10.4% compared to €82.8 million in 2023.

Put in perspective, 2024 represented a peak for such transactions in terms of volume (€91.4M) compared to the levels of such investments made since 2021—€68.1M—when we first recorded such dealflow activity between local and regional or international investors.

Adding to this, we observed that also the volume of transactions with a local source of capital went up by 49.6%, reaching €18.8M, and more than doubling the number of transactions compared to the previous year—reaching 41 transactions in 2024 compared to 18 transactions in 2023.

In hindsight, we can see that the volume of transactions that were made exclusively with national-level capital reached a peak in 2021, with €43.5M and 67 transactions, respectively.

This switch in the dynamic happened while the volume of transactions that were made exclusively with international-level capital went down by 36.8%, getting to only €18.4M as compared to the €29.1M volume recorded in the previous year.

The 80/20 rule: the top 20 Romanian venture deals represented 80+% of the total volume

Contributing 87.7% to the total volume raised by Romania-born startups, the top 20 deals amounted to €114.6M in 2024 and were raised by the following companies (in descending order of their total fundraising made in 2024): FintechOS (€54M), Biblechat (€12.4M), dotLumen (€5M), MOOV Leasing (€5M), Blindspot (€3.2M), Filmchain (€3M), Ogre AI (€3M), Frisbo (€2.9M), Pago (€2.2M), Adapta Robotics (€2M), Bright Spaces (€1.9M), Sessions (€1.9M), Genezio (€1.8M), inki.tech (€1.6M), Footprints (€1.6M), Swisspod (€1.6M), MixRift (€1.4M), LifeBox (€1M), and Youni (€1M).

These companies are addressing the following industries presented below (in decreasing order of the total volume raised): Finance (€56.2M), Well-being (€12.6M), Deeptech (€6.8M), Automotive (€5.0M), Marketing (€4.8M), E-commerce (€4.5M), Entertainment (€3.0M), Big Data (€3.0M), Robotics (€2.0M), and Real Estate (€1.9M).

A plethora of builders from Romania

As in the case of every Eastern European-born or global startup, time will tell whether it will be struggling to survive or turn into a rising star. Seemingly Romania has a plethora of builders that during the year raised promising rounds (in descending order of their total fundraising made in 2024): Parol (€1.2M), Youni (€1M), Fagura (€0.9M), DesignVerse (€0.8M), Jobful (€0.6M), Vestinda (€0.5M), FieldOS (€0.5M), Questo (€0.4M), and more.

Top industries addressed by Romania-born startups

More than 70% of the investment volume of 2024 was raised by startups addressing the following 5 industries: Finance (€58.4M), Well-being (€12.7M), HR (€9.8M), Deeptech (€6.8M), and Automotive (€5.0M), totaling €92.8M.

Romanian diaspora founders and founding rounds: volume of funding in 2025

by Mircea Ghita, Principal at Metis Ventures and Venture in Eastern Europe 2024 Report Contributor

In August 2023, Mircea wrote about the funding volume raised by Romanian founders in the country vs. Romanian founders in the diaspora. At that time, the data suggested that diaspora founders had raised around 6x more than founders based in Romania. Since then, we have new info—especially from this report—and it’s time to update the numbers.

Our report shows a total funding volume of €130.7M in 2024 for Romanian startups. This figure covers everything from pre-seed to Series B+ rounds, plus various convertibles.

Worth noting is that about €35M are new rounds, while about €95.7M are follow-on rounds.

Updated data on diaspora

In his original article, Mircea mentioned that Romanian diaspora founders had raised about $104M in pre-seed, seed, and Series A (notably from companies like Datology AI, Ezra, Tektonic AI, etc.). Now, let’s expand that to include the end of 2024 data and align with the broader coverage of Series B+ rounds, as done in this report.

Here are some important diaspora rounds:

• Databricks: $10B (Series J)
• Harmonic: $75M (Series A)
• Dexory: $80M (Series B)
• Starcloud: $24M (pre-seed + seed)
• Cascade AI: $3.5M
• others undisclosed (another about $14.5M)

Including the Databricks outlier, the total diaspora figure increases to $10.3B+, which includes $10B from Databricks and an additional $301M or so. Databricks skews this number massively.

Making sense of the numbers

• With Databricks included, we’re looking at over $10B raised by diaspora founders, dwarfing the €130.7M in Romania.
• Excluding Databricks gives us about $301M total for diaspora—still 2.3x higher than the local figure (considering the EUR-USD conversion too).
• Keep in mind that the €130.7M local figure also includes many follow-on rounds (like FintechOS’s €60M series B extension)—some of which started years ago—while much of the diaspora data I’ve listed above references relatively fresh raises.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the conclusion remains the same: diaspora founders manage to attract more capital largely because they have better access to funding networks and, in many cases, more advanced know-how derived from operating in mature ecosystems. In fact, Mircea tends to believe that many experienced diaspora founders left Romania precisely because they struggled to find the right support—be it in terms of capital, mentorship, or market opportunities—back home. This doesn’t mean local founders can’t succeed; rather, it emphasizes the importance of building stronger support structures within Romania’s startup ecosystem so that talented entrepreneurs feel they can thrive.

What 2024 showed is that the industry is experiencing a cycle turn—a focus on frugality, dedication, and grinding with all forces to solve really hard problems using technology. In order to bring hard things to life, grit and endurance are essential. The brutality of the market is a normal thing. It always has been so in the early stages of startups. Because of last year’s hype, both founders and investors lost some discipline. But we can now see that the focus turned back on metrics and capital efficiency. The best companies always have an amazing work ethic. Startups are damn hard and require this intensity to survive and thrive. This is the reality, like it or not.

The VC industry is a long game. The whole idea about equity investment is that $1 today can have potentially exponential returns tomorrow, returning $10-1,000+ in enterprise value. Besides, successful startups are built by exceptional people—if you lock in founders with private-equity-style deals, aren’t you saying you don’t believe you invested in the top people for the job? Aggressive terms now may invite retaliation later, damaging potential growth. Now more than ever, as Europe continues to rise and new technology trends, like deep tech, go mainstream, the message is clear—the next step is about building huge value, not just giving early-stage money and hope for a small M&A. It requires cooperation over conquest between all the parties involved. It requires new investors and new thinking in the established ones.

To further accelerate the growth of the Eastern European tech ecosystem, it is essential to address the funding gaps both in the very early stages as well as in the late stages, foster a more supportive regulatory environment, and continue to cultivate vibrant tech hubs across the region.

We collected most of the deals made public by sourcing from Crunchbase and media outlets. We then added to the public data a layer of data coming from operators in the region—from business angel groups to programs and communities to VCs and all in between. All of them are mentioned within the acknowledgments section at the beginning of this report, under the data providers line. We thank them all again for making this possible.

There are no perfect reports, and there is no perfect set of data. Please assume an accuracy level of around 90-95% on the numbers presented. Our data verification and validation process is a process of human intelligence, complemented by input from How to Web’s network.

In terms of positioning our report’s data, it’s also important to note that we combined several data collection and verification methods, including:

• aggregating public information about investment rounds
• data from trusted contributors such as angels, VCs, startups, accelerators, relevant organizations and institutions, and other noteworthy reports, etc.
• third-party sources for data points such as Crunchbase and Linkedin profiles etc.
• informed assumptions

Here is how you should look at the data and stats and what the main criteria for keeping a startup on our final list of transactions are (or not). The data was selected and labeled based on the following set of rules:

We tracked only equity investments of companies with either Eastern European headquarters, Eastern European founding teams (or strong representation of Eastern Europeans in the founding teams), or strong ties to the Eastern European market. We did not include in the final list of transactions grants, loans, convertible notes, buyouts, etc. We didn’t include deals that are committed but not signed yet or still in progress (on crowdfunding platforms, for example). We did add bridge rounds, but we tagged those as “follow-on.”.

All equity investments with no public value have been eliminated. Their number is small, and while it affects the totals, it does not affect them significantly.

Investments with no specified investors were also not included, as many of those are actually grants, service payments, or other similar financing instruments and not equity investments.

There’s more capital to be added via grants, private and institutional undisclosed VC and angel rounds, or money committed but not wired. We didn’t add these to the final analysis in order to keep the total volume accurate, but we did keep a raw version of all this data in the datasets to which you’ll find a link at the end of the report.

The list of transactions does not include investments in foreign startups with Eastern European founders. However, we did make a couple of exceptions. We list all transactions in EUR or convert them into EUR if they originated in a different currency.

Transactions up to €300K were tagged as pre-seed rounds, all transactions between €300K and €3M were tagged as seed rounds, and everything above €3M was tagged as a Series A round. Exceptionally, some transactions above €300K were tagged as pre-seed based on the timing of the round and conversations with the founders about the objectives for the round. Additionally, we classified investments smaller than €3M as Series A rounds due to the companies’ expansion into the regional market. Using this classification, some companies have raised multiple pre-seed and seed rounds if the total capital raised was not over €200K, respectively €3M.

Splitting capital between investors in a transaction was made using the simple rule that the lead investor contributes 80% of the capital, while the co-investor with 20% of the capital. Although this is not an exact approximation, it is certainly within a reasonable range. We also made a split attribution of capital volume by local capital exclusively/international exclusively or mixed.

Do let us know if you find anything that should be updated.