Startup Skener 2026: 72.1 per cent of domestic start-ups looking for investment
The sixth edition of research by the Digital Serbia Initiative shows the ecosystem's ambitions are rising, but also that a third of teams still operate without stable revenue.
As many as 72.1 per cent of Serbian start-ups plan to raise external investment in 2026, while 25.4 per cent are targeting funding rounds above one million euros, three times more than in last year’s survey, when 7.6 per cent of teams set their sights that high, according to the sixth edition of Startup Skener published by the Digital Serbia Initiative (DSI) in May 2026. Access to smart capital is also rising: business angels funded 23.1 per cent of start-ups, and incubators and accelerators 23.8 per cent.
On the other side, a third of the start-ups surveyed in the same research operate without stable revenue, pointing to growing polarisation between teams that have found product-market fit and those still in the pre-market phase. The main challenges founders themselves cite are access to finance (60.5 per cent of responses) and customer and user acquisition (37.4 per cent), the portal Netokracija reported on 15 May.
EU funds as a parallel source
On the public-financing side, the IPA III pre-accession instrument and the Reform and Growth Facility for the Western Balkans together hold 14.2 billion euros for the 2021-27 period, plus a further 6 billion euros earmarked specifically for reforms and economic growth, according to figures the EU Delegation to Serbia publishes on the Europa.rs portal. Specifically for innovation projects in Serbia, the IPA 2019 project has secured 26 million euros of grant funding for the period through end-2026.
Nebojsa Bjelotomic, director of the Digital Serbia Initiative, told the daily Politika that the ecosystem had entered “a consolidation phase with growing differentiation”: the number of start-ups is flat compared with 2024, but the quality of teams and the size of ambitions are rising. Bjelotomic added that the appearance of the first domestic “unicorn”, with an estimated valuation of a billion euros, could be preceded by rounds of 30 to 50 million euros in 2026 or 2027.
Who is investing and who is supporting
The most active domestic venture capital fund in 2025 was South Central Ventures, with a portfolio of around 80 million euros covering the Western Balkans, while Telekom Srbija, through its Telegrupa fund, completed several investment rounds in domestic SaaS and fintech teams. The Innovation Fund of the Republic of Serbia, financed by a combination of budget resources and EU components, ran five public calls in 2025 with a combined value of 18.4 million euros, the fund said at the end of April.
Tech-market analyst and ICT Hub Ventures partner Kosta Andric told the Bizlife portal that growth in the ecosystem could be weighed down by “the classic capacity problem”: a shortage of senior engineers who could scale companies beyond 30 staff.
Regulatory context
During 2025 Serbia adopted amendments to the Investment Law that introduced the category of “innovation-activity investor”, with corporate tax relief for up to eight years for companies deriving at least 70 per cent of revenue from software development or research. Our understanding is that the status has been granted to 47 companies, with a combined project value of around 145 million euros. Foreign VC funds particularly prize the combination of this status with the relatively low senior engineer salary in Belgrade (around 3,500 euros net on average) and access to the EU market through the Stabilisation and Association Agreement.
The biggest rounds in 2025 and Q1 2026
Among the largest domestic funding rounds in the past four quarters, the standouts are Tenderly (a developer tool for blockchain) with a series B of 40 million dollars, ID-Wall (digital identification) with 12 million euros and the SaaS company Joberty with 8.5 million euros. All three rounds had foreign lead investors (Accel, Tiger Global and Project A respectively), while domestic funds and business angels co-invested with tickets of 500,000 to 2 million euros.
According to the Business Registers Agency, the number of newly established companies classified under information and communications technologies (NACE codes 62-63) reached 1,247 in the first quarter of 2026, growth of 8.4 per cent on the same period last year. The next ecosystem status report, the half-year snapshot for 2026, is scheduled for November.
