Invest in country: Serbia

SGS

SGS is a Swiss inspection company with worldwide operations. They seek startups to collaborate with and/or buy, which could help their inspection operations.

They’re especially interested in AI, machine vision, target recognition, IoT (e.g. humidity measurements), 3D mapping of bulk cargo, 3D modeling of buildings and construction sites, safety regulation management software – in general anything that helps make inspections faster, with lower manpower costs, and with more evidence of what was inspected.

Verge HealthTech Fund

Verge HealthTech Fund invests globally into startups building global next-generation health solutions. They seek health tech companies with commercial or at least clinical validation.

The fund’s partners are health tech founders and operators, with experience in building and scaling companies internationally.

As a global fund, they prefer to partner with local partners on investments, either as a lead or follow investor, but they have also made solo investments as well.

They typically seek a board or at least a board observer seat.

Health Founders

Health Founders is the first health tech accelerator in the Baltics, based in Estonia. Their digital-first acceleration program for early-stage startups focuses on helping health tech companies to grow sales, work with the regulatory framework, and everything health-specific about building a business. They seek non-invasive health tech companies with at least a demo version of their solution.

They run 1-2 batches per year, each ending with a demo day for investors and potential clients.

DYNAX Invest

DYNAX Invest is a angel syndicate from Bulgaria that focuses on supporting selected startups through investments, fundraising the rest of the funding round and advisory. They focus on European startups, and have done especially many investments in the CEE region.

They are industry-agnostic. Having a tech element is a plus, but not mandatory. They have a strong preference for startups with traction, either revenue or otherwise. In expectional cases, for example a deep tech startup, could be interesting also before traction.

Their team has extensive experience with M&A and investment banking, including fundraising.

They can help find a lead investor, but are not leading rounds themselves. They normally don’t seek a board seat.

Exerte

Exerte Partners is a family office from Cyprus. They invest generalistically, but have a slight emphasis on food, biotech, energy and SaaS solutions. Their expertise includes scaling and internationalization, as well as optimizing at scale.

They invest typically as a co-investor, but have occasionally lead rounds in cases they know especially well (e.g. food). They don’t generally do convertible notes.

Swiss Post Ventures

Swiss Post Ventures is the fund of Swiss Post, who operate a multi-billion euro business in fleet management, public transportation (buses), postal offices, communication services etc., mostly in Switzerland. Swiss Post has 60k employees, Swiss Post Ventures has three people.

They’re looking for startups especially in mobility, logistics, cyber security, communication platforms, and digital health.

The startups they invest into should have some link into Swiss Post’s value chain and ecosystem.

They are often a follow investor, and prefer to invest less than 50% of the round. They have occasionally been a lead investor for a startup whose market they understand exceptionally well.

Runa Capital

Runa Capital is a US-European software fund focused on helping European companies enter the US market and vice versa. They focus on deep tech, B2B SaaS, and regulated industries, like fintech, education and digital health.

The founders of Runa Capital are serial tech entrepreneurs. Before their work as investors, the founders of Runa Capital built companies like Acronis, that raised their last round of $250M at a $3.5B valuation, as well as Parallels and Acumatica, also very successful software companies.

They mostly invest B2B and B2B2C. They rarely do invest in exceptional B2C companies as well.

Invests as solo, lead or follow. More likely to be a follow investor at earlier stages, and lead in the later stages. They typically join the company boards in later stage investments.

Highrise Ventures

Highrise Ventures focuses on European startups in proptech, smart buildings and adjacent fields. The team was experience both as investors and founders in ecommerce, IoT, real estate, proptech and construction tech startups. Urban tech, greentech, sustainability, urban mobility and energy sources and energy infrastructure are also interesting for them.

They invest mostly in B2B and B2B2C tech companies, especially deep tech. They’re generally not that interested proptech transaction or asset valuation companies. They are very welcoming for diverse teams as well as first-time founders.

They’re also interested in company building and company replication opportunities, and they have a team that is able to support these endeavours. Around a quarter of their portfolio fits these models.

They’re often either the only investor or a co-investor of a round, with leading a round being rare for them.

Angular Ventures

Angular Ventures invests into early-stage B2B companies, especially those aiming to sell to big companies. They invest into European and Israeli founders globally, as well as teams based in Europe or Israel.

They prefer software companies, with hardware being ok as long as the main value is in the software side. Marketplaces are also interesting to them, especially if they value-add services to users. They’re interested in both deep and regular tech as long as they’re sellable to enterprise customers and the capital needs are reasonable.

They have an extensive venture partner program of senior experts in companies like Google to help portfolio companies get their offering and processes right for enterprise customers.

They often lead initial rounds but not the follow-on ones.

Wharton Alumni Angels

Wharton Alumni Angels has approx. 400 members doing angel investments into promising startups globally. Their most active regional clubs are in US, UK & Europe, and Brazil. They prefer tech-enabled companies that have early revenue or other significant indications of their ability to start scalable growth.