Page 29 - bne Magazine August 2022

bne August 2022 Companies & Markets I 29
Impact Hub’s Moslavac acknowledges the problem of brain drain and the difficulties in reversing it, but says it’s important to look for the positives. “We have good examples from other counties where lot of good talent left, but brought back knowledge and often funding,” he says. “I don’t think the brain drain is something that can really be stopped, but probably there are ways for Serbia to benefit more from great people that are not physically here.”
Petrovic also talks of Serbia’s “very big technical diaspora”, with highly educated Serbians who left their home country now sharing experience and knowledge. Like Bjelotomic, he believes there has been movement back into Serbia since the start of the pandemic, not least because it was one of the first countries in Europe to roll out a mass vaccination programme.
He believes Serbia has benefited from its relationships with developing countries forged during the Cold War when Yugoslavia was one of the leaders of the non-aligned movement. Even today, Serbia is well known among those nations. “We’re a brand in these countries, [young people are] still coming here to go to college,” he says. This brings new talented graduates into Serbia.
More recently, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, countries across emerging Europe, including Serbia, have received a flood of immigrants, among them numerous tech professionals. These include both Ukrainians fleeing the war and Russians and Belarusians who can no longer live with their government’s actions and their countries’ international isolation. DataArt’s Zavileysky comments that the Serbian market "is welcoming many engineers from Russia and Ukraine, which certainly has an impact”.
Starting with education
The start of creating a new generation of tech talent lies in education, and the DSI is reaching out to universities and schools to help. The organisation has been working with the education system from elementary school right through to postgraduate level. This includes the Master 2.0 programme where the DSI brings different faculties together to create cross-disciplinary master programmes that give students the skills to work in industries such as game development.
Industry representatives say that while Serbia provides a good technical education more needs to be done on the commercial side. “We need to change that,” says Bjelotomic. “It’s good that we are good engineers, but it’s important to note that people investing in startups are predominately from the financial sphere. They are looking for entries and exits, not necessarily for the best technology.”
Similarly, Moslavac says that Serbia has a strong education that is “left over from the old system of building good engineers”. However, he says, “being a good engineer doesn’t make you a good businessman ... to build a a good startup you have to understand business. There are a lot of smart people around but it’s not about building a perfect product, it’s about having a perfect customer for the product.”
On the other hand, Traken’s Petrovic is positive about Serbia’s "very good old school, technically based curriculum” which, he believes, “is a goldmine if you know how to act on it”. This education is coming into its own with the emergence of the blockchain industry.
Global companies with Serbian roots
One constraint cited many times by industry figures in Belgrade is the small size of the Serbian market. That being the case, ambitious startup founders look to go international from the start or at least early on in their development.
“The size of the market is a challenge for startup founders here. It’s a very small market with not such a startup culture,” says Maslovac. “Serbia is place of talent – there is certainly
a lot of talent in Serbia, especially tech talent – however, such a market makes it very difficult to build a product or service for the customer, as this is a numbers game. This is why it’s very interesting to approach the market of the Western Balkans, which has a potential 20mn users instead of 6mn for their services.”
Some of the really standout Serbia-founded companies
went abroad early on. Among them is consulting, software engineering and digital product development company HTEC Group, which now has its headquarters in San Francisco. In 2021, the company bought up Momentum Design Lab in Silicon Valley, following this with the announcement of a $140mn investment from Brighton Park Capital for global expansion. That deal was among the largest initial funding rounds by dollar value in Europe in the past year, HTEC said at the time.
Following the latest investment round, the aim is to “build HTEC into one of the most impressive global technology consulting companies,” said Aleksandar Cabrilo, CEO of HTEC Group at the time of the investment. The company, founded in 2008 as a startup within the Business Technology Incubator of Technical Faculties of the University of Belgrade, has now grown into an international company that employs over 1,000 people.
Startups interviewed by bne IntelliNews also referenced international expansion. Traken, for example, is seeking to work with electricity companies from other European countries rather than focussing on Serbia.
Joberty is fundraising for a seed round that it plans to use for its expansion to global markets, including the US. “Our plans are ambitious, but simply that's the only way to go,” said Mijailovic. “The startup scene is very fast-paced, and if you move slowly, you might still survive, but you won't win big time. Big dreams took us here, and we won't stop until we succeed globally.”
EatMeApp’s Lazovic-Lønningen says "going global” when asked about the future plans for the company. At the same time, however, she talks of the power of Serbia’s culture
and social networks. “[Co-founder] Sanja Dramicanin] and myself ... want to create even stronger momentum in Serbia,” Lazovic-Lønningen says. “We dream big, cross-border, but our heart is where our home is and our grandmothers are.”
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