November 16 (SeeNews) - Bulgaria is leader in Southeast Europe (SEE) in terms of the number of locally based venture capital funds, a report published by the Bulgarian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA) showed.
New funds raised in Bulgaria reached $251 million (241.3 million euro) year-to-date in 2022 after $111 million in the full 2021, according to the Startups and Venture Capital In South Eastern Europe report published last week. Thus, more funding was raised in the last 18 months than ever before in Bulgaria.
Venture capital investments into Bulgarian startups amounted to $244 million year-to-date, making the 2022 result the second highest after record-breaking 2021 when investments reached $475 million.
The report further showed that the enterprise value of startups in Bulgaria grew to $5.6 billion in 2022 from $903 million in 2017. In terms of enterprise value, Bulgaria comes third after Romania and Greece. According to the report, the three countries combined form over 70% of the SEE ecosystem enterprise value.
The combined enterprise value of startups in the SEE region surged to $31.8 billion in the first half of 2022 from $5.5 billion in 2017, growing almost twice as fast as Europe’s startups.
The SEE has already produced nine unicorns, including Bulgarian-founded payment management platform Payhawk. The region currently has 11 future unicorns, including Bulgarian-founded startups Gtmhub and Hyperscience.
Startups in Bulgaria account for over 80 job openings per 100,000 inhabitants. Thus, the country comes first ahead of Greece with over 60 job openings and Croatia with over 50.
Overall, Bulgarian and Croatian startups are three times more likely to be backed by venture capital funds compared to startups in Kosovo, Albania or Montenegro, the report showed.
($ = 0.9616 euro)