In the past two months I accelerated my sourcing efforts in the region. I have a few observations that seem to be valid for some countries in the region, however this post is focusing on Romanian founders - as this was my sourcing focus. So it might be too early to draw conclusions for other countries.

But it looks like Romanian founders leaving the country are doing much better than the ones in the country - at least in terms of fundraising & gaining investors’ confidence.

Locally, only few startups actually raise good money lately. Data from Dealroom, The Recursive and Activize show that startups in Romania raised about €15M (apx. $17M) in pre-seed, seed and series A in 2024. My data shows a bit more - apx. €17-18M, but let’s focus on the public data as the next part of the post is doing the same and the delta is also quite small. The main rounds were the ones of Genezio, .Lumen, CogniSync and a few others.

However, I was surprised when I found out how much Romanian founders who co-founded startups in other regions have raised. About $104M or apx. 6x more! And this includes only 9 companies (also in pre-seed, seed and series A): Datology AI ($46M), Ezra ($21M), Tektonic AI ($10M), Adfin ($4.9M), Bluefish AI ($3.5M), Root Global (€8M), Deltia (€4.5M), Filmchain ($3M) and MixRift ($1.6M; a bit “less diaspora” though) - so an avg. of $11.5M per company.

To put it differently, only 14% of the money raised by Romanian founders were raised by founders in the country. Here’s a piechart to show that:

Interestingly, some of these companies do not even get to talk to the local VCs. I know some of these names are new for some people (I checked it). Most of the funding came from from really good investors: Index, .72, Felicis, Radical, Crane, Point9, Cavalry and others. Romanian investors’ money were probably less than 2% of the total raised by diaspora. And btw, there’s data I am missing here (as I know some other founders who did not publicly share much about their rounds).

Why is this happening? Is it because resources here are too scarce? Is it because of the different approaches in growing a startup? Is it that strong founders do not find co-founders? Or is it just “correlation and no causation” type of situation?

Well, from some of the discussions I had it’s mainly that founders were already connected to the “new” regions they were in. They were already there, it was not necessarily a decision to move out of RO to found the startup somewhere else. So I tend to believe it’s rather a macro reason behind this. Romanians go west for better schools, jobs and opportunities. Many perform well in their career and later they end up founding startups there. However, I know a few cases the founders could’ve been more flexible in choosing where to start the company. They met their co-founders in their previous remote jobs but the decision was to open the company directly in the western markets. And that’s natural, especially if the other co-founders are from there. In both cases, technical teams are many times in CEE.

If you’re a diaspora founder I did not include in this, let me know. At some point you will probably receive a message from me anyway. And by the way, at Metis, we help you out connecting with many of the western investors too.