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CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE • INNOVATION
EBRD Star Venture
JUNE 9, 2026
A team in Pristina is building cloud software for Swiss dental practices. Not a proof of concept, not a side project: a product live and aimed at one of Europe's most demanding markets. That is the opening image for Kosovo's EBRD Star Venture cohort, and it is a useful frame for what Kosovo's tech sector actually is.
Kosovo declared independence in 2008, making it one of Europe's youngest nations. Its tech sector is younger still, but the direction is clear. A population that skews young, speaks English, and has family ties to Germany, Switzerland, and the US has given the ecosystem a head start that raw GDP would not predict. ICT is Kosovo's fastest-growing export sector, and a wave of outsourcing companies from the 2000s and 2010s has begun producing founders who want to own the product, not just deliver the service.
Kosovo has the inputs that matter: talent, English fluency, and diaspora networks that reach deep into Western European markets. What it does not yet have is the full infrastructure to convert those inputs into venture-backed companies. Domestic capital is thin. There are no large homegrown institutional investors, and the country's market of 1.8 million gives founders limited room to grow before they have to go regional or international.
That is where EBRD investment and programmes like this one matter. The EBRD Star Venture Programme, run locally with Seedstars, works with founders at the stage when the technology is real but the business is not yet fundable: governance, hiring, investment readiness, and the introductions that turn a credible product into a scalable company.
Roaadent (roaa.ch) builds cloud-based dental practice management software for the Swiss market. Switzerland's dental sector runs on fragmented, largely manual processes, and Roaadent integrates AI and third-party APIs to solve that. The choice to build for Switzerland, rather than the home market, is a signal: the product is designed for the hardest buyer from the start.
POWERP (powerp.org) is an ERP platform covering financial management, HR, inventory, CRM, supply chain, and project management in a single system. It is built for businesses across the Balkans and beyond that still run on disconnected systems and manual workarounds. Coming from a full-cycle software engineering company, POWERP is a product that grew from years of building custom solutions for the same problems.
Kosovo's ecosystem is small, and domestic venture capital barely exists. Brain drain is real: many of the country's best engineers leave for Germany or Switzerland, often through the same diaspora channels that could otherwise serve as a market and network advantage. The programme cannot fix the capital gap alone, but it can give founders a concrete reason to build at home. And the diaspora, rather than being only a source of loss, can be what it already is for Roaadent: a direct line to a paying market.
