With the aim of investing in technology companies engaged in the development of high-tech products and services operating in Central and Eastern Europe, a new venture capital fund named Vesna has recently been established, the first such fund in these areas. So far, the fund has raised 50 million euros, with a special focus on Croatian and Slovenian companies. The fund is designed to promote technology transfer from Slovenian and Croatian scientific organizations, as well as to bring the results of investments in science closer to the market, explains fund manager Dalibor Marijanović.
– The innovation we promote will have a high-tech foundation that has been developed or will be developed at our research institutions. In other words, the fund encourages the commercialization of scientific results. We invest in companies that have emerged as spin-offs from universities and institutes or those that develop new products and services funded through research and development projects together with scientific organizations. So, we are talking about high-tech companies – explains Marijanović.
The fund will invest in companies developing technology related to addressing climate challenges, advanced materials, and artificial intelligence. The plan is also to increase the number of projects in the early development phase that could enter the market.
– Regarding projects, we have interesting solutions being offered to us from some medical solutions in the area of recovery from strokes, wound recovery, or knee injuries to technical solutions in the field of artificial intelligence, drone management, or product anti-counterfeiting – adds Marijanović, but emphasizes that the main goal of the fund is to increase its value by three to four times.
Specifically, the fund in Croatia is already collaborating with Croatian universities, faculties, and institutes such as the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, the Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Technology, the Ruđer Bošković Institute, the University of Rijeka, the University of Split, and the University of Osijek, as well as Algebra University. Some of the partners in Slovenia are the University of Maribor and the University of Ljubljana, while in Italy, it is the nearby CERIC research center in Trieste.
One of the partners in the fund is also Dražen Oreščanin, co-founder and former CEO of Business Intelligence and co-founder and board member of startup Legit, which emerged as a spin-off from Business Intelligence. Oreščanin says he got involved in the Vesna fund because he has known the other partners for a long time – Dalibor Marijanović, Nina Dremelj, Maja Križan, Srdja Iveković – with whom he has previously collaborated on other projects where they were in different organizations, such as HAMAG or the Business Angels Slovenia association.
