The Visegrad Fund authority approved the grant for PEDAL Consulting to support the mainstreaming of alternative finance mechanisms for entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMEs in the Central and Eastern Europe.

The context of the project is capitalizing on current trends in alternative finance and impact investing, especially crowdfunding and crowdinvesting and cross-border impact investments for SMEs, startups and enterprises in CEE. With this project, we aim to set the grounds to advance the ecosystem and enabling environment in Serbia, by conducting know-how transfer and resources transfer from the Visegrad countries: Slovakia, Poland, The Czech Republic and Hungary. Serbia has not yet enabled needed regulatory framework for crowd investing, crowdlending or alternative investment funds, despite the growing need for new mechanisms of support among the target group. In terms of crowdfunding, in the period 2012-2016 a total of app. 655.000$ has been crowdfunded in Serbia, while in 2017 alone the sum went over 700.000$ and in 2018 two Serbian startups got more than 1.2M$ in investments on a UK platform Crowdcube. A number of international projects and investment funds is looking into Serbian startups and SMEs for scalable and replicable businesses and solutions and opportunities to invest in them. This project aims to focus on best examples of practices in Visegrad countries, research the Serbian context, as well provide more insights, data and incentives for SMEs, startups and enterprises to turn to alternative finance mechanisms as financing tool.

The project is slated to start in June 2019 for the period of 12 months.

For more information, please contact r.miskuf@pedal-consulting.eu