West Region Romania needs to diversify access to finance for startups and scaleups. The establishment of the Business Angels’ Association in Timisoara is one of the concrete outcome of the iEER actions for West Region Romania to make the entrepreneurship ecosystem more conducive for startups.
One of the priorities of the iEER action plan for the West Region Romania is to diversify access to finance for startups and scaleups, by supporting the emerging VC network and the support organisations to establish links between Startups in the region and (inter)national VCs.
An important outcome of the joint efforts made by the actors of the local ecosystem in this direction is the setting up of the Business Angels’ Association in Timisoara.
The founding member of the Business Angels’ Association, Mr. Ciprian Man, shared with us the making of Growceanu – from “greu”(difficult) to “grow”.
Since 2016, the actors in the startup ecocystem in Timisoara have been working on various components which were lacking in the region. An important one was the involvement of local investor talent in startup entreprises. The idea of a business angel assoication came to be important action for us since it would hlep build a wider dialogue between entrepreneurs, existing business angels and other local ecosystem players such as NGOs, city planners, freelance techies and, of course, startups. At the end of 2018, Growceanu was founded and fill this gap by being the first business angel group in the region.
- iEER has played a significant direct and indirect role in this process: we had valuable input from the founders of the Finnish Startup Commons and other iEER partners, starting from their first visit to Romania in 2017. We also regularly met, discussed and acted together with the local partners, our friends from the West Regional Development Agency, we had received plenty of input and feedback during subsequent meetings. But one point which stands out the most is the connection facilitated by West RDA with the ESIL community (the Early Stage Investing Launchpad), headed by Business Angels Europe and the META Group and funded by the European Commission.
Link to the vidoe of the launch event
