Every regional ecosystem eventually asks the same question: does local capital create companies, or just follow them? Big foreign investors mostly want mature startups, not first-cheque risk, which leaves the earliest, hardest stage to funds based here. And the question is getting sharper: when code is cheap and a small team can ship in weeks, a first cheque buys something very different from what it did five years ago. Three investors operating at different scales, from one Romanian region to CEE to pan-European, discuss what regional money can actually build, what it can't, and what has to come from somewhere else.
