The Region’s Biggest Export Is Founders

Maybe we (Central & Eastern Europe) don't have market scale or deep capital pools, but we sure do have experts. The talents that built some of the most important technologies and solutions of our time.

For better or worse, CEE has exported more brilliant minds than we can keep track of. Some are more prominent and visible than others, which helps us in this cause. Inspired by the most recent findings from Yoram Wijngaarde, CEO of Dealroom, we dived into Dealroom's European Diaspora Index.

As Wijngaarde was curious to research how European diaspora moved the needle for so many big tech companies, I was driven by the same curiosity – to find familiar CEE names and surnames in the list.

So, here is how it went. We sifted through the list of unicorns founded by founders who are originally from one of the following countries: Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechia, Croatia, Hungary, Greece, Slovenia, Estonia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Serbia, Ukraine, North Macedonia, Latvia, Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Moldova, and Cyprus.

"Originally" here encompasses founders who were born in Europe at least, and then moved abroad either as a child or at a later stage in life; and the founders who grew up in Europe, but later moved the business elsewhere. A company appears in the list if at least one co-founder's country of origin, as recorded in the source index, is one of the 21 countries listed.

Disclaimer: Origin is the founder's, not the company's.

Where the founders came from

Counted by company, Ukraine leads by a wide margin. Counted by value, Poland does (on the strength of a single company, though). Both readings are below; be wary – neither is the whole story on its own.

Companies with founders from two listed countries: PayPal (Ukraine and Poland), Upgrade (Bulgaria and Kosovo), Cyberhaven (Romania and Ukraine) — are counted under both. Croatia, Slovakia, North Macedonia and Montenegro have no companies in the index at all.

Four companies carry 3/4 of the total

OpenAI, xAI, Databricks and Snowflake together account for $1.41 trillion, 78% of the region's $1.8 trillion. The remaining 82 companies are worth $395 billion.

Worth noting: Full company value is not attributed to the founder's share of the company, so $1.8T is the value of companies these founders helped start, not value they own. Weighting each company by its founder share gives roughly $360bn instead of $1.8T.

Six of eighty-six stayed home

Only six of the 86 companies were founded in the founder's home country. The other 80 were founded abroad, 76 of them in the United States.

Each dot is one company. 

The six are: Grammarly and Creatio (Ukraine), UiPath (Romania), Skype and Pipedrive (Estonia), blueground (Greece). All six are headquartered in the United States today.

All 86 companies

Sort by any column, filter by country of origin, or search by name. Highlighted chips are origin countries from the 21 in scope; grey chips are co-founders' countries outside the CEE and Baltics.