The fourth overview of the Belarus startup ecosystem reflects its state at the beginning of 2022 and was to be released in March 2022. However, this plan did not come true, in the same way like many others. Despite never-ending challenges — those we learned to deal with and unprecedented new ones — we decided to publish it to avoid the gap in the list of annual reports.
Its goal remains the same — help us to understand how the system is developing over the years and show prospects of innovative activity in the country.
Given period was notable in terms of investments attracted by startups and a slowdown of new deals.
We mapped a record number of transactions that are worth over a million dollars and a record amount of 411M USD raised by Belarusian startups. In 2021 we had many reasons to be proud: PandaDoc added Belarus to the list of countries with unicorn startups and other projects (Flo Health, Behavox, WorkFusion to name a few) picked up the pace to make the same list. We watched lots of M&A deals: VOCHI became part of the international company Pinterest, Targetprocess was acquired by Apptio, Rocketdata – by 2GIS and Begu by the Belarusian player Yamigom.
The record amount of investment was mainly ensured by megadeals, while the total number of investment deals has been decreasing for the third year in a row as well as the number of early investment deals.
Despite the overall slowdown of the flywheel’s spinning, we believe in the power of a new form Belarusian startup landscape is transforming into — distributed and international. However, it goes a long way to analyze, grow and celebrate our community. And at this stage of development, it is crucial to maintain and foster the connections between clusters.
P.S. Please, keep in mind this report was prepared before February 2022. We are fully aware the situation has significantly changed since then. Next January we’ll present the latest report with the analysis of how these changes have affected the ecosystem in 2022.
