It’s hard to imagine the creation of a tech startup community without access to first- class universities. After all, a dorm room became the birthplace of many great innovations, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook.

Students are a great source of ideas because they’re ready to disrupt the existing norms.

They also have the tech skills and more time to focus on the creation. Universities do not only become a birthplace for many startups, but also an important system for lots of young and hardworking talents.

Our main goals include maintaining the best professionals in the local ecosystem and startups founded by Belarusians, and also ensure that those who left during the political crisis will return. It could be done through internships in local tech startups, university accelerator programs and so on. It’s also important to have teachers with practical entrepreneurial experience. Additionally, startups and local investment groups may also involve these professors as advisors since they are usually the best resource for finding talents earlier than others.

Major annual conferences attract people to the ecosystem. These events increase the awareness of investors and corporations about what’s happening inside the ecosystem. Additionally, it also provides founders and investors with the opportunity to connect, which is the foundation for future business partnerships. The current examples of these events include GEW Belarus, Venture Day Minsk and Emerge.

Examples of the major international conferences include Web Summit Lisbon, earlier Dublin, or SLUSH in Helsinki. It’s important to note that governments of these countries recognize the economic benefit of international startups and VCs coming in and building companies there.

Putting the startup community together creates enormous opportunities for growth, promoting instant sharing of knowledge, talent and ideas. Plus, when a lot of startups are centered in one building or area (whether it’s a neighborhood or the whole city), it makes it easy for investors to learn about the entire pool of startups and meet all the founders at once.


There aren’t many coworking spaces in Belarus. Until recently, the main player was Imaguru but it was shut down by the regime in April 2021, and since then continues to develop the ecosystem from abroad.

In the end, no efforts on ecosystem development will be able to create a successful startup community without the actual success stories. These success stories for Belarus were EPAM, Wargaming, PandaDoc, MSQRD, and others.

In Estonia, Skype’s success story pushed the development of the whole tech cluster and eventually led Estonia to become one of the most successful tech ecosystems in the world.

When there are actual success stories, there are also entrepreneurs who want to become founders of their next company. And by this time, they already have much more experience for it. No matter whether these serial entrepreneurs emerge from successful or failed startups, they still got the experience from their previous venture. If an entrepreneur treats failure correctly, next ventures will be even more successful and even on a grander scale. It’s also closely related to how the community treats failure, and how developed is the entrepreneurial culture overall. The key feature of the true entrepreneurial culture is risk and failure tolerance.

Even though initial expenses to start a tech company are relatively low, founders still need early-stage funding to hire the team, release the product, and promote it. The issue that was present in Belarus at a certain point was that many wealthy people represented traditional businesses and were not connected with the world of tech startups, which became a trend just a few years ago. It doesn’t make traditional businessmen bad investors, they are just less effective in making quick decisions whether to invest in a startup or not, and their funding terms usually weren’t acceptable for an early-stage startup that would become VC-funded later on. One of the first angel investor communities was Bavin. However, they were not able to succeed due to many reasons, including the gap between the tech startup community and the traditional business approach.

While working with the startup community, we quickly realized that angel investors have to be trained and organized. That’s why we created the very first angel investor training course at Imaguru, which became the foundation for the angel investor network Angels Band. During GEW 2016, the Belarusian Business Angel Network (BBAN) was born. In 2018, it was transformed into the Belarusian Business Angel Association Angels Band. The first graduation of the Business Angel Academy at Imaguru took place in 2017. The active Belarusian angel investors are graduates of the academy. Nowadays, Imaguru also developed a whole learning platform for investors: https://vc.imaguru.co/

Today Belarusian angel investors make their first partner deals and most likely will be able to unite their capital in the future, perhaps creating a fund managed by the investment committee. This fund would be able to take more risks and standardize funding terms. It could bring a lot of benefit for the local startup community since it would provide opportunities for more deals inside the ecosystem, even at the early startup stages.
As regional markets see big wins or successful exits, this invested capital often returns to the startup ecosystem as an angel investment for other startups. As the startup community has more successful exits and more new entrepreneurs, the growth of the local ecosystem becomes inevitable.

There are two reasons why local capital is needed. First, there’s a very slim chance that a serious investor would agree to fund a startup that’s outside of their geographical area until that startup achieves a certain level of success or recognition. That’s why the first round is almost always raised locally. The second reason to have local capital (in this case, venture capital) is that without it every growth-stage company would have to talk to VC investors abroad, who will want this company to relocate to a different area. That’s what happens in Belarus today due to many factors, which are not always connected with VC investors.
Being in the same place for an investor and a startup does have a logic behind it. If an investor works with a company at the early stage, they would need to spend a lot of time together, which means they would need to be located geographically close.

Of course, a very important component of any startup community is venture capital. To expand, the startup would need to raise significant funds and possibly gain access to tech giants of Silicon Valley, which often comes with VC investors.

Since there is no legal framework for VC in Belarus yet, traditional VC funds still do not exist here. Successful investors who can raise capital around their team are forced to register their funds abroad, even if their main focus remains on Belarusian founders. Mainly these funds are formed on the so-called secondary capital, which includes entrepreneurs who are investing back into the community after their successful exit. It leads to a great number of angel investors and funds who help the next generation of entrepreneurs.

This is why the new VC legislation should become one of the first steps for forming the VC ecosystem in new Belarus. To further encourage the creation of funds, it’s also important to use a mechanism of the fund of funds, which combines funds of many investors and then invests the whole amount in VC funds (for example, VC funds of large corporations and, possibly, the government).

The purpose of the fund of funds is what’s called double revenue in the startup world. This mutual fund is dedicated to increasing revenue by raised capital, also contributing to the development of the national ecosystem.

Every community needs its champions — people who attract others to the community and also make sure that new startups would be known beyond the community, too. They are like a connecting link between the community and those who are beyond it.

These people are critical. They spend a lot of time on planes, traveling the world and learning about companies and ideas. These are the people who spread the word and encourage others to join the ecosystem. In Belarus, successful entrepreneurs could become those champions — for example, Mikita Mikado, Michael Rumiantsau, Dmitry Gursky, Nikolai Oreshkin, Dmitry Birulia and many others.

Marketing efforts and branding are also very important. Every local community needs its own unique branding built around its most distinctive and impressive feature. There is no need to replicate Silicon Valley, not all ecosystems in the world are built around silicon. Copying someone else could never be impressive.

Local press/websites/organizations also could be involved in the marketing efforts.

Local tech companies that achieve success on the global market are creating opportunities like no one else.


Among 100 top global outsourcing companies are four Belarusian ones: EPAM, IBA, Itransition and Intetics. Experts note that every direct job position in the tech industry creates four indirect job positions in the economy. Belarusian IT professionals are some of the most qualified in the region. Almost half of all IT professionals work in five companies: EPAM, Wargaming/Game Stream, IBA Group, Itransition and iTechArt Group. EPAM remains the major employer in IT, employing over 10,000 professionals in their Belarusian office. Nowadays, the company is also expanding its foreign locations.

We can talk a lot about entrepreneurial culture and relationships inside the ecosystem. This is one of the most important (if not the most important) elements in building a successful ecosystem. Analyzing everything that was said and written on this topic recently, we found one publication particularly interesting — sharing it below.