Moldova has launched an innovation fund of more than €1mn for technology startups, opening the first of four funding rounds at Moldova Business Week in Chisinau alongside an EU partnership announcement on September 30.

The Moldova Innovation Fund will be operated by the Moldova Innovation Technology Park (MITP), the state-backed virtual park that hosts the country's technology industry, and financed through EU4Innovation East, a programme funded by the European Union and co-financed by the French government and implemented by Expertise France. It will run for 24 months and make pre-seed and seed grants to companies at the earliest stages to broaden access to the market to young entrepreneurs with good ideas but no money.

Grants come in two sizes: €20,000 for pre-seed startups, to cover idea validation and an early prototype; and €40,000 for companies that already have a product but need money for marketing, further development and growth to make them investor-ready for private funding.

Moldova has developed a sophisticated virtual-only technology park and is working with the EU4Innovation East programme, an EU vehicle for helping the development of a new economy in its countries of operation.

"Today, we close that gap," Claudiu Nasui, the minister of economic development and digitalisation, told the launch. "This money has a precise job. Validate the idea. Build the prototype. Test the technology on real users."

A small fund with a specific job

A million euros is not much money. The two grant sizes will allow for about 30 projects, but Marina Bzovii, the park's chief administrator, told IntelliNews that Moldova already has a developed tech sector and the goal of the fund is to catalyse an already vibrant sector, to make it possible for more innovators and entrepreneurs to launch businesses. For example, Moldova's outsourcing business, based on a combination of highly skilled technicians and low costs, already earns the country around half a billion dollars in exports a year and continues to grow. Nevertheless, the fund is a new initiative, and measured against the technology sector worth around €1bn a year, is close to a rounding error: the park's residents are expected to turn over about MDL20bn in 2026 and the sector as a whole passed $1bn in revenue in 2025.

Asked whether €1mn and 20 to 30 projects was a serious intervention in a sector that size, Bzovii did not argue the point. "This is just a new mechanism that we have launched today," she said. "I think it's just a start." Other agencies run other schemes, she noted, and the park maintains a public database of about 300 startups to draw applicants from, as well as opening out the application to anyone that wants to apply. The fund's job, as she put it, is to help the real beginners get going.

Capital, not ideas, is the binding constraint, Bzovii said. "Investment has been the biggest challenge of the tech industry," she told the launch. "Every startup would come with the same issue." The problem has grown as the park's residents have moved up the value chain: a recent study found that 48% of them are now working on their own products rather than selling development hours, she said, and companies large and small are switching out of outsourcing towards product development. All of them need access to capital.

Moldova already has a substantially larger state instrument for technology companies, run by the Organisation for Entrepreneurship Development, with a planned budget of MDL190mn over three years. It offers grants of up to MDL500,000 to startups with annual revenue below MDL5mn, and up to MDL2mn to those below MDL25mn, according to the agency's website.

Those grants come with conditions that exclude the companies the new fund is designed for. The smaller measure requires the beneficiary to put in at least 20% of a project's value; the larger one requires 50%. However, the fund is an attempt to kickstart pre-seed money to get new projects off the ground that the sector has been missing for now. Traditionally, pre-seed money has been raised from friends and family but that doesn't work in Moldova.

"No amount of birthdays and parties will be enough for someone to raise €100,000 in Moldova to start a tech company," quipped Michelle Iliev, the state secretary at the economic development and digitalisation ministry, who was responsible for working with the EU to get the innovation fund off the ground.

The fund's structure, four rounds over two years rather than a single call, is an attempt to build an investment pipeline rather than hand out a one-off tranche, and Iliev says that the goal is to attract more funding from other sources once the pipeline is delivering a flow of successful projects. Bzovii made the same point from the park's side, describing the four calls as a learning curve for her own team as much as for applicants, and saying the design was meant to leave the door open to other partners and donors who want to add money to it.

The money is tightly fenced. Eligible costs run to prototype refinement, early market validation, materials and components, small-batch manufacturing, laboratory access and testing, with hardware projects explicitly in scope. Priority sectors include artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics and the internet of things, though Bzovii invited applications from outside them. “Show us something we weren’t expecting. Surprise us!” she says calling on tech entrepreneurs in the audience. Companies can apply before they have a legal entity, but will need one to sign a grant agreement. Awards are competitive and only a minority of applicants will get money: "the best of the best will be awarded," she said.

Digital Moldova

Moldova now has more than 300 technology startups, which generated €39.5mn in revenue in 2025, created more than 1,200 jobs and attracted €15mn in investment, double the figure of the year before, on EU4Innovation East's numbers.

That is a real sector, a young one, but one of the government's great hopes for rapid development. The MITP technology park is the flagship institution tasked with pushing the sector. It now has 3,037 resident companies drawn from 49 countries, including 416 foreign-owned firms, employs more than 26,000 people and accounts for over 5% of Moldovan gross domestic product, according to the park. Residents pay a single tax of 7% on turnover in place of the standard bevvy of corporate and social taxes. The park had about 300 resident companies when it opened in 2018.

The park is a tax perimeter rather than a place. "Moldova Innovation Technology Park is a virtual park," Bzovii said in an interview with IntelliNews. "We are actually built around a tax regime of 7%. We don't have a big building where we put all the companies." The single rate, approved in 2018, replaces seven separate taxes. "It's simple, it's clear, it's predictable for all companies," she said. She insists the design is sui generis: asked whether it borrows from Estonia's digital state or from the High Tech Park in Minsk, she said the model "is nothing that you can find elsewhere” and was built specifically for Moldova. Other countries, she added, are now asking how it works and trying to replicate it.

Bzovii, who has run it for most of that time, said the growth has overshot every projection made for it. "The feasibility study eight years ago said that only 400 companies would join in 10 years," she said. "We are in year number eight. We have 3,000 resident companies." On her figures the sector is now the most productive part of the Moldovan economy by a wide margin, with about 4% of the active population generating 5.8% of gross domestic product.

She was blunt about why that matters in a country that has had a bad decade. The technology sector, she said, has kept growing through the pandemic, through the war next door and through every crisis Moldova has been put through in the last five years, and it is now one of the largest single contributors to output.

The tax regime is the park's principal selling point and the minister was happy to advertise it. "I have not seen a better tax anywhere in the world," Nasui said of the 7% single rate, which folds in income tax and social contributions into one payment. "It's one payment, it's clear rules, predictable for years."

Nasui, who is a former highly successful Romanian economics minister, until he switched nationalities to take over economic development in Moldova a few years ago, set the fund inside a sequence he wants founders to follow: start in the regulatory sandbox, take pre-seed money from the Innovation Fund, scale with private capital, operate inside the park's tax regime and sell into the EU single market. He also pointed to Moldovan access to European supercomputing capacity through a European digital innovation hub, which he said lets small companies try out technologies they could not otherwise afford to test.

"When a Moldovan company owns this technology, the value stays here. It stays in Europe," he said. "In salaries, in taxes, in the next generation of founders."

He was equally clear that €1mn of public money is a first step and not a substitute for investors. "We cannot only build on public funds," he said. "We need somebody to put skin in the game, to make an entrepreneurial bet on an idea." The sectors he named as open to the fund were artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, cloud and deep-tech hardware, plus agriculture, on the grounds that one of Moldova's oldest industries deserves new tools. Cybersecurity he made a case of its own: cyberattacks, he said, are part of daily life and daily reality in Moldova, and that unwanted exposure is also hard-won experience the country can sell.

Moldova's unicorn

The sector's problem is not that it has produced nothing. It is that what it has produced has tended to leave. "We have a lot of companies that started in Moldova but now they moved into Europe and they're now European unicorns," Bzovii said.

Her own example is Endava, the technology services group that began life in Chisinau as Compudava and is now listed in the United States. "We call it somehow Moldova's unicorn," she said, drawing the comparison with EPAM, the Nasdaq-listed engineering group that started life in Belarus. Endava is a services business rather than a product company, which is exactly the shape of Moldovan success the fund is trying to change, but it is the country's proof that global-scale technology firms can start there.

The other name she reaches for is Orange, which runs what she describes as its largest technology team anywhere out of Moldova, employing close to 1,000 people on research and development. The logic is the one that built the outsourcing industry: high-quality engineering at a lower cost than western Europe.

Moldova also won an award recently for the fastest-developing startup base in Europe, she said, and has quietly become a supplier of engineers to industries that never advertise where their code comes from. "If you're driving a car, most probably behind the software of the car there have been IT specialists from Moldova," she said. "If you use a bank, probably in some of the parts there were specialists from Moldova, because they worked from here globally."

She makes a similar claim for the state. A large share of Moldovan public services are now delivered digitally, she said, and the country does not sell that hard enough abroad. It is a point the government has been making all week, and one of the areas the EU delegation singled out for the fund's attention.

What the park has not produced in proportion is venture-funded product companies. Its tax regime rewards services revenue, which is what most of its residents sell, and outsourcing does not generate the kind of equity stories that attract funds. The fund is an attempt to widen the base of the sector rather than to reward the part of it that already works and go up the value chain from services to products.

Who decides

The novelty Bzovii claims for the fund is not its size but how awards will be made. Applications will be screened for eligibility, then assessed by a coordination committee with the support of a panel of independent technical experts, with shortlisted teams required to pitch before any money is committed and to report against stated objectives afterwards.

The committee is drawn from the ministry of economic development and digitalisation, the ministry of finance, several other public institutions and private-sector business organisations, with the private-sector seats filled through a public call. Its job is to evaluate projects, approve funding decisions, ensure transparency and monitor implementation. Its full composition has not yet been published.

Notably, the park that operates the fund will not decide who gets the money. "We do the administrative part. We don't take the decisions," Bzovii said. The technical experts are being recruited through a separate public call aimed at founders and engineers with their own track record, who cannot then apply to the fund themselves. Conflict-of-interest declarations are required.

The point of all that machinery, on her account, is the signal it sends downstream. A company that has been through an expert panel, a mixed public-private committee and a pitch has something to show the next investor, which is what a country with almost no domestic venture capital most needs to manufacture. An information session on the application rules is scheduled for the end of the Moldova Investment Week. "You need a strong concept, a realistic budget," Bzovii said.

Where it sits in a much bigger flow

The fund is a small part of the growing support Brussels is directing at Moldova, which is a leading accession candidate country. The EU's Growth Plan for Moldova, agreed in October 2024, provides up to €1.9bn for 2025 to 2027 through the Reform and Growth Facility. Moldova has implemented 28 reform commitments and unlocked more than €500mn under the facility so far, the first meeting of the EU-Moldova monitoring committee was told in Chisinau on September 24. The European Commission will formally assess the reforms Moldova delivered in June and disburse against them in early October.

Separately, an EU-Moldova investment conference in Chisinau on June 4 announced up to €641mn in investment, of which €433mn is routed through international financial institutions including the European Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the French development agency, and €208mn comes from eight private projects that signed letters of intent, the Commission said. Under the Growth Plan's call for expressions of interest, 115 companies applied and 10 have signed letters of intent.

The EU has also been building the plumbing beneath the fund for a year. In September the bloc awarded more than €1mn in grants to six organisations that support Moldovan startups, under the same EU4Innovation East programme: the ICT association ATIC, for a training and prototyping programme; Dreamups; the Startup Moldova foundation, for EU market access and expansion grants; Technovator, for deep technology and microgrants; XY Partners, for health technology pilots; and YEP! Moldova, for a startup academy aimed at 1,000 young people, the EU delegation said.

The delegation's representative at the launch Julda Kielyte was explicit that the grants are not the point. "The mission goes beyond the individual grants," she said, describing the fund as an attempt to establish a mechanism that becomes a lasting part of how innovation is financed in Moldova, and one that builds a stronger pipeline of companies ready to attract private capital. The combination of European money and long-term local ownership, she said, is what will decide whether the mechanism outlasts the two-year project.

She named agriculture, healthcare, energy and public services as the areas where the EU wants to see solutions, noting that making public services more efficient is a government priority, and made the retention argument that runs through most EU spending in the country: a fund like this gives young Moldovans a reason to build their future at home. "Our mission for this fund is to help businesses grow, create jobs and develop solutions that improve people's lives," she said. "The European Union is very proud to support Moldova in research and innovation."

Marta Kos, the EU enlargement commissioner, told the business week by video message that "Moldova's moment is now" and that investors backing the country were backing a European success story.

A deregulation government selling speed

The fund lands in the middle of a push by a new government to reposition Moldova as a cheap, fast and lightly regulated base inside the EU's orbit. Prime Minister Vasile Tofan, an investor elected by parliament in July, told the conference that the country would become friendlier to entrepreneurs over the next three years, with fewer unnecessary rules.

The Romanian Nasui, 41, is the whizz kid hired in from the outside to drive the process, who ran Romania's economy ministry between 2020 and 2021, was appointed Moldovan minister of economic development and digitalisation on August 25 and granted Moldovan citizenship the same day. His brief is to streamline the state apparatus, cut public spending and deregulate the private sector. He told the conference the government would modernise the economy and widen the use of capital markets as a top priority.

The numbers the government is selling are respectable rather than spectacular. Foreign direct investment reached €409mn in 2025 against a stock of €5.37bn. The EU takes more than two-thirds of Moldovan exports and supplies more than 85% of the foreign capital in the country. A state aid scheme worth MDL4bn offers grants of up to 60% of an investment. Natalia Bejan, who runs the investment agency, told the delegates at the launch that the government wanted to make doing business in Moldova as easy as possible.

Against that, Moldova is a candidate country at the edge of a war. It was granted candidate status in June 2022, opened accession negotiations in June 2024 and has since closed Cluster 1 of the negotiating chapters in June 2026 and Cluster 6 in July, having aligned with more than 3,000 EU legal acts. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a roadmap for Moldova's accession on September 16.

A week before the business week opened, Moldova's National Security Council agreed that the government should ask parliament for a state of emergency in the energy and hydrological sectors. The country recorded 39 violations of its airspace in the first nine months of 2026, against 17 in the whole of 2025, and has received a €120mn EU grant towards a medium-range air-defence system. On the day of the presentation a drone crashed on Moldovan territory, in the latest incursion from the conflict next door.

For a fund making pre-seed grants, that matters less than it does for a factory. Local residents told IntelliNews that they are nervous about the conflict spilling over into Moldova, but “after more than four years we have gotten used to it and get on with our lives,” one resident told this correspondent. Software is the one Moldovan export that cannot be stopped at a border or hit from the air, which is part of why Chisinau and Brussels keep coming back to it.