What 10 years of building a startup ecosystem in Albania taught us

Just to be clear, it was not evolving because an entrepreneurship program appeared (although it had catalytic effects), but because founders, organizations, and communities showed up, year after year, and did the heavy lifting of building a startup ecosystem.

This is not a success story in the traditional sense. It's an honest account of what we've seen, what we've learned along the way, and what still needs to happen for Albania's startup ecosystem to become truly self-perpetuating.

We're sharing it because we think it matters, not just for Albania, but for anyone working to build ecosystems in emerging markets where ambition runs ahead of infrastructure, and where progress is real but fragile.

How it started and how it evolved

When Swiss EP first engaged in Albania, the ecosystem was nascent. There were motivated individuals and pockets of energy, but little infrastructure to channel that energy into sustainable and competitive ventures.

Over the past decade, we've observed three distinct phases in the startup ecosystem development of the country:

• Phase I - Activation. The early years were about creating the conditions for startups to exist at all by raising awareness, introducing basic support structures, and identifying founders and organizations willing to take the first steps. Progress was slow, highly irregular and often invisible from the outside.
• Phase II - Raising the bar. As the ecosystem gained its footing, a level of consistency in support services emerged, the focus shifted from quantity to quality. This meant working with accelerators and support organizations to improve their methodologies, introducing international expertise to bridge knowledge gaps, and pushing founders toward investment-readiness rather than just idea validation and company registration.
• Phase III - Building credibility. In the most recent phase, most efforts focused on positioning Albania as a legitimate player in the regional startup landscape. Albanian founders have access to international acceleration programs and state grants, they pitch at global events, and the ecosystem has begun attracting outside attention as a genuine emerging market, capable of producing startups committed to growth.

This progression didn't follow a fixed timeline or a linear path. There were setbacks, false starts, and moments where progress felt reversible. But looking back, the direction has been consistent and forward-looking.

What drove the strongest progress, or factors of success

Several factors made a measurable difference in Albania's ecosystem development:

1. Focusing on structural changes, rather than one-off interventions, created a lasting impact.
2. International expert support played a critical role in bridging know-how gaps, but only when paired with genuine local ownership. We learned early that expertise imported without local anchoring tends to evaporate once the engagement ends.
3. An emphasis on quality over volume helped shift the ecosystem's culture. When support organizations began prioritizing startup success over cohort size, the signal to the broader ecosystem shifted. Founders began to understand that credibility in the market required substance, not only a flashy pitch deck.
4. Sequenced interventions strengthened local capacities over time in ways that isolated programs could not.

The honest challenges

Progress in Albania has been real, but there are still areas that require significant work:

• Early-stage capital remains limited. Angel investment has not yet reached the level needed to sustain a strong pipeline of new ventures. Founders who reach investor-readiness often find themselves without local capital to back their next step.
• Many support organizations remain donor-dependent. Quality has improved significantly, but financial sustainability is still an open question for most ecosystem actors. When organizations depend on external funding cycles, their ability to plan and invest for the long term is constrained.
• Founder-led governance and capital recycling are still developing. The transition toward a self-sustaining ecosystem requires successful founders to reinvest in capital, mentorship, and institutional leadership. That culture is emerging, but slowly.
• Gender inclusion is uneven. Women are visible in the ecosystem at the workforce level, but less so in ownership, investment, and scaling teams. This is not unique to Albania, but it is a gap that compounds over time if left unaddressed.
• Geographic concentration remains a challenge. Startup activity is heavily concentrated in Tirana, leaving much of the country underrepresented. Broadening the ecosystem's geographic footprint will be essential for long-term resilience and a healthy startup pipeline.

What ten years taught us

Working in Albania has sharpened our thinking about how ecosystems actually develop. Four lessons stand out:

1. Startup quality can improve faster than local capital develops. This creates a structural imbalance that external programs cannot resolve on their own. Closing the capital gap requires deliberate, long-term work to develop local investors alongside founders.
2. International expertise adds significant value, but cannot replace local ownership. The most durable progress we've seen has happened when international support enabled local actors to lead.
3. Ecosystems mature not when more startups are created, but when more of them scale and when success is reinvested. Volume is easy to measure and tempting to optimize for. But the real indicator of ecosystem health is what happens after the first cohort.
4. Diaspora engagement becomes truly effective only once credibility is established. Albania has a large, talented diaspora. But we've observed that diaspora capital and expertise tend to flow toward ecosystems capable of producing a clear ask for support, where individual diaspora members can make a real and direct impact.

In conclusion

Albania has made real progress. The ecosystem that exists today, with its international accelerator, pro-active Startup Albania Agency, its investor-ready founders, would not have been imaginable ten years ago.

But the next phase will be more demanding. Closing the remaining structural gaps in startup funnel creation, capital formation, founder-led governance, and geographic diversification will require more than continued external support. It will require the ecosystem to believe in itself enough to invest in its own future, where state institutions and private actors work side by side, within a clear division of labour, for the ultimate success of Albanian startups.

That's the transition we're working toward. And it's why we'll keep showing up.

The people building Albania's startup ecosystem (founders, organizations, communities) are closer to that inflection point than they might think. We're very honored to be part of the journey.