Bulgaria's new JEREMIE investment strategy through 2035 will operate through four investment windows designed to address key and clearly identified market gaps, caretaker Minister of Innovation and Growth Irena Mladenova said on April 14 at the opening of the JEREMIE Bulgaria: New Opportunities forum. She said the priorities match both Bulgaria's strategic documents and EU priorities.
The event was organized by the European Investment Fund, part of the European Investment Bank Group, and the Ministry of Innovation and Growth.
The four investment priorities are aimed at growing the ecosystem built in Bulgaria, both entrepreneurial and for private equity and venture capital, encouraging the link between research and its commercialization through a technology transfer system, dual-use technologies and the military-industrial complex, and infrastructure projects under the Three Seas Initiative.
“We are already making a clear transition from a startup ecosystem to a scale-up ecosystem. This means support will not be aimed at encouraging the creation of companies, but at keeping those companies that have already grown in the country and need larger-scale financing. Until now, they did not have access to it, and that forced them either to look for strategic investors or financing abroad. With the upcoming growth fund, we will be able to keep these companies in Bulgaria. This is important because the added value and the jobs stay in the country, as does the contribution to the budget and the national economy,” Mladenova said in connection with efforts to scale up Bulgaria's ecosystem.
On dual-use technologies, she said that with the JEREMIE fund Bulgaria is entering the new European industrial wave, an area in which the country has potential.
Speaking about the infrastructure instrument under the Three Seas Initiative, Mladenova said it would support not only connectivity but also the scaling up of the business environment. In her words, Bulgaria's inclusion in similar pan-European initiatives also sends an important political signal.
Mladenova also pointed to the importance of the JEREMIE instrument created in 2010 for the emergence and development of Bulgaria's ecosystem as a regional leader in Southeastern Europe.
She said she hoped the investment strategy presented on Tuesday would become the next phase of the successful partnership between the Bulgarian government, the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund in support of the economic transformation of the Bulgarian economy.
The JEREMIE initiative is a European Commission programme developed jointly with the EIF that enables Member States to use structural funds to finance small businesses through loans, guarantees and equity. It operates through a revolving holding fund, with repaid resources reinvested in new financial instruments.
Government and EIF representatives agreed at the end of 2025 to extend the JEREMIE initiative until 2035. Under the deal, EUR 160 million will be reinvested and channelled into the Bulgarian economy from this year to support deep-tech, technology transfer and artificial intelligence projects. In mid-February, Parliament approved at first and second reading in a single sitting the bill ratifying the agreements amending and supplementing the framework and financial agreements between the Bulgarian government and the European Investment Fund on the initiative’s implementation.