Your step‑by‑step guide to breaking into Eastern Europe’s venture‑capital fellowships and scout pools – what they expect, how to stand out, and where to read more.
If you are a product lead in Prague, a machine‑learning engineer in Cluj, or an MBA candidate in Warsaw who wants to swap pitch‑event spectating for writing or influencing the first check, you are looking at a region that no longer sits on the sidelines. A May 2025 analysis of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) counted 52 unicorns and €213 billion in startup value, while noting that local funding fell only 15 percent in 2023 versus a 35 percent drop in Western Europe. Early‑stage deals still dominate: 92 percent of regional venture rounds are pre‑seed or seed, making small, distributed checks the currency of access.
Scout tracks hand you someone else’s money—often US $50 000 to $150 000—and let you deploy it in sub‑$25 000 slices. You earn carry (10 to 20 percent is market) but rarely invest personal cash. A London‑headquartered fund with CEE focus said in a Business Wire note that automating its scout workflow allowed it to scale from 30 to more than 100 scouts in under two years.
Fellowship tracks invest in your time. Over three to twelve months you attend workshops on fund economics, shadow diligence calls, and graduate with a mock or real track record. Think of them as a compressed apprenticeship that skips two years of junior analyst grind.
Interview funnels typically run three stages: a culture chat, a written memo, and a partner debate. Acceptance rates hover around three to five percent, so start prepping before applications open.
Taken together the articles say the same thing: Eastern Europe is no longer an asterisk on a global slide deck. Cohort‑style investor training has become part of the infrastructure—an on‑ramp that matches local efficiency with global capital appetite.
Commit to that plan and you will exit the cohort ready to speak the language partners and limited partners trust—metrics, risk ladders, and return profiles—while still bringing the local intuition that no headquarters can replicate.
Spearhead announced today that it has raised $100 million for its fourth fund. The basic outline of the program remains the same, but what’s changed is what happens after the formal Spearhead program has finished.
The famed scout programme from US VC firm Sequoia has launched in Europe. We meet the scouts.
It started as First Round Capital’s experiment. After all, founder Josh Kopelman had started his first company, Infonautics, while he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Partner Hayley Barna had started Birchbox while still at Harvard Business School.
If you are an African graduate, professional and entrepreneur trying to get into venture capital, here are five African VC fellowships you should consider joining.
Sifted found nine such programmes founded in Europe. They range from a few days to a few weeks, from free to thousands of euros.
Lagos-based early-stage investment platform Microtraction has launched a bid to source more deals and identify “high-trajectory” founders.
Accel, the US venture capital (VC) giant, has launched a startup scouting program in Europe, building on the legacy of its US project. Scouts in the “Starters” program are allocated $200К each to find, invest in, and nurture European startups with growth potential.
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