Dear readers,

This week on IT Logs, we look at why successful exits remain so rare in N. Macedonia. Discussing one of the successful examples, Adeva co-founder Tosho Trajanov shares how his company grew from a small freelance operation into a business generating $12 million in ARR before its acquisition by Toptal, and why the region still makes entrepreneurship harder than it needs to be. 

We also speak with Navivo Capital’s Krzysztof Knopp about where smart money is going in CEE, why investors are prioritizing revenue quality over AI hype, and why fewer, higher-conviction bets may be the way forward. 

Plus, we cover fresh developments across the region and explore why regional VCs may be ready to give Serbian startups another look.

Enjoy!
Bojan Stojkovski
Editor-in-Chief, IT Logs

For N. Macedonia’s startup ecosystem, successful exits remain few and far between. There are founders who build products, companies that secure funding, and teams that manage to sell their services internationally. However, turning a business into an acquisition target for a major global player is a different kind of achievement, one that the country has struggled to produce consistently.

Adeva, the technology talent company co-founded by Tosho Trajanov and Katerina Trajchevska, is one of those rare examples. The company began in 2016 as a small freelance operation and grew into an international network connecting businesses with experienced software engineers and technology professionals. It eventually reached around $12 million in annual recurring revenue without taking outside investment before being acquired by Toptal, the global network for highly skilled freelance professionals.

The acquisition, which closed earlier this year, represents more than a successful business transaction. But while the acquisition gives the founders room to consider what comes next, Trajanov is not treating the outcome as proof that N. Macedonia has already solved the problems facing its entrepreneurs. If anything, his assessment suggests the opposite.

From freelancing to a global business

Adeva’s origins were considerably less ambitious than its eventual outcome. In 2016, shortly after graduating from university, Trajanov and Trajchevska began freelancing and gradually brought other colleagues into their projects.

The appeal was straightforward: greater flexibility, the freedom to organise their own time, and the possibility of working with clients from anywhere in the world. They were not initially trying to build a major tech company, but rather discovered a way of working that suited them and decided to see whether it could become a business.

The turning point came when a client needed a type of engineering expertise that was difficult to find in N. Macedonia at the time. The founders began looking across the border, eventually finding an experienced engineer in Serbia who remains with the company today.

That experience helped them recognise a much larger opportunity. Rather than operating as a conventional outsourcing agency or a marketplace where developers compete for individual assignments, Adeva could offer companies carefully selected engineers who would work directly with their teams.

But even in those early days, the founders encountered a problem that would follow them throughout their journey - the difficulty of running an internationally oriented business through the country’s regulatory and administrative systems.

Trajanov says the company initially operated through a Macedonian entity, but ran into complications when it needed to pay professionals abroad. The founders found that the rules and tax treatment made some arrangements unnecessarily complicated.

In 2017, they opened a company in the US and transferred the business there. “We were technical people. I studied at FEIT, while Katerina studied at FINKI. When we opened the US company, we realised that the whole ecosystem worked for you, from finance and payments to everything else.” Trajanov explains.

That experience changed their ambitions. Adeva no longer needed to think primarily in terms of N. Macedonia, Serbia, or the immediate region, since it could sell to companies in much larger markets and build a distributed network of professionals across borders.

Opportunity was global, but so was the competition

Adeva grew by combining a relatively lean operating model with an increasingly international talent network. Furthermore, the company could offer competitive rates while maintaining an emphasis on engineering quality.

The team expanded from around ten people into a business with more than 50 employees and a broader network of professionals. Demand accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies needed experienced engineers and sought partners familiar with remote work.

As a result, as Trajanov explains, the company benefited from being in the right market at the right time, but its existing capabilities also mattered: remote delivery was already part of its operating model rather than something it needed to invent under pressure.

By the time of the acquisition, Adeva's client base had evolved alongside its international reach. While US companies initially dominated, European business grew significantly after the pandemic. Before the sale, Trajanov says, approximately 40% of the business came from the US and 60% from Europe.

The company also developed a more geographically diverse engineering network. In its earlier years, roughly 80% of its talent came from N. Macedonia. During its final years as an independent business, that share had fallen to around 20%, with engineers increasingly coming from Poland, the UK, Spain, Portugal, and other markets.

However, this shift also shows one of the less comfortable realities of the Macedonian tech sector. Having capable engineers is not the same as having a deep enough pool of specialists to support every type of international project.

While Trajanov is quick to acknowledge the strengths of the country's established IT companies, he notes that this happens particularly in the more traditional technologies. His criticism concerns the nature of the work available and its long-term implications for the workforce. “A major problem we inherited is that much of the work is maintenance rather than product development,” he says.

An engineer who spends a decade maintaining an existing system may accumulate valuable experience, but that experience does not necessarily translate into the skills required to solve new and complex engineering problems. “Two years without working on something new in the IT industry can already leave you with little value in the labour market, and that period keeps getting shorter.” Trajanov points out. 

The challenge, in his view, is not simply a shortage of talented people, but also a shortage of opportunities for those people to develop their expertise. In turn, the country has struggled to attract the kinds of companies that establish substantial engineering teams to tackle complex technical problems. 

Without those employers, engineers have fewer opportunities to work on research and development, build products beyond the minimum viable product stage, or acquire experience solving problems at scale. “We have good people, but many haven't had the opportunity to develop further,” Trajanov emphasizes. 

Why the exit happened when it did

Adeva's acquisition was not the result of a sudden decision to sell at the first attractive offer. According to Trajanov, potential buyers had expressed interest in previous years, but the founders did not consider those opportunities the right fit.

Toptal approached the company at a moment when Adeva was facing a different strategic question: what would the next stage of growth actually require? The business had reached approximately $12 million in ARR without external investment. But Trajanov sees scaling a company as a series of distinct challenges, each requiring a different approach.

His framework breaks the journey into stages, from moving from zero to $100K in revenue, then from $100K to $1 million, from $1 million to $10 million, and eventually into the territory of a much larger company.

At each stage, the problems change. Finding initial customers is different from building repeatable sales processes, which is different again from creating the management structures and operational capacity required to support a much larger organisation.

Toptal entered the picture as Adeva approached its next major transition. “The question was whether we wanted to keep growing by 5% or 10% a year, retain our clients and gradually add new things, or take a different path,” Trajanov explains.

The acquisition offered an alternative to continuing independently at a more measured pace. Toptal, meanwhile, was looking to consolidate its position in the market, expand its client base, and add another established network of experienced engineers.

For its founders, the transaction also marks a personal transition. Trajanov has been spending more time in the lakeside city of Ohrid with his family and intends to explore ideas and projects that he previously lacked the time to pursue. “I'm still a geek deep down. I have ideas for new companies, and I want to try some of them,” he tells IT Logs.

Making entrepreneurship less complicated

Despite the exit, Trajanov argues that N. Macedonia lacks the practical infrastructure that allows founders to concentrate on selling, developing products, and expanding their businesses. He points to a particularly telling example from the Adeva Hub, the community and co-working space the company opened in 2022.

Integrating recurring payments cost the business approximately €5K. For an established company, that might be an inconvenience, but for an early-stage startup founded by someone with a promising idea but limited resources, it could represent a significant barrier. “In the US or Estonia, you don't encounter the same kind of problem. That's one reason so many companies open their businesses there,” he says.

His proposed solution is not another collection of startup grants or short-term support programmes, but a more fundamental change in how the business environment works, which is through simpler administration, accessible financial infrastructure, reliable payment systems, and fewer obstacles to operating internationally.

If Macedonian companies are expected to compete with businesses in Germany, Estonia, or the US, they should not have to spend disproportionate resources solving problems that those competitors can handle through established infrastructure, he adds.

Trajanov also believes the country needs a more deliberate strategy for attracting businesses that bring advanced engineering work and developing managers capable of building internationally competitive companies. This requires more than waiting for investment to arrive, as the country needs to identify areas in which it can develop a genuine competitive advantage and invest strategically enough to become relevant.

He also sees a generational dimension to the problem. Young people have fewer reasons to tolerate systemic inefficiencies when they can work for international companies or establish businesses elsewhere. At the same time, they may feel little obligation to contribute to an ecosystem that has not given them the conditions to succeed.

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