FITD — North Macedonia's Government Innovation Fund Turning Grants into VC-Backed Startups

Founded in 2013 as a government agency, North Macedonia's Fund for Innovation and Technological Development (FITD, known locally as FITR) offers a tiered menu of instruments: start-up and spin-off grants covering up to 85% of costs (capped near €30,000) for early R&D, and larger technological-extension grants covering up to 50% of costs (capped near €500,000) to help established SMEs adopt new technology, with roughly 40% of total project value co-invested by beneficiary companies.

The fund aims to turn early-stage grants into investable, growth-stage technology companies, building North Macedonia's start-up and SME innovation ecosystem.

From 2014 to 2021 the World Bank backed the ecosystem through its €17.7 million Skills Development and Innovation Support project, financing four start-up and SME support instruments delivered through FITD. The fund helped enable three accelerators (Seavus, X factor and UKIM), and supported the launch of North Macedonia's first National Startup Council in 2021 alongside a National Corporate Innovation programme and National AI Strategy.

By the early 2020s FITD had supported over 550 to 800+ companies and projects (figures vary by year and counting basis across sources) worth more than €100 million combined, roughly 70% of them start-ups. A named example tracked by the World Bank, computer-vision start-up Pixyle.ai, received about €80,000 in FITD start-up grants in 2018–2019, grew from 8 to 30 mostly local STEM employees, tripled its revenue over three years, and went on to raise €1 million from South Central Ventures — one of five North Macedonian start-ups that fund has backed at that scale, alongside a further €2 million raised by another FITD-linked firm, Native Teams, from Bulgaria's 11 Ventures.

No independent counterfactual evaluation of aggregate job creation was found in the sources reviewed: the figures come from World Bank reporting and a Swiss Entrepreneurship Program case study, and company-wide job and revenue outcomes beyond named examples like Pixyle.ai are not separately broken out.