Slovenská sporiteľňa and Crowdberry: 18 months of partnership building a stronger private capital market
29/04/2026
29/04/2026
In October 2024, Slovenská sporiteľňa, Slovakia’s largest digital bank and a member of Erste Group, became a shareholder in the investment platform Crowdberry. It was the first-ever direct investment by a leading Slovak bank into a regulated fintech company in the country’s history. Eighteen months into the partnership, it is clear that this was far more than a symbolic move. The collaboration has delivered tangible results, new investment products and infrastructure with ambitions extending well beyond Slovakia.
What do GymBeam, MultiplexDX, Boataround and Sensoneo have in common? Beyond their well-known and highly regarded founders, these companies have all grown with the support of crowdinvesting capital raised through the Crowdberry platform.
Their achievements speak for themselves. GymBeam is on track to generate total revenue of up to €300 million this year, with year-on-year growth of more than 30%. Boataround has grown from a small six-figure business into the European market leader in yacht rentals, with total booking value approaching €80 million. Thanks to Pavol Čekan’s MultiplexDX, the first patients have been able to access diagnostics supporting personalised cancer treatment. Sensoneo, meanwhile, has expanded from two countries to 85 markets, becoming a global leader in smart waste management.
To date, private investors have deployed €110 million through Crowdberry into 52 local companies and real estate projects, while the combined value of companies in investors’ portfolios exceeds €900 million.
Securing alternative sources of capital for business growth and investment in innovation is becoming increasingly important for the economic competitiveness of Slovakia and the European Union as a whole.
“Fiscal consolidation measures also have an impact on the competitiveness of Slovak companies. This makes it even more important to systematically strengthen and support Slovakia’s business environment,” says Norbert Hovančák, who was a member of Slovenská sporiteľňa’s Management Board responsible for Corporate Banking at the time of the investment.
The conclusions of the report prepared by Mario Draghi, former President of the European Central Bank, have lost none of their urgency over the past 18 months. Europe continues to lag behind the United States and China in innovation, productivity and access to growth capital.
“To accelerate innovation, decarbonise the economy and respond flexibly to geopolitical change, Europe needs new investment financed from both private and public sources,” Hovančák explains.
This is precisely where traditional bank financing encounters regulatory constraints. Banks are well equipped to finance businesses with an established track record and a proven business model. Innovation, digitalisation and growth investments with less predictable future outcomes, however, can fall outside those parameters.
The partnership with Crowdberry enables Slovenská sporiteľňa to connect its corporate clients with private growth capital that the bank itself cannot provide from its own balance sheet.
One of the constraints facing EU economies is the limited availability of capital for innovative projects with a higher risk profile. Crowdinvesting connects two sides of the market — entrepreneurs who need capital to grow their businesses and are willing to offer investors an equity stake, and investors seeking to invest directly in Slovak and Czech companies or real estate, while accepting the risk of capital loss if the underlying business underperforms.
Slovakia continues to lag significantly behind. “According to Invest Europe, we rank behind all other V4 countries — and even behind Bulgaria and Romania. Slovakia is included among the other Central and Eastern European markets, with private investment amounting to just 0.023% of GDP. In neighbouring Czechia alone, the ratio of private investment to GDP is six times higher, at 0.152% of GDP, while the EU average is as much as 20 times higher than in Slovakia,” says Dano Gašpar, Managing Partner at the Crowdberry investment platform.
The composition of investment is equally problematic. “Corporate investment in intellectual property accounts for only 10% of total investment in fixed assets, with real estate continuing to dominate. In Czechia, the share is more than twice as high, while the EU average stands at 40%. As a result, companies are putting their future productivity, value creation and, ultimately, competitiveness at significant risk. Even catching up with the regional average would require greater investment in research and development, innovation and digitalisation. Financing these areas requires additional sources of capital alongside traditional bank lending — in particular private growth capital, which can leverage available public funding, including EU grants. This is not only our view; it is also recognised by the National Bank of Slovakia,” adds Dano Gašpar.
The shared mission of Slovenská sporiteľňa and Crowdberry - to catalyse the private capital market and strengthen the financial health of small and medium-sized enterprises - translated into tangible results within the first year of the partnership.
The most significant milestone of the past period was the registration and settlement of the first-ever shares issued by a Slovak joint-stock company and assigned ISINs on the private blockchain infrastructure of the Czech central securities depository, CSD Prague, under the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime. This represents a key building block of the European Savings and Investments Union, which aims to mobilise more capital for European businesses.
For small and medium-sized enterprises, real estate developers, investment vehicles and funds, the next stage of regulatory development could enable genuinely cross-border flows of private capital — digitally, efficiently and without traditional geographic barriers.
Together with Slovenská sporiteľňa, Česká spořitelna and the wider Erste Group, we are building the infrastructure for Central Europe’s private capital markets. What began as a Slovak initiative is now evolving into a regional project with real scale and significance.
Crowdberry was founded in Bratislava in 2015 with a vision of giving people in Slovakia and Czechia direct access to investment opportunities in local companies. A decade and tens of millions of euros later, that vision is converging with Slovenská sporiteľňa’s ambition to strengthen the competitiveness of Slovak businesses, including in areas that the bank itself is unable to finance due to regulatory constraints.
“At Slovenská sporiteľňa, we care deeply about the growth of the domestic economy. But for that to happen, we need successful and prosperous businesses. Ultimately, our collective prosperity depends on how well companies in our country perform. Crowdberry complements our existing investments in alternative capital providers, and our partnership enables us to offer companies financing options beyond traditional bank lending,” explains Norbert Hovančák.
“In Slovenská sporiteľňa, we have gained a strong, strategic and forward-thinking banking partner with whom we share the vision of building a capital market that remains significantly underdeveloped in Slovakia. After a year of working together, we are seeing not only growing confidence, but also a shift in how investors want to manage and grow their capital. That is precisely why we launched the pilot version of our mobile app, opened secondary trading in shares and introduced digital bonds.
In 2025, we doubled the amount of capital provided to companies and real estate developers compared with 2024. We remain committed to Crowdberry’s mission — to build a strong domestic capital market and broaden access to investment opportunities in Slovakia and, increasingly, in Czechia,” concludes Dano Gašpar.
