Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency

Regularly organised by the Investment Projects Department of HIPA, Capital Academy is aimed at facilitating successful cooperation between Hungarian businesses and financial and professional investors. In order to facilitate this, Hungarian and international speakers hold practice-oriented training to the applicants in the training programme.

The main topics of the first module of the programme were capital raising funds, fundraising, financial opportunities, winning over investors as well as business planning and market positioning this year, too. In the second part of the training, based on these, participants could familiarise themselves, among other things, with the details of the capital raising process, EU funds aimed at projects and the importance of an exit strategy, and could learn about successful capital raising case studies as well.

The experts of the BÉT, Márton Paulovits and Dr Kata Lódi, said that the stock exchange was a goal achievable by everyone. Large companies did not start as such either, and especially not ones listed on the stock exchange. Any company can become first a medium-sized, then a large company gradually, by taking the steps one by one. The BÉT can help in taking these individual steps with the ELITE Programme, the Xtend market launched in the autumn and the recently launched analysis and quotation service. ELITE is a capital neutral programme, i.e. it does not only support companies preparing for admission to the stock exchange, but is also a programme containing training elements focusing on corporate development, with opportunities for soliciting new business and building relationships.

In his introduction, Gábor Sashalmi, Regional Manager of the Domestic Branch Offices of EXIM Bank in Western Hungary, highlighted that the main focus of their medium-term strategy was on supporting SMEs and, accordingly, they had helped as many as 1,125 SMEs more efficiently assert themselves in export markets this year with their various credit, insurance or guarantee products.

In his presentation, József Török, Business Development and Startup Director of the Széchenyi Capital Fund, mentioned what challenges they could see in cooperating with entrepreneurs in the first years of the investment and how they overcame them, and also pointed out frequently repeated errors.

Álmos Mikesy, Investment Director of Hiventures, showed that Hiventures Zrt. managed HUF 57 billion in total in its risk capital funds, from which it supported the growth of innovative Hungarian SMEs in their early life stages. With their investment programmes, they help startups from the idea phase to entering international markets through their capital investments ranging from HUF 9 million to HUF 500 million.

The participants had the opportunity to participate in presentation practice this time as well; they could receive feedback not only from the staff of the HIPA and Hungarian experts, but also from the Managing Director of the Austrian Speedinvest, a risk capital fund focusing on digital startups. Michael Schuster pointed out that no such abundance of funds had ever been in the market, which was awaiting good projects, which did not lack business capabilities either.

The success of the Capital Academy training series is demonstrated by that fact that a company pitching at the training in May 2017 signed an investment contract with Hiventures in November under the incubation capital programme.