Latvian Chamber of Commerce and
industry (LCCI) organized the InvestHorizon raising awareness seminar on
December 10th in Riga. The
event aimed to help entrepreneurs who are thinking about development plans but
have come to the question about attraction of financing and investment. It was
a great opportunity to get knowledge about risk capital-the most actual
business financing instrument.
In Latvia, there is strong gap between companies’ needs and investor offers. As it often happens, high proportion of investments is aimed at bigger companies with long term experience, and not at SMEs who are at start-up or early stage level.
That is why the
importance of such projects as InvestHorizon and of EU funding in Latvia is
crucial to support SMEs in developing their products, sales, internal
organization and financing. Due to limited training possibilities about
investment readiness in Latvia, the seminar attracted high number of participants.
Companies, widely interested in InvestHorizon opportunities, received the best examples on how InvestHorizon program could help in investment attraction both in Europe and Latvia. One of the speakers, Rūdolfs Krese Investment Director of the venture capital fund ZGI Capital, Council member of companies "Ērenpreiss Original" and "Art Fair Service". During the presentation the following topics were touched :
1. How to attract venture capital for your company;
2. The main evaluation criteria;
3. Transaction structuring;
4. Cooperation process.
5. How to sell your business to investors?
Following, Līga Ābola, Head of EU projects department at LCCI, explained how to boost investment-readiness of SMEs and small mid-caps in Europe and associated countries, as well as how to raise awareness amongst SMEs about investments, and coaching plans for SMEs improving proposal and presentations with the help of InvestHorizon project.