Sara Lerota did not start in tech or startups. She started in arts marketing and retail management, which is an unlikely path to becoming one of the more connected ecosystem builders in the Western Balkans and beyond. The pivot happened at SPARK in 2016, where she ran startup acceleration programs in Mostar and became Bosnia's representative in the Startup Europe Western Balkans Network. She earned the B&H Digital Pioneers Fellowship from the UK Embassy in 2018 while doing that work. She was not attending the ecosystem. She was building it. She brought the opportunities created in EU back home to Western Balkans.
From there she moved into managing investment portfolios. At MarketMakers, a Swiss Embassy-funded entity, she sourced, evaluated, and closed investments in SMEs and IT companies. At Ministry of Programming - a startup studio ranked on the Financial Times 1000 list - she was VP Strategic Partnerships for four years, contributing to structuring deals and investing over a million euros in startups across healthtech, musictech, and fintech.
She has since co-founded ABSL Western Balkans, a regional platform positioning the Balkans as a serious destination for business services and nearshoring. She founded Satori Catalyst, a global impact studio working with startups, accelerators, and ecosystem builders all over the world. Through her work with Women TechEU she added value to a project which evaluated over 3,000 startups, supported 160 with non-dilutive EU grants, and contributed to €53.8 million in additional private investment raised by those founders. Those are program numbers, but she was not a passive participant - she was an active advisor on strategy, partnerships, and investor readiness.
At Dealion she built the Partnerships pillar - the layer that connects the club to the broader ecosystem of accelerators, investors, and cross-sector opportunities. She now continues as an Advisor. Her specific value is knowing the difference between a partnership that looks good and one that actually creates value for all involved. She has spent her career structuring both, and she knows exactly which mistakes are preventable and which opportunities bring scale.
Most partnerships fail not because of bad intentions but because nobody defined what success looks like for both sides before they started. The fix is always the same: get specific before you get excited.
The Western Balkans has been an afterthought in most European innovation programs for a long time. This is a positioning problem, not a talent problem. The talent is here. The infrastructure just needed to be built.
Dealion is the kind of room where a founder who has been through a €75k EU grant process can sit next to someone closing enterprise deals in Germany and they both walk out with something useful. That's the model. Not hierarchy. Exchange.
Mentorship is a gift that is not ours to keep. Keep learning, and keep sharing those learnings to those who wish to learn too.
