Delina Ibrahimaj's millions for start-ups: the same names win every year, projects disappear, companies only change the board
If you thought that tenders and concessions are the great treasury of budget money, you have forgotten about start-ups. There are millions there too. There are repeat winners there too. There are companies that change names, but not owners. And above all, there is a public fund that is shared with a signature, seal and institutional blessing.
When Minister Delina Ibrahimaj presented the 2026 fund of 535 million lek, or about 5.35 million euros, everything was wrapped up in the usual words of innovation, technology, new entrepreneurship and doubling of support. But verification of the official lists of winners for 2024, 2025 and 2026 shows a much less modern reality: taxpayers' money seems to be circulating within a narrow circle of beneficiaries, returning year after year to the public fund.
VNA reviewed the winning projects and the winners themselves. Comparing the lists shows that a significant number of start-ups have been funded repeatedly, while some of them appear as winners in all three calls organized so far.
At least seven start-ups have received funding in both 2024 and 2025: Space 05, which in 2024 appears as “Destil – Space 05” and a year later as “Space 05”; “Kungul”, which in 2024 applied as “Kungul App”; as well as Axiom Breach, Komuniteti, Autokorrektori i Gjuhës Shqipe, B2Balkan and List Albania.
The repetition becomes even more apparent in the comparison between 2025 and 2026. MedWallet, Axiom Breach, B2Balkan, Albanian Language Autocorrector, Komuniteti, and VLEPA appear again on both lists.
One way to mitigate the repetition of names on paper seems to be to formally change the project, while the NIPT and the owners remain the same.
Emil Andoni benefited in 2025 with the "e-Health Albania" project and re-received funding in 2026 under the name "eDoktor", under the same NIPT, without even having a product with users today.
The same model also appears in Gregor Andoni with “GrAnD Industries” at “GrAnD Creative Industries”, Fatjon Gjata with “Brisk Square” at “Outerlynx”, Meivis Struga with “EKOFUNGI Albania” at “ESI Projects”, and Aldi Lekaj with “ATA” at “ECN Partners”.
So, instead of innovation, the documents show a much simpler mechanism: the name is changed, the beneficiary is retained, the funds continue.
Concrete examples of funded applications raise even more questions about control and monitoring. The company “Tana Zone”, founded in July 2025 with a minimum capital of 100 thousand lek, without an app and without a website, received 4.6 million lek for the “Expansion Phase”, a phase that according to the regulation requires demonstrated market presence.
The case of “Marigo Marketplace” is even more significant. The project received 3.5 million lek in 2024 and another 6.8 million lek in 2026, reaching 10.3 million lek in total. Today, the application has been deleted from Google Play because it had only 284 downloads, it does not exist in the App Store and the official website displays a server error. In other words, the product for which public money was paid twice no longer exists.
Furthermore, "Marigo" is owned by the wife of Genti Selenica, who is himself the owner of the company "Baboon", another winning business of this fund, which has been operating in the market for years and can hardly be treated as a start-up anymore, especially when its activities are in decline.
“Onemor” SHPK also enters the list of question marks. The “Grant 2026” call was opened on February 17, 2026, and just three days later, on February 20, the company “Onemor” SHPK was established, with sole partner Alban Fejzaj. Just four months after its establishment, this company was declared the winner in the Expansion Phase, receiving 6.13 million lek.
This conflicts with the regulation, which requires that applicants in this phase have submitted at least one tax balance for the previous year, a calendar-impossible criterion for a company established in February 2026. If it had competed as a new entity in Phase 1, the maximum funding ceiling would have been 1.5 million lek. Inclusion in the Expansion Phase enabled it to receive over 4.6 million lek more.
Meanwhile, the evaluation process, scoring of files and on-site verifications remain hidden from the public. At the head of this structure is the National Startup Agency, headed by Arjan Ymeri, who appears publicly with two-time fund winners like Arben Oshafi of “B2Balkan”. The agency is under the direct political subordination of Minister Delina Ibrahimaj.
In the start-up fund signed by Minister Delina Ibrahimaj, the innovation does not seem to be the technology, but the recycling of the same beneficiaries: from Arjan Ymeri to repeated winners such as B2Balkan, Axiom Breach, Komuniteti, Marigo Marketplace, Baboon and other companies that change their names, but not their path to public money.
