Top Pre-Seed VC Investors Worth Pitching in Poland (2026)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by Borys Musielak

Poland’s pre-seed layer went quiet in 2023–24. The old PFR programs wound down, private funds sat on their hands, and first checks got hard to find. That’s over. New FENG / PFR Starter vehicles have closed, a wave of small private funds launched, and a few later-stage funds started writing early checks again.

This is our map of who’s actually deploying at pre-seed right now.

Every entry has the same skeleton: stage · typical first check · what they back · who should pitch them.

Pre-seed native funds

These write the first institutional check as their default job.

AIP Seed

Pre-seed · up to ~€200–250k · sector-agnostic · 100% private

The earliest institutional money in the country, measured by volume. Founded by Dariusz Żuk out of the AIP incubator world, the fund has done 110+ investments — breadth over concentration, first-money-in, day-one relationships. Small tickets, always with matched co-investors, plus a network of “Competence Hubs” for ops, legal, and growth support. Portfolio includes CallPage, Foodsi, GLOV, SiDLY.

Pitch them if: you’re at MVP stage and want an institutional name on the earliest round with hands-on operational support. Skip if: you need a single large lead check or deep technical diligence.

Bitspiration Booster

Pre-seed / seed · deep tech · private (Kraków)

The technical fund. The team are engineers — ex-Google, ex-Allegro CTO, ex-Motorola — not spreadsheet people, and they say so loudly: reality over hype. They’ll interrogate your technology, not your projections, and they’re comfortable with quantum, new materials, biotech, and other things most funds can’t evaluate. Reported 170% on Fund I.

Pitch them if: your risk is technical, not commercial, and you want investors who actually understand the science. Skip if: you’re a pure go-to-market or marketplace play.

Hard2beat

Pre-seed · deep tech · PFR Starter / FENG-backed (~84M PLN)

The most aggressive new deep-tech fund on the market — 10 deals in their first 12 months. Founded by serial operators (Piwik Pro / Clearcode lineage). The whole thesis is defensibility: a genuine technical moat that can’t be copied, across medtech, cybersecurity, and dual-use / defense. Early portfolio: Neuromedical, Defguard, DefendEye, Pikralida.

Pitch them if: you’re a technical team with a hard-to-replicate edge, especially anything dual-use. Skip if: your advantage is speed or brand rather than technology.

S20

Pre-seed · €100–300k · private, fast

Partners from SpeedUp spun out a small, agile, fully private vehicle. The pitch is speed and conviction: they’ll commit quickly and back high-agency founders before the round is obvious — pre-traction is fine. Tilt toward “People & Planet” verticals (edtech, digital health, cleantech, future of work) but flexible around it. Came out of stealth on the back of 10 early investments.

Pitch them if: you want a fast yes at the idea or MVP stage from an experienced team. Skip if: you need a large lead check to anchor the round.

SMOK Ventures

Pre-seed / seed · €100–600k· US–Polish, Bay Area bridge

That’s us, so we’ll keep it short. Ex-founders. We connect the Bay Area to Poland and CEE, we write early, and we like dev tools and industry-specific AI agents. Recent bets include Paypercut, Spacer Robotics, MOS Health and Slickshift.

Pitch us if: you’re a technical CEE founder building for a global — especially US — market and you want that network on the cap table from day one. Skip if: you’re regional-only by design.

Sunfish Partners

Pre-seed / seed · ~€250k first check · deep tech · German–Polish

Offices in Berlin and Warsaw. Backs technical founders in space, defense, and digital health / data — and increasingly leaning into the defense and European-sovereignty end. Named Polish VC of the Year in 2023. Fund II explicitly widened beyond Poland into the broader CEE region.

Pitch them if: you’re deep tech with a sovereignty or dual-use angle. Skip if: you’re consumer or generic SaaS.

Funds that lean later but write pre-seed checks for the right deal

These aren’t pre-seed shops. But each one will come in early when the deal is strong enough — worth knowing exactly when that switch flips.

Inovo (Inovo Venture Partners)

Seed-first · €0.5–4m · post-traction · CEE

The region’s flagship early-stage fund and the first Polish VC to raise a third fund (targeting ~€100m). Booksy, Packhelp, Zowie, Preply, Brand24, Tidio. They’re seed-and-up by design; pre-seed happens only as an exception, via small “discovery tickets” (~€100–250k) in deals they’re convinced about.

Pitch them if: you have real traction and want a strong brand-name seed lead in CEE. At pre-seed: only if you’re already a hot round.

Market One Capital (MOC)

Pre-seed / seed · up to ~€1.5m · marketplaces & network effects · pan-European

Europe’s specialist marketplace and network-effects fund — €140m across two funds. Portfolio includes Tier, Packhelp. Most of their deals are post-launch, but they’ll go pre-seed, even pre-launch, when the network-effects thesis is clearly there.

Pitch them if: you’re building a marketplace or platform where network effects are the whole game. Skip if: your business doesn’t have a platform dynamic.

Movens Capital

Pre-seed to Series A · €250k–3m · multi-stage · CEE

A frequent co-investor of ours. €60m Fund II, backed by EBRD and PFR Ventures, and they lead most of their rounds. The center of gravity is seed / Series A — they do pre-seed selectively — across enterprise software, AI, fintech, health, and climate. Packhelp, Alokai, Talkie.ai, Doctor.one.

Pitch them if: you want a lead that can keep following on all the way through Series A. At pre-seed: selective, and stronger if you already have signal.

How to actually use this list

The stage tags matter more than the logos. Pitching a €4m seed lead on a pre-revenue idea wastes everyone’s week; pitching a pre-seed micro-fund to lead a €3m round does the same. Match the check to your round, then match the thesis to your company.

And the honest part: nobody backs everyone. A “no” from a deep-tech fund on your marketplace isn’t a signal about your company — it’s a signal you knocked on the wrong door.

If you’re a CEE founder at pre-seed building dev tools or industry-specific AI agents, that’s our lane. Reach out.

This is a living list — the Polish pre-seed market is moving fast in 2026, and we’ll keep it current.

Why We Invested in intoDNA

Posted on January 12, 2026January 12, 2026 by Borys Musielak

Sometimes, a breakthrough isn’t software. It’s science.

When we first looked at intoDNA, it didn’t fit our usual pattern. It wasn’t a SaaS startup. It wasn’t purely software. And yet, it checked every box we care about: world-class founding team, global ambition, deep IP, and early commercial traction with real customers—including 8 of the top 10 global pharma companies.

intoDNA is changing the way we detect DNA damage in cancer cells—and by extension, how we treat cancer itself. Their patented STRIDE™ technology is 100x more sensitive than anything else on the market and could drastically reduce the time it takes to determine the right therapy for a patient—from months to days. Better decisions, fewer failed treatments, more lives saved.

This is precision oncology for the next decade—and we believe it will be standard-of-care.

A world-class team building beyond their field

The company is led by Magda Kordon, PhD in biophysics, who co-invented STRIDE™ and led intoDNA from an academic spinout to a profitable company with over 60 paying customers. She’s joined by Agata Wierzbicka, a rare operator who scaled one of Poland’s biggest startup exits (Base CRM → Zendesk), and a deep bench of scientists, engineers, and business leaders with global experience.

“This is one of the strongest, most complete founding teams we’ve seen—not just in biotech, but across all industries we invest in.”—says Borys Musielak, founding partner at SMOK Venures

From lab to hospital

intoDNA has already proven STRIDE™ in their own lab, selling DNA-damage detection services to pharma for R&D and clinical validation. Now, they’re going further: productizing the tech and moving it into hospitals, where it can be used directly by oncology teams to guide treatment decisions.

It’s a bold shift—from centralized services to decentralized, AI-powered diagnostics—but it’s exactly what’s needed to democratize access to personalized therapies.

A big bet on the future of healthcare—and SMOK

This is the third time we’ve backed a startup outside of software (after Proteine Resources and Pstryk), and it reflects a broader shift in how we think about the future. In a world where AI is eating software, we believe the edge moves to companies that:

Work with real-world, regulated, or scientific data
Build defensible tech rooted in IP or infrastructure
Have a clear path to distribution and adoption—even in complex markets like biotech or energy

intoDNA is all of that. And it’s also another example of what’s possible when we combine SMOK’s core thesis—backing CEE technical founders early—with the reach of our growing angel network.

This was a co-investment with SMOK Angels, and we’re thrilled to have them along for the ride.

“Thanks to Smok Angels I was able to close a great angel from my home town Kraków in days rather than weeks.”-—says Magda Kordon—”For founders with ground-breaking technology, this is the perfect way to secure funding quickly and keep their focus where it matters most — pushing research forward and building the product.”

Are you building something ambitious in CEE?

If this kind of thinking resonates with you—or if you know a founder we should meet—check out our investment FAQ and send your deck to borys@smok.vc.

Let’s build something that outlasts the hype.

Why We Invested In Juo

Posted on June 27, 2025June 28, 2025 by Borys Musielak

Sometimes, the third time’s the charm.

We first met the Juo team when they were still deep in product exploration mode—building and testing some of the most advanced web experimentation tools we’d seen. Not your typical web analytics stuff, but serious infrastructure-level tech. The ideas didn’t always hit the market the right way, but the team’s speed, ambition, and technical depth were impossible to ignore.

We passed on investing twice. But each time they came back, the thinking was sharper, the product tighter, and the use case more focused.

When they showed us early traction in July 2024—around $5K in MRR, growing 25% month-over-month—we finally said yes. Less than a year later, they’re well on track to cross €1M in ARR, with some of the biggest DTC brands in Europe already onboard.

Subscriptions in Europe are broken

Subscriptions are a holy grail for e-commerce brands—predictable revenue, better retention, stronger LTV. But in Europe, setting them up is a nightmare. Credit cards aren’t the dominant payment method. Tools built for the U.S. market rarely work out of the box. And local solutions are often clunky, rigid, or hard to integrate.

Juo fixes this. It offers a seamless subscription layer for e-commerce brands, with full support for local payments and easy integration with existing checkout flows. It’s a no-brainer for merchants—and it shows in their win rate.

Beyond subscriptions

What Juo is building under the hood goes far beyond subscriptions. While the dev-side stays intentionally low profile, the long-term vision is clear: a programmable, future-ready infrastructure layer for all physical product businesses—flexible enough to power much more than just e-commerce.

Rebuilding the e-commerce dev stack

Subscriptions are just the entry point. Juo is quietly rebuilding the modern commerce stack in Europe—modular, developer-friendly, and tailored to the real-world complexity of selling physical products. We’re proud to back a team that’s not only scaling fast, but laying deep technical foundations for what’s next.

We’re excited to be on this journey with the Juo team!

Are you fundraising for a CEE startup?

If you made it this far, liked what you read, and feel like our thinking resonates—whether you’re a founder or know someone building something great in Central and Eastern Europe—we’d love to hear from you. Check out our investment FAQ and send your deck to borys@smok.vc.

Let’s talk.

Why We Invested in Proteine Resources

Posted on October 1, 2024July 1, 2025 by Borys Musielak

Sometimes, you back the founder—no matter what they’re building.

When Bart Roszkowski told us he was leaving the software world to build fully autonomous insect factories, we didn’t flinch. We’d backed him before (as co-founder of Vue Storefront), and we knew what he was capable of. If Bart was taking on the future of protein, we wanted in.

Proteine Resources is not your typical SMOK investment. It’s capital-intensive, hardware-heavy, and involves breeding bugs. But what the team has built—and what they’re aiming for—is nothing short of a blueprint for the next generation of food and agricultural infrastructure.

A massive market craving a solution

Europe alone produces over 100 million tonnes of biowaste annually. Most of it still ends up in landfills or incinerators, despite new EU regulations mandating sustainable disposal. At the same time, demand for alternative proteins—for animal feed, pet food, and even cosmetics—is exploding.

Proteine Resources is meeting both challenges head-on. Their proprietary insect breeding technology outputs protein of unmatched quality, with superior margins and a drastically smaller environmental footprint than traditional sources like soy or fishmeal.

“The demand already exceeds current supply 30 times over—and that gap is only growing.”

They’re starting with poultry and premium pet food producers, but the tech can be applied to any physical product category that requires sustainable, high-quality protein inputs—from aquaculture to pharma.

Deep tech meets deep domain expertise

The founding team is one of the strongest we’ve ever backed. Bart brings 17 years of startup and scaling experience. He’s joined by Konrad Włodarczyk and Dominik Helbin, two of the top insect breeders in Europe, with decades of hands-on experience running Poland’s largest orthoptera farms. CTO Dawid Misiniec ties it all together, building out an engineering stack that combines AI, automation, and sustainability in a way that makes industrial insect farming actually scalable.

The result? A patented, end-to-end production stack that includes:

Automated, AI-controlled insect breeding
Zero-emission factory design
A unique heat-recycling system that powers neighboring mushroom farms
Premium-grade insect-based products sold across three high-margin verticals

“Most people don’t realize how broken our current protein supply chains are—until they see how little land, water, and energy we need to produce something better. This is not a science project. It’s a new industrial standard.”
— Bart Roszkowski, co-CEO, Proteine Resources

Timing is on their side

From biowaste regulations and soy restrictions to booming demand in pet food and sustainable agriculture, the market tailwinds for insect protein have never been stronger. And Proteine Resources is one of the few players approaching the problem with the technical depth and operational maturity needed to build a defensible business.

We invested early—before the full system was operational—because we’ve seen how this team executes. And because this is not just another biotech startup. It’s infrastructure for the future of food and materials.

Are you building something ambitious in CEE?

If this kind of thinking resonates with you—or if you know a founder we should meet—check out our investment FAQ and send your deck to borys@smok.vc.

Let’s build something weird (and wildly scalable) together.

Why We Invested In Masthead Data

Posted on June 20, 2023June 28, 2025 by Borys Musielak

Sometimes things just click. The moment I met Yuliia I knew she’s an exceptional founder who figured out a niche in a huge data observability market. I wanted to be part of her story.

SMOK Ventures joined the $1.3M USD pre-seed round of Masthead, a Canada-based 🇨🇦 data observability startup founded by a Ukrainian 🇺🇦 couple Yuliia Tkachova & Sergey Tkachov.

The Back Story

I met Yuliia courtesy to Google Form Startups where she pitched her startup in front of investors in Warsaw 🇵🇱 in March 2023.

We immediately clicked.

I experienced the problem they are solving—i.e. breaking data streams — first-hand while at Samba TV, so it was not hard for me to understand the value Masthead provides.

Yuliia is an ex product manager, like myself, so we spoke the same language, which also made it easier to get to the point quicker.

She walked me through the live demo of a product at the conference. Normally things like those end up super awkward. This time, however, it was not. I think it was mostly because of the passion she has for the product, and how she can talk about it both on a generic “VC level” and on very technical “CTO level”. Once she realized I can get deep into the technology, it got super interesting.

Data Observability — The X Factor

Data Observability has become an essential component of modern data stacks to tackle growing numbers of erroneous data. This means a dynamically growing demand for such solutions. Harvard Business Review data shows that $3.1T annual losses are generated due to erroneous data in the US alone.

The main differentiator which makes Masthead’s solution unique and valuable for their clients, is that unlike traditional data observability solutions, Masthead does not compromise on clients’ data privacy and security. Their platform observes data pipelines and table health in real time via logs without accessing clients’ data directly (i.e. does not require a database connection). Thanks to this technique, the company’s software is also easier to integrate than competitors that require database connections.

The fundraising timeline

Founders often ask about our process and how fast we can move, so in full transparency, here’s how the process looked like in case of Masthead.

The fundraising was initially slow, like for every first-time founding team, but it quickly picked up once SMOK and Monochrome committed about the same time. With focal and DEPO and a few angels already being part of the deal, within days, the round changed from under- to oversubscribed with a new investors unfortunately not being able to me it.

That’s how the actual timeline looked from my perspective as a VC:

January 20th. Yuliia sends a cold email with the deck which we ignore.
January 25th. Yuliia pings us over email. We reply back that Canada is outside of our scope and that we’re passing because we’re like total idiots 🙂
March 27th. Michael Ciffra from DEPO Ventures introes me to Yuliia who’s planning to be in Warsaw.
March 30th. First met with Yuliia in Warsaw, and quickly figured out they are actually well within our geo-scope with a CEE-based backoffice team and Ukrainian founders.
April 1st-14th. Internal due diligence — chatting with multiple founders and engineers of data-heavy startups like Sumologic, Data Dog and Snowflake to confirm the product market fit.
April 18th. Yuliia chats with Dan Bragiel, our SF-based venture partner. As a US fund investing in CEE we always want to have both our US partner and our CEE partner involved in each investment we make.
April 20th. SMOK commits to invest. Negotiating terms.
April 25th. KYC and formal DD finished.
May 4th SAFE signed.
May 9th. Money wired.

The fundraising process confirmed my belief in Yuliia and her founding team. Being able to navigate the fund raise, keeping in constant loop with all the parties, accommodating for some specific requests of each VC and staying genuine and confident at all times are all traits of exceptional founders and those will be required later on when the company raises a seed / series A and further rounds, hopefully taking the data observability market by storm!

Are you fundraising for a CEE startup?

Let’s talk.

Sasha Yatsenko joins SMOK as Principal for Ukraine & the Baltics

Posted on January 26, 2023June 28, 2025 by Borys Musielak

We’re thrilled to announce Sasha Yatsenko joining SMOK Ventures. Sasha takes over the principal position to help us invest in top early stage startups in Ukraine and the Baltic states. First two investments have been finalized and will be announced shortly.

A bit over a year ago when we announced that we planned to hire an investment team in Ukraine we did not expect that Ukraine would shortly show up on all the news channels globally due to the Russian invasion on the country. Back then we wrote:

Why Ukraine? When we were deciding on the next countries, we took three things into account: engineering talent pool, startup founding experience, and proximity to Poland. Ukraine is an obvious choice. The country is as big as Poland in population and its engineers are famous worldwide and are already fueling the growth of Silicon Valley’s top companies as well as creating its own unicorns like GitLab, or Grammarly. We already have dozens of Ukrainian founders in the pipeline, so all this combined, the expansion east sounds like the natural move for SMOK.

Today we stand by the above even more firmly. Having seen the bravery of the Ukrainian nation on the front line and having observed the vibrant tech ecosystem adjust very quickly to the new conditions and keep building, we knew we wanted to build our presence in the country regardless of the politics.

Why the Baltic states?

Lithuania, Latvia and most of all, Estonia, are small European states with a disproportionate success in founding fast-growing startups, just to mention Pipedrive, Bolt, Wise, Vinted, Veriff or Prinful as some of the most prominent unicorn examples. We’ve already made two investments into Estonian entities (MX Labs and Bitskout) and we’ll be announcing our first investment in Latvia soon. We’re planning to double down on this geo by building a dedicated team to cover the Baltic region led by Sasha, so if you’re an early stage investor, angel or ecosystem builder from one of the Baltic countries, expect a call soon!

Who is Sasha?

Sasha has been one of the key figures in the Ukrainian early stage startup ecosystem for nearly a decade. He helped build BRISE, a boutique pre-seed venture firm as founding partner, where he invested in companies like Vochi (exit to Pinterest) and Finmap (1.2m funding raised from Presto, SID). He participated in the selection of startups for the Ukrainian Startup Fund. Sasha was also named the most friendly Ukrainian investor by local founders and Ukrainian ecosystem builders in 2021. Before becoming a VC, he had his own web studio, travel agency and worked as Chief Digital Officer at dentsu Ukraine.

At SMOK everything is about culture. Culture defines who we fund, who we work with and even who our investors are. We have a long-term plan to become the go-to fund for founders all across Central and Eastern Europe. We believe teaming up with Sasha will help us achieve this goal faster. We’re absolutely excited to have him onboard!

Are you raising for your Ukraine or Baltics-based startup?

Contact Sasha at sasha@smok.vc.

Why did we invest in Bitskout?

Posted on July 27, 2022June 28, 2025 by Borys Musielak

Recipe for a successful pre-seed round? An experienced team, focus on being global from day one, stellar co-investors and a growing technology trend. Here’s why we invested in Bitskout.

Founders, founders, founders

In early-stage startup investing, founding team quality is the most important success/failure indicator. The product will likely change a 100+ times in the next 2 years, markets will shift, new competitors will show up, and the team will be there to navigate it all.

This time we made a bet on Ilia’s and Alexey’s experience and proven ability to deliver. Many years in the world’s top tech corporations and entrepreneurial mindsets made a great foundation to become startup founders. And yeah, if you didn’t notice already, they are brothers! One may say that SMOK, also being co-founded by two brothers, may have an affection for these types of deals, but hey – if it works, it works.

What is also worth mentioning, Ilia and Alexey managed to deliver a working product in just a few months, with no budget. They literally did that by the book. Before reaching out to investors they established key product hypotheses, created an MVP and proved that it works.

Stellar co-investors and global mindset from day one

The round has been filled with investors from three distinct corners of Europe. Bitskout managed to convince SMOK Ventures (American fund investing in CEE), Shilling VC (Portugal) and Octopus Ventures (UK). Why is that so important? Because it will be a major multiplier for Bitskout’s business and VCs network, especially when fundraising for the next round. Bitskout had these two elements from the start:

Global mindset – rather than focusing on local market;
Long term vision – as the current round is not a destination, but rather a beginning of the journey.

*Founders of Bitskout – Ilia Zelenkin (left) and Alexey Zelenkin (right).*

No-code AI

Bitskout allows users to make use of the most powerful AI engines in the world, without writing a single line of code, and all of that directly in the user’s working environment. It means that users can employ powerful AI with close-to-none effort. I believe that no-code is the next step for work automation. Rather than software replacing people, it should make them more efficient. People who work with manual and mundane processes should have easy access to the best automation tools, and Bitskout makes it happen.

If you want to learn more about this emerging technology trend, here’s a recent article from NY Times.

Moving to remote investing

Not that long ago I would have met all our portfolio founders offline a few times before making a decision. The Bitskout investment process is one of the first steps into the direction of fully remote or hybrid (online/offline) investing. Why so?

Obviously, I still want to meet founders and get to know them well before making a decision. Though, keeping in mind SMOK’s focus on investing across CEE, I cannot be personally present in each major startup hub in the region as much as I’d like to. So, much like many startups switching to fully remote, I need to hold up on the idea of having a beer with each team before investing. And honestly, it’s great! There will be plenty of time for social chit-chat in

So how exactly did the process look like in the case of Bitskout? I scouted the lead remotely, later we had a few online chats with the CEO. During the process we met face-to-face only once, with the CTO, who happened to be an expat living in Krakow, Poland. In the meantime, SMOK’s Venture Partner – Dan Bragiel verified the deal from Sillicon Valley standpoint. What was also of great help in the process, the CEO did a tremendous job in preparing an investors’ data room.

Are you fundraising for a CEE startup?

Let’s talk.

SMOK is hiring an investment team in Romania

Posted on October 28, 2021March 14, 2022 by Borys Musielak

SMOK Ventures launched in 2019 to disrupt early stage venture capital investing in Emerging Europe by connecting top local founders with VC and tech leaders in Silicon Valley and Asia. Now the fund is expanding to Romania and the rest of CEE and we’re looking to add first team members outside of the founding group. Someone like you, perhaps?

Who is behind SMOK?

We are a team of entrepreneurs and community leaders with the aim to help early stage startup founders build multi-million-dollar global software enterprises from Central and Eastern Europe.

We’re led by Paul Bragiel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bragiel), entrepreneur turned investor. He has advised or invested in the seed rounds of 200+ companies which includes holdings in twelve unicorns including Uber, Niantic (of Pokemon Go fame), Stripe, Unity, GoJek, Carousell & Zappos. Paul has founded and oversees 7 funds with over $400m under management across 4 continents.

Diana Koziarska and Borys Musielak form the Warsaw-based part of the founding team. They’re both entrepreneurs and community leaders. Before SMOK they co-founded ReaktorX, an acceleration program which helped 150+ founders launch their first businesses. Borys also built a media & AI startup Filmaster and sold it to San Francisco based Samba TV.

We’re also supported by San Francisco-based Dan Bragiel, a venture capitalist and angel investor with an angel portfolio including a number of hyper-growth startups like Opendoor, Virta Health, ShipBob and Playco.

Image for post — *SMOK.vc team: Paul (left), Diana, Borys (right)*

What’s our track record?

As SMOK we’ve made 12 Deals in 12 months (and added 6 more since writing that article) backing some of the top Polish entrepreneurs like Lech Kaniuk of the Delivery Hero fame, Dorota Rymaszewska, a former VP Sales at Booksy or Maciej Prostak, Maciej Sawicki, and Jarek Sygitowicz.

11 out of the first 12 companies we backed in 2020 have already raised follow-on rounds, with valuations growing more than four times in less than 12 months.

We’ve co-invested with top global funds from countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Germany, UK and the US as well as top global angels, including the founders and VPs of companies like Supercell, Rovio, Pipedrive, Affirm, FitBit or Mint. Top European funds like Creandum or earlybird backed our seed investments in Series A stage.

Those were good two years, against all odds 🙂

Why Romania?

In a very short time we became the go-to fund for serial entrepreneurs launching their new businesses in Poland. We’re committed to take it to the next level now, with the Central and Eastern European expansion.

When we were deciding on the next countries, we took three things into account:

engineering talent pool,
startup founding experience,
proximity to Poland.

Romania is an obvious choice. The country is half the population of Poland, but its engineers are famous worldwide and are already fueling the growth of Silicon Valley’s top companies as well as creating its own unicorns like UiPath and soonicorns like FintechOS, eMag or BitDefender.

We already have dozens of Romnanian founders in the pipeline, our partner Borys has been active in the ecosystem mentoring at How To Web’s Startup Spotlight program, so all this combined, the expansion south sounds like the natural move for SMOK.

Who are we looking for?

Working at SMOK is a lifetime opportunity to break into venture capital and together build one of the top VC funds in Central and Eastern Europe, one country at a time.

You’ll be working on:

building the deal flow and community around SMOK in Romania and other CEE countries,
analysis and due diligence of our investments in all markets,
supporting our portfolio companies,
attracting new LPs to the fund,
writing, talking and screaming about SMOK in our blogs, social media (we already started building online communities with the CEE Valley group on Facebook and on Twitter), press, meetups and conferences.

Basically, the same stuff we as SMOK founding partners currently work on. We’re a small team with huge ambitions and we require the same from our early team members.

The position is remote-friendly, but the preference is that you are based or prepared to move to either Bucharest, or Cluj Napoca and in the future travel a lot across those countries and potentially the rest of the CEE markets once it’s finally safe to travel, obviously.

How to apply?

We want the process to be transparent and simple.

First, think deeply about why you want to work at SMOK, how does it fit your long-term career goals. We want those to be aligned with ours.
Secondly, read our FAQ, specifically the investment criteria, and find us 3 top early stage deals in CEE that you believe we should invest in. Be prepared to justify your choice.
When ready, apply via this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeJi3CYh7ryIyeG4H2ROQYi0ybXmz2iDpGdlxA3RmNqf8bVSA/viewform
Ping me via borys@smok.vc when you’re done!

Why we invested in Shen AI

Posted on April 8, 2021June 28, 2025 by Borys Musielak

Big vision, successful repeat founders and technology that can literally save lives. There’s a lot to like in Shen AI, our most recent investment at SMOK.vc. Let’s break it down!

The Vision

In company’s own words:

Most people around the world don’t have access to up-to-the-minute and readily-available diagnostics. Instruments are expensive and the healthcare systems are overloaded. Yet, almost everyone has cellphones. Shen AI turns mobile phones into mini diagnostic systems to prevent health problems from happening or stop before they get serious.

I find this vision very appealing. Access to health care used to be a genuine problem globally even before COVID-19. Now it affects not only the developing nations but nearly everyone regardless of where they live.

Being able to self-diagnose at home daily and spot problems while scrolling your favorite social media app sounds like a dream, but as the technology advances, the dream is finally becoming possible. Tech like what Shen AI is building paired with a robust tele-medicine solution to connect patients with real doctors when a problem is spotted feels like the future of healthcare. We’re excited to potentially be a small part of it!

The Founders

Like with every startup we invest in, also here, it all started with the founders. Both Remi Kościelny and Przemek Jaworski are serial entrepreneurs with years of experience building and scaling tech companies.

Remi co-founded one of the most successful mobile game studios in CEE region, Vivid Games, (where our partner Paul Bragiel was an early investor) which he took to the Warsaw Stock Exchange. He recently left the company after recording its biggest year to date in terms of revenue.

Przemek has been involved in a number of startups, including ZMorph, a 3D printing hardware company where he raised ~$3M in VC funding.

Remi is a hustler and a frontend guy, Przemek is a hacker and a backend ninja. They do seem like a dream pair of founders, don’t they?

*Remi (left) and Przemek (right) — the founding team of* Shen AI

The Technology

Video cameras built into modern smartphones are powerful and very sensitive light sensors that can capture subtle changes in human skin color and texture. They can also register and track tiny physiological details that are normally invisible to the naked eye. Coupled with powerful processors and smart algorithms, able to perform millions of calculations per second, they can tell more about your health than many dedicated medical devices. Inspired by the possibility of capturing such wealth of data from the skin, the team committed themselves to creating a simple, yet powerful video-based diagnostic platform: Shen.AI. How does it work?

Once the facial video image is detected and stabilized, it is passed into two simultaneous computation streams.
One extracts the signal from blood pulsations in the skin vasculature, and is able to detect heart rate, blood oxygen saturation and blood pressure.
The other, in the meantime, is able to examine skin texture and build its color map model used for facial skin health diagnostics.
Together they form a unique data processing pipeline, which ultimately connects to an AI-driven diagnostic engine.

The Co-Investors

Once we’re committed to investing, we love to bring to the table others, who we feel can add a lot of value to the founding team. In case of Shen AI we were able to complete this pre-seed round with four magnificent investors from all around the globe:

Joseph Mocanu via his Singapore-based Verge HealthTech Fund who brings 20 years of experience in developing and investing in healthcare technologies.
Aaron Patzer — a New Zealand based entrepreneur known for co-founding and selling Mint.com, who has recently been involved in digital health projects like Carbon Health, Radix Health or Vital Software
Ragnar Sass and Martin Tajur — Estonian angel investors, co-founders of Pipedrive, a unicorn from the Baltics

We’re very excited to work with such a group of entrepreneurs and investors and I’m sure they will all add value once the company grows.

Are you fundraising for a CEE startup?

Let’s talk.

Why We Invested in Alokai

Posted on January 19, 2021June 28, 2025 by Borys Musielak

I’m proud and excited to announce that SMOK Ventures co-led the $1.5M seed round of Vue Storefront (now Alokai). Read the full article to find out why.

What is Alokai?

Alokai is setting the new standard in e-commerce by providing shopping experiences like native apps while boosting site performance. Technically it’s a headless frontend that works with all the popular backends like commercetools or Magento. With Vue you can upgrade your dated e-commerce store’s look & feel without the need to migrate all your products and the backoffice. Alokai is currently the world’s fastest-growing open-source e-commerce frontend.

What do you mean open source? Do they give the software away for free?

Yes! And it’s beautiful 🙂

I’ve always been an open source guy. I’ve used GNU/Linux on my desktop and vim for text editing for the last 20 years. I’ve been on Signal since it launched. I closely followed the growth of MySQL, Git(hub), WordPress, Docker, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Nginx, Redis and others. I understand the power of open source in terms of community building.

Open source model specifically works when your product is primarily used by software engineers. Engineers put more trust into those tools that they can verify themselves by looking at their source code and documentation. Open source model means free distribution and potentially exponential growth with little marketing. However, it can be a challenge to monetize.

The best companies in this space find a way to provide value to customers with their free product while upselling them with premium features like cloud hosting and storage, add-on marketplaces or services. Alokai is no different here. Its free Vue.js frontend library Storefront UI is being used by 250+ e-commerce stores globally already with zero sales efforts. The company can focus on the bigger enterprise deals while not ignoring the long tail of users who are good with the free version. I think it’s brilliant and very future-proof as a significant fraction of users of the free version sooner or later converts to a premium, fully hosted & supported edition.

Mobile e-commerce market is booming, but still uses legacy desktop-centric software

Currently e-commerce merchants are experiencing a mobile gap. Consumers spend much more time than money on mobile devices. Conversion on mobile is much lower than in desktop browsers. This is caused by shitty user experience as the majority of e-commerce websites are created in a responsive web design paradigm, i.e. the design originally created for desktop is fitted into much smaller mobile screens in a responsive way.

Alokai is using a Progressive Web Apps (PWA) paradigm. The mobile frontend is created from scratch, using the state of the art user experience and design tricks, previously only known from the native apps. This greatly increases the mobile conversions, making the merchants more money.

PWA also has a huge impact on improving site loading times. 53% of mobile site visitors quit when the site takes more than 3 seconds to load. Alokai makes sure this is never the case.

If it’s so obvious that PWA gives so many advantages, then why haven’t all the merchants switched to a modern architecture already? Well, the problem is that migrations suck. No one wants to leave the backend tools they are used to, reimplement the products database, or connect the new backend to all the external systems, etc. This is where Alokai really rocks. Vue does not force the merchants to change their backend at all, as the system works with all the popular e-commerce backends like commercetools or Magento. With Vue you can upgrade your frontend to a modern, lightning fast, mobile-first experience while keeping all the good old backend systems intact. And when the time comes, they can still migrate to another backend while keeping the frontend. Decoupling the two and adding flexibility for merchants is why Alokai became so popular so fast.

How have we met the founders?

Alokai is a rare example of a software house spin-off that worked. The product has been incubated by Divante, a Wrocław-based e-commerce agency founded by the Karwatka brothers, Tomasz and Piotr.

I first talked with Tomasz and Piotr about potentially investing in Vue back in October 2019 during one of the founder meetups set in the beautiful region of Jura Krakowsko-Częstochowska in Poland. Pre-COVID times, we do miss you!

Back then Vue was still part of Divante, but the brothers made the decision that the project’s potential was bigger than the company and that the only way to grow exponentially is to go separate ways. I’ve been in constant touch with the team ever since, advising the early founders and former Divante employees, Patrick Friday and Filip Rakowski on product, marketing and general vision of the company. Patrick is an experienced sales & bizdev guy and a previous founder. Filip is an quially experienced product manager and engineer. A match made in heaven! In January 2020 Bartek Roszkowski joined the team as COO. Bartek is a serial founder responsible for the success of startups like mfind and Nexto (both have been acquired). The founding team was set, and now it was the time to do the fundraise. I’d love to say the process was as lightening fast as the Alokai frontend on mobile devices, but the truth is, it was rather long and painful (spin-offs are hard!). However, we were able to add Movens as a co-investor and we quickly agreed on the major terms with the team. We’ve been supporting the team together for most of 2020 and we eventually closed the deal in December 2020.

So, why have we invested, again?

It’s rare but Alokai basically checked all the boxes for a SMOK investment into an early stage startup:

amazing founding team in Patrick, Filip and Bartek, best suited to disrupt the e-commerce tools industry,
fantastic advisors in Tomek and Piotr who support the founders on a daily basis,
phenomenal traction with the open source version of the software,
a good commercialization plan with positive early signals from enterprise customers,
great access to customers via founders’ network in the e-commerce world,
fast-growing e-commerce market with a number of legacy, not mobile-first systems waiting to be disrupted.

Are you fundraising for a CEE startup?

Let’s talk.