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Author: Borys Musielak

SMOK is hiring an investment team in Ukraine

Posted on by Borys Musielak

Last updated: October 2021

SMOK Ventures launched in 2019 to disrupt early stage venture capital investing in the Eastern bloc by connecting top local founders with VC and tech leaders in Silicon Valley and Asia. Now the fund is expanding to Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics 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.

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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 who all sold their previous businesses generating profits for their investors.

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 seed funds from Finland, Singapore and Japan as well as top global angels, including the founders and VPs of companies like Supercell, Rovio, Pipedrive 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 Ukraine?

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.

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.

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 Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics,
  • 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 Kyiv, Lviv or Odessa 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. When ready, apply via this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeJi3CYh7ryIyeG4H2ROQYi0ybXmz2iDpGdlxA3RmNqf8bVSA/viewform
  4. Ping me via borys@smok.vc when you’re done!

Good luck!

Why We Invested In Authologic

Posted on by Borys Musielak

Sometimes, you just know.

I met Jarek Sygitowicz at SXSW in 2021. Neither of us had cash for a hotel, so we crashed on the sofa of Przemek Żebrowski (now one of SMOK’s LPs). It was the kind of startup scrappiness that usually makes for a good story—and in this case, a great investment.

A few months earlier, in September 2020, Jarek pitched me the idea for Authologic. He had no product, no traction, and the company was just three months old. But the vision was clear, the timing was perfect, and the team—made up of serial founders with two successful exits under their belt—was one I would’ve backed blindfolded.

I committed on the spot. It remains one of the easiest investment decisions I’ve ever made.

Stripe for identity

Identity is one of the last unsolved layers of the internet. Every fintech, marketplace, or digital platform needs to know who their users are—but verifying identity online is still painfully fragmented.

Some countries have robust national eID systems. Others rely on third-party KYC providers. Startups often have to stitch together multiple solutions just to serve a single market. It’s messy, expensive, and error-prone.

Authologic solves this by aggregating national and global identity verification APIs into a single SDK. Think Stripe for identity—a plug-and-play solution that works across geographies and use cases, and makes it just as easy to verify a user as it is to accept a payment.

This is especially relevant in the GenAI era, where anyone can forge a document with ChatGPT and a bit of patience. Authologic bypasses the need for selfies and ID scans by using verified digital identities where available—but supports those methods too when needed.

“Stripe made payments simple. Authologic is doing the same for identity.”

A team built for trust

The founding team had already built and exited two companies before starting Authologic—but they weren’t interested in playing it safe. They were going after one of the most foundational problems in digital trust and doing it from day one with global ambition.

A month after our $250K pre-seed investment, they were accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch. The product has since matured into a widely used identity layer for fintechs and regulated industries across Europe and beyond.

We’re proud to have been their first backers—and even prouder to watch them build the infrastructure layer for trusted interactions online.

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 inSTREAMLY

Posted on by Borys Musielak

Since launching SMOK in 2019 I’ve only had one goal in mind — to invest in every single globally successful startup founder coming out of Poland. We’ve reviewed about 1 thousand startups in the first 12 months of operation. inSTREAMLY is our third investment. What makes me believe they are one of the above?

What is inSTREAMLY?

inSTREAMLY automates the process of displaying content on multiple live stream channels, making live streaming more accessible for brands and media industry.

Brands can partner with hundreds of streamers simultaneously and display content on all the channels through one dashboard.

Streamers can effortlessly cooperate with brands and be paid for content distribution in an automated way.

The experienced founding team

It’s always about the founders first. If we don’t have a fit, if we don’t believe the founding team can build a global leader in their space, we’d never invest, regardless of how revolutionary the idea, the business model or the technology is. inSTREAMLY founding team consists of four amazing people:

  • Maciej Sawicki, CEO, esports veteran, 5-time founder, community leader and expert in the fields of video marketing and streaming,
  • Damian Konopka, CTO, lead programmer, previously founded a popular esports ranking site streamerzy.pl,
  • Wiktoria Wójcik, a former streamer, now responsible for relationship with the streaming community at inSTREAMLY,
  • Szymon Kubiak, an executive from the agency world, responsible for ad buying and revenue growth.

I’ve known Maciej for a while (more about that later). The moment I met everyone else I knew they are a well-balanced group of people who trust each other and stand for each other. They seemed like the people with something to prove. Experienced. Knowledgable. Hungry. Exactly who I’m looking for!

Bootstrapped till product-market-fit

One of the traits of top founders is their ability to bootstrap their way to the seed round without compromising the cap table. This was the case with two of our previous investments, SmartHotel and Exit Plan Games. Same goes for inSTREAMLY.

When you bootstrap you spend your own money. This shows your dedication to the idea, but also forces the founding team to act lean and spend efficiently. It’s a great foundation for the future. Whatever you’re building, you’ll most likely have to go through multiple crises before reaching the unicorn status. The lean start defines your culture and helps you survive when things go bad.

inSTREAMLY was funded by Maciej for the first year of operations. They built the software, they gave it to befriended esports teams. They got the advertisers interested. They started making money. The moment we got serious about investing the company was already making 25k EUR a month and some of the customers included Netflix and Sony Playstation. It’s a good situation to be at as a founder when you’re raising a seed round.

The huge and growing streaming market

We had a world-class team and good early traction that validates the initial business model. The remaining question was: is the market big enough to be able to produce a unicorn independent from scratch?

inSTREAMLY operates in the USD 42.60 billion video streaming market. Video streaming is one of the fastest growing platforms in 2020 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4% till 2027. The company started in the “niche” of esports — a 1 billion dollar market on its own — which the team knows best. But the technology does not restrict them in any way to grow into other niches in the future.

Top esports streamers are big and recognizable enough to be able to attract the advertising and sponsorship deals on their own. However the long tail of mid to smaller streamers currently have no way of monetizing their content except for using the restriction-heavy tools provided by the streaming platforms like Twitch, YouTube or Facebook. The current market is huge and fragmented and screams for an independent ad marketplace like inSTREAMLY to take over.

The timing is also perfect as the competition is still limited while the market is already big enough to produce an independent leader even if we only consider the long tail of esports streamers.

The fundraising process — a few insights

Founders often ask me how to best prepare for venture capital funding. My answer is always the same — build credibility by building things. And let me know about the stuff you’re building, the earlier, the better.

I first met Maciej briefly in 2013 when he had a video agency and they recorded the talks at our monthly OpenReaktor events. Maciej also spoke at one of my events in 2018. However, we only properly met later that year when Maciej reached out about “a few ideas he was thinking about” (not exactly the best pitch :>). One of those ideas turned out to be the early version of what later became inSTREAMLY. We chatted for an hour or so. I learned about how the esports business operates and then forgot about it for a year.

Maciej followed up in July 2019. I have to admit I slept over here a bit. When he reached out about the funding I was focused on another termsheet. I failed to respond to his linkedin message and we almost lost the deal in consequence. It was thanks to my partner Diana who organized a small roundtable about gaming and esports that we got back in touch with Maciej in November.

By then he has sold his agency and focused 100% on his startup. He was testing the technology to place ads into multiple streams at the same time in his own esports team Devils.one and a few other teams. The early results seemed promising. It got me interested. Maciej already had two termsheets on the table at this time so we had to act fast. We soft-committed only a few weeks later and officially committed to invest mid January, after Maciej met my other partner Paul Bragiel in Zurich. Termsheet negotiations took about 2 weeks and we got from commitment to signing the investment agreement in less than 2 months. We officially signed the deal on March 26th, in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis in Poland. It was my only in-person meeting that month 🙂

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inSTREAMLY notary signing in the middle of COVID-19 crisis in Warsaw

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.