Blog

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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

I’m proud and excited to announce that SMOK Ventures co-led the $1.5M seed round of Vue Storefront. Read the full article to find out why. What is Vue Storefront? Vue Storefront 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 […]

12 months ago we launched SMOK Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund bridging Central European startups to Silicon Valley and Asia. I’d like to give you an update on how we’re doing. Year 1 in Numbers We’ve reviewed just under 1000 startups and made twelve investments, eight of which are public as of today. We’ve […]

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 […]

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 […]

The idea that has always guided us in the Reactor was to help startup founders from all over Poland. The coronavirus, which grounded most home entrepreneurs, was one of the impulses for us to implement the program completely online – eliminating many restrictions for participants!

Yay! We’ve just made our first deal as SMOK! We invested $520k in SmartHotel, a smart new way for guests to interact with hotels or Airbnb hosts through Messenger chatbot and SmartTV app. Here is why. 1. The People I could actually start and end here. This investment is first and foremost about the team. […]