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Tag: fintech

Why We Invested In Juo

Posted on 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 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.