Polish VC market: Q1’22 summary — great numbers even though we were all focused on Ukraine!
Recap of the Polish VC market based on research Inovo Venture Partners has done in cooperation with PFR Ventures.
In Q1’22 we jointly invested EUR 250.7M (PLN 1.16B) in Polish startups (57% came from private sources). This amount is almost as high as was invested in all of 2019 (EUR 295M = PLN 1.27B).
It’s incredible how far we’ve come in three years. The top global VCs that we cooperate with say that Poland is no longer perceived as an ‘emerging market’ but rather as a ‘mature’ one and that it does not differ much from Germany in terms of its potential (quotes on that later).
It’s an exciting thought, and I agree with it. Of course, we are still far behind our Western neighbors in terms of investment value. Still, we are practically there when it comes to market structure, the potential of startups, and the professionalism of entities involved. And if you look at it in terms of speed of growth, we are way ahead of Western markets. Those are good reasons to celebrate 🥂.
Strong numbers in the last quarter were driven mainly by the Iceye mega-round. However, even if we don’t include this outlier, we’re left with EUR 130M (PLN 599M), which is over double what we invested in Q1’21 and Q1’20 (both around EUR 55M = PLN 245M).
The Polish VC market is now like a well-oiled machine. For a long time now we’ve noticed that the number of rounds remains stable at around 100 per quarter.
There is a lot of activity at the initial stage — in Q1 there were as many as 85 pre-seed / seed rounds. Two of the largest were Omnipack and Mindgram, at ~EUR 6.5M (PLN 30M).
We are also happy about the stable number of Series A rounds — 10 this quarter.
Top 5 rounds in Q2’22
Interestingly, the two largest rounds were done by startups run by the Polish diaspora (Iceye — Finland, Silent Eight — Singapore), and the third by a company based abroad (Stonly — France).
At Inovo we also see many Polish founders who settled abroad and launched exciting projects there. They’re so interesting that we decided to invest — we’ll surely share details soon.
Round size
Impact of the war in Ukraine
The fact that Q1’22 was such a strong quarter is especially remarkable when you realize that starting February 24th, we were absorbed by the war.
The eyes of the whole world turned to Ukraine, and Poland — including the startup community — has been very involved since day one. Many people spent every waking moment helping out, probably even prioritizing that over day-to-day business operations, including fundraising.
Since the war started, I have heard people asking about the impact it would have on CEE startups. We monitor the situation constantly, checking how international investors see it. Here is the perspective of Rob Kniaz from Hoxton Ventures:
That being said, let’s all hope for peaceful times to return soon and for Ukraine to have a swift victory. Slava Ukraini!
Methodology: how did we collect data
We conducted this research in collaboration with PFR Ventures. We sourced our information from aggregators such as Crunchbase, MamStartup, Pitchbook, and Dealroom.
What qualifies the transaction as “Polish”?
1. At least 1 of the co-founders is from Poland.
2. There is a Polish office with full-time employees on the ground.
3. The company is funded by a Polish VC.
4. The company recognizes Poland in its materials (website, press releases).
Inovo Venture Partners is a first-choice VC for ambitious founders from Poland and the CEE region. We back early-stage, post-traction startups with up to €3M of initial investment, and help them build global brands while driving growth of the local startup ecosystem. We take great pride in being close to top founders who think big. We’re investors in: Booksy, Infermedica, Spacelift, Tidio, AI Clearing, Zowie, Jutro Medical, Intiaro, Packhelp, Preply, Eyerim, Allset, SunRoof, Archbee, AhoyConnect, and uPacjenta. Our second fund reached a total of €54M.
For more information visit: inovo.vc
