A record quarter for Polish VC ecosystem!
We believe the Polish startup and VC market size will cross 1 billion PLN this year!
As in previous quarters, we have once again analyzed the venture market for the last quarter. We have already released a 2017–2018 report, which you can find under this link, as well as a Q1 summary here.
We are thrilled to announce the findings of the second quarter of 2019!
The second quarter of 2019 has been a record quarter for VC in Poland, with transactions totaling 444.2M PLN, which has been higher than both all of 2017 (397M PLN) and 2018 (213M PLN). The record number was mostly driven by one of the largest transactions that the Polish VC market has ever experienced — 344M PLN Series E of Docplanner invested by four international investors.
We strongly believe that, if we’ll be able to keep such pace, the value of Polish VC market in 2019 will cross 1 000 000 000 PLN, contributing to approximately 0,062% of GDP, which would put us ahead of countries like Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Austria, or Norway.
Furthermore, Q2 2019 value of transactions has increased significantly compared with previous quarters (21 deals adding up to 103.3M PLN), as well as the analogical second quarter of 2018 (12 deals, summing up to 36.6M PLN). On the other hand, the number of transactions has fallen from 21 deals in Q1 2019 to 18 deals in Q2 2019.
Out of this 444.2M PLN, the split between various types of deals goes as follows:
As mentioned before the largest deal this quarter was Series E of Docplanner, a booking platform and management software provider for doctors, which has managed to raise 344M PLN. The investors included One Peak Partners (UK), Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing (US), Piton Capital (UK) and ENERN Investments (Czech Republic).
We believe that it is the start of the mega-rounds era! Following the example of Docplanner, we are sure that companies like Booksy, Brainly, Packhelp, or Infermedica will each fundraise rounds of over 100M PLN.
The second-largest round in Poland was Alpha Talent, a cloud platform that connects global enterprises with software houses, offering tech talent as a service. Interestingly, the round was the largest seed round ever done in Poland. The investor behind is a Polish VC fund Aper Venture.
Other meaningful rounds include: Talkin Things — 14.5M PLN by Montis Capital, Infermedica — 14.0M PLN by Karma Ventures, Dreamit Ventures, Müller Medien, Inovo Venture Partners, as well as HCM Deck — 12.2M PLN by mAccelerator, Innovation Nest, Rafał Sonik.
Note: beginning this year, we have decided to include not only fundraising rounds by Polish startups, but also investments of Polish venture capital funds in foreign companies — this gives a better picture of how the local VCs distribute their money, but on the other hand it is slightly inconsistent with how we reported previous quarters.
Also, we are aware that other publications estimating the size of our local market exist, and they propose values different than ours. These discrepancies result from the way the data is collected — some of them are self-reported and may include the deals we couldn’t capture, but on the other hand, they might be a little over-enthusiastic as the VCs could overstate some of the numbers.
As always, we want to emphasize that we only use publicly available sources to gather the data and thus we might miss some of the transactions taking place. We strongly advise all the founders and their investors to disclose the transactions in their medium of choice — either a startup database or via a press release.
Regardless of the source, we already see that 2019 will be a record year for the Polish startup and venture capital ecosystem!
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Methodology: how did we collect data
Publicly available data sources on the Polish venture capital market often do not reflect its actual appearance, omitting significant financing rounds or improperly presenting those that took place. Because of that, we aggregated and we analyzed all the information available in many independent public databases as well as industry news portals such as Crunchbase, MamStartup, Pitchbook and Dealroom. The goal is to present the actual state of the local VC ecosystem more truthfully and accurately.
