Polish VC is on a funding spree!
The summary of the third quarter in our venture capital market.
365M PLN in total funding. 28 transactions. Local and global VCs.
Just after a record second quarter of this year, during which ~445 million PLN were poured into Polish startups (or into foreign ones contributed by Polish venture funds) our local ecosystem is not slowing down. Add to that around 110M USD in the first three months of the year…
…and it’s 921M PLN of funds raised and invested in 9 months of 2019!
(Or 240M USD / 215M EUR, respectively).
We have shyly anticipated it at the beginning of the year, now we’re sure about it— Polish VC market value will cross 1 BILLION ZŁOTY this year!
Also, as mentioned before, it would contribute to approximately 0,062% of GDP, which would put us ahead of countries like Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Austria, or Norway.
Although 365M PLN of total capital invested in Q3 did not manage to beat the previous period (445M PLN in Q2), it is a record in terms of the number of transactions taking place. 50 investors have participated in the 28 rounds we’ve qualified.
An upward trend is clearly visible. We expect more big rounds to happen in the coming months, as many of our rising stars (e.g. Infermedica, Packhelp, Displate) will probably fundraise their next rounds.
It gets interesting when it comes to the split between various type of deals:
Last quarter, the dominating category was “International VCs in PL startups” (thanks to, again, DocPlanner). In Q3 it shifts towards the situation we’d love to see the most of “Polish + international VCs in Polish startups” — which basically means global players join forces with our local ones to fund the most promising companies. This quarter there were two outstanding prospects:
Booksy (beauty market SaaS-enabled marketplace, our portfolio pride) and Brainly (P2P EdTech marketplace).
Their rounds both equaled to around 115M PLN (~30M USD) each, and in both cases, the Polish part in these rounds was Manta Ray (VC investment arm of Sebastian Kulczyk [top 3 wealthiest people in Poland]).
Other investors in Booksy’s Series B round were, among others, Piton Capital (remarkable marketplace fund from the UK), Enern (one of the best VCs in the CEE region, headquartered in Czech Republic), Industry Ventures (well-known VC fund founded in 2000 in the US), and XG Ventures (US fund with 22 successful exits).
On the Brainly side, the number of investors is smaller, but no less impressive — the round was led by Prosus (sub-organization of Naspers), with a follow from Runa Capital (large international VC).
Other meaningful rounds include: Synerise (42M PLN), MarketInvoice (UK-based, but with meaningful participation of Polish Cogito Capital), Reliability Solutions (13M PLN), or Nestmedic (8.6M PLN).
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.
Most importantly, PFR (Polish Development Fund) recently announced the value of the first three quarters to already cross the 1B PLN level, however, our methodology and reasoning are different (our understanding is PFR wrongly included the entire round size of MarketInvoice, while we only calculate its part provided by the only Polish fund — Cogito Capital).
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.
If in your opinion we’ve lost an important transaction in our calculations, please let us know via kontakt@inovo.vc!
Regardless of the source, Polish ecosystem rocks!
Heading straight for 1 BILLION VALUE IN A YEAR.
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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.
