The best year ever — 2019 in Polish VC (8x YoY growth in venture capital funding for Polish startups!)
… most probably making Poland the fastest growing startup & venture capital ecosystem in Europe!
Every quarter we release a blog post summarizing recent developments in the Polish startup and venture capital market. For the 2019 yearly report, we have joined forces with PFR Ventures to present the most accurate data. Here are the findings:
85 international and local VC funds have participated in 269 financing rounds resulting in PLN 1.27B (EUR ~294m) total value (8x YoY growth!).
If we add to that foreign investments of Polish VC funds, the value grows to PLN 1368B (EUR ~320m).
This means roughly 0.05% of Poland’s GDP, which puts us just around the European average, around countries like Germany, Spain, Norway, Italy, Czech Republic, and Hungary. There is still is much room for improvement though, as the US VC market comparted to its GDP is whooping 0.36% (around 7x more than Poland's’ result at the moment).
Nothing better captures the phenomenon of the last year than this chart:
And here is how the market has grown every quarter in the last 2 years:
Although Q2 2019 is a little bit skewed due to the mega-round of DocPlanner (344M PLN / 80M EUR), the upward trend is clearly visible in both the value (e.g. each quarter in 2019 being higher than the best quarter in 2018) and the number of transactions taking place.
Let’s have a look at the largest transactions, as they had the greatest impact:
Below are the proportions between local and international players in:
- total value of transactions:
Polish funds =PLN 468m (37%)
international funds = PLN 798m (63%) - total # of transactions:
Polish funds = 254 (95%)
international funds = 15 (5%)
It is clear that Polish funds account for the vast majority of the transactions, however looking at the total value, international VCs take the lead.
It can be concluded, that our local investors support the companies at their earliest stage (Seed, Series A), whereas for the later rounds (Series B, C, and further), bigger funds step in.
The data below supports this, as there have been approximately:
- 243 Seed rounds
- 22 Series A rounds
- 4 Series B+ rounds
Our predictions — financing rounds in 2020
From another analysis of ours, around 25% of Seed stage companies manage to raise their Series A rounds, and 12% continue to raise Series B.
Using the above numbers, this should translate into around 61 Series A rounds and roughly 3–4 Series B rounds in 2020/21. Such a situation is not only beneficial for us, as we invest primarily in the Series A stage, but also to the entire ecosystem, as the average Series A round is at 10–12M PLN, meaning up to 732M PLN of market value from this segment alone!
At Inovo Venture Partners, we’ve done 3 investments in 2019, and in 2020 we plan for 6 more deals.
Please make sure to reach out to us if you’re looking to raise your pre-Series A or Series A round in the near future!
For the visual version of the presentation, be sure to visit this link!
Again special thanks to PFR Ventures for the collaboration.
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As always, we want to emphasize that we mainly 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.
Inovo Venture Partners backs early-stage, post-traction startups that can grow 100x. We partner up with ambitious founders like Stefan from Booksy, Maja from Zowie, or Marcin from Spacelift. We invest between €0.5–2m in startups from Poland and the region.
