Top 20 largest rounds of Polish VC [2019]
Our local startup and venture capital ecosystem is clearly gaining momentum — in recent years we had a chance to observe at least twenty financing rounds of over 5M USD. Curious who made it to the top?
Before jumping to the ranking, a few words on the methodology:
the ranking was prepared using publicly available info, with the help of well-known VC/startup databases (e.g. Crunchbase, Pitchbook, Dealroom), and announcements in some of the commonly read sites (e.g. TechCrunch, Mam Startup). Thus, I might have missed something — either if the round was not disclosed to the general public, HQ moved from Poland to the USA (making it harder to filter in the databases), or simply by a mistake. If it’s the case, feel free to message me — I’ll be happy to update the article.
Cumulatively, the top 21 deals (including Pracuj Group) amassed over 315 million dollars alone (does not include previous rounds not listed below) with 2017 being the best year for Polish venture capital scene so far.
Enough of that! Not to keep you waiting anymore, here is the list:
0. Grupa Pracuj
Round size: 95M USD
Date: June 2017
Investors: TCV Ventures
Can it still be considered a VC round? It depends on how you approach it — there are some arguments for it to be classified as both a VC (minority stake, investor being both venture capital and private equity firm) and PE (well-established company [operating since 2000] generating positive cash flows, no co-investors, lots of money).
That’s why I’ve decided to give it a special place before the actual raking starts. Nevertheless, an amazing milestone by the leading polish online job marketplace and HR solutions provider. The investor, TCV Ventures has supported some other companies you might have heard of: Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, or Groupon, to name just a few.
1. Base
Round size: 30M USD, Series C
Date: August 2015
Investors: Tenaya Capital, Index Ventures
Probably a lot less known in Poland than the previous spot, Base is a data-driven CRM with scientific sales approach. Though it is located in Silicon Valley now, it has its roots in Krakow. Over its lifetime, the company has managed to fundraise over 50M USD (you’ll probably notice that later in the article) and acquire more than 5k paying customers.
Last year Base has been acquired by Zendesk, which is a leading US customer service software company valued at >8B USD. Unfortunately, the companies did not share the purchase price.
2. DocPlanner
Round size: 20M USD, Series C
Date: June 2016
Investors: Target Global, Enern, Winter Capital, EBRD
DocPlanner is a platform connecting patients with healthcare professionals present not only in Poland (ZnanyLekarz), but also in 9 other countries (incl. the Czech Republic or Italy, but also Mexico, Colombia, or Chile). The numbers may explain how they achieved raising ~50M USD, as over 30 million unique patients visit its sites every month with more than a million bookings.
The round was led by Target Global, an international VC fund headquartered in Berlin with 700M USD in assets under management. It has already supported 3 unicorns, Delivery Hero, AUTO1, and Blue Apron, and I believe DocPlanner has the potential to join them.
3. DocPlanner
Round size: 16.8M USD, Series D
Date: May 2017
Investors: Enern, Target Global, Market One Capital, One Peak Partners
Less than a year later, the company received another substantial funding led by well-known Czech Republic fund Enern, and again by Target Global. According to press releases, the money was (and still probably is) used for further expansion in Latin America.
4. Brainly
Round size: 15M USD, Series B(1)
Date: May 2016
Investors: Naspers Ventures
Some of you may know Brainly under its Zadane.pl name. At the time of the investment, according to Michal Borkowski, CEO the company had “over 60 million students in 35 countries (that) interact with Brainly every month”. What is amazing though is its monetization strategy — the company does not charge users any money for the vast majority of the content. Staying completely free for a long period of time allowed the company to amass tens of millions of users very quickly.
The round was entirely led by Naspers Ventures, an investor in Delivery Hero, Byju, SimilarWeb or Udemy. Publicly available databases propose two Series B rounds taking place, however, I‘ve decided to list them separately, as they happened a year apart from each other.
5. Base
Round size: 15M USD, Series B
Date: March 2014
Investors: Index Ventures, Social Capital, OCA Ventures, and others
I have warned you that there are a few companies dominating the fundraising game on our local playground. The 5th place already, and we have 3 players switching places.
This round had 8 investors committing a total of 14 million dollars.
6. Brainly
Round size: 14M USD, Series B(2)
Date: October 2017
Investors: Kulczyk Investments, General Catalyst, Point Nine Capital, Naspers, and Runa Capital
Same company, new investors. Kulczyk Investments joined and led the round to put Brainly valuation at 120M USD pre-money.
7. Booksy
Round size: 13.2M USD, Series B
Date: July 2018
Investors: Piton Capital, OpeanOcean, Enern, Vostok New Ventures, Zach Coelius, Manta Ray Ventures
Finally, a new player in the ranking! Booksy is the leading beauty marketplace for finding, scheduling and managing appointments (with over 2.5 million bookings per month worldwide), anchored by a SaaS app for business management — thus making it a SaaS-enabled marketplace, a business model similar to the one Docplanner has.
Present already in over 30 countries globally, the company led by Stefan Batory is still growing rapidly and entering new markets. It is also a proud investment of Inovo, the fund I work for — be sure to contact us if your company is currently looking for Series A funding.
8. Silvair
Round size: 12M USD, Series A
Date: November 2016
Investors: Digital Garage, Innovation Nest, CyberAgent Ventures, New Europe Ventures, Trigon TFI
Silvair, similarly to Brainly or Booksy, is a Polish company headquartered in the United States. It offers “interoperable wireless solution for lighting control” and yes, I wasn’t sure what that exactly means as well. After a quick dive into its product, I can tell you that it offers IoT (Internet of Things) solutions using Bluetooth mesh technology to, among other things, support advanced lighting control strategies in order to optimize energy cost, increase the comfort of building occupants, and allow for remote maintenance. Interesting!
Prior to going public on the Warsaw Stock Exchange in mid-2018, they had raised the largest series A round of 12M USD of all companies present in the ranking, with the help of Polish and international 5 investors.
9. Estimote
Round size: 10.7M USD, Series A1
Date: January 2016
Investors: Javelin Venture Partners, Homebrew, Box Group, Digital Garage, Commerce Ventures, New Europe Ventures, Buran VC
Describing what Estimote is building and how it can be used in one short paragraph is again quite a challenge, so I will use the help of PitchBook: it develops sensor-based analytics and engagement platform designed to change how people run businesses in the physical world. The company’s small, wireless sensors (beacons) use Bluetooth to detect the location of nearby smartphones and communicate with them using an API, enabling retailers to i.e. deliver advertising content based on customers’ locations within a store.
Eight international investors participated in the round intended to expand product development, engineering, and R&D.
Note: Crunchbase and TechCrunch say the round to be ~10.7M USD, whereas PitchBook proposes it to amount ~13.3M USD (with 10 investors instead of 8).
10. DocPlanner
Round size: 10M USD, Series B
Date: May 2015
Investors: EBRD, Team Europe, Point Nine Capital, Piton Capital, RTAventures, Fabrice Grinda, FJ Labs, others
DocPlanner again, for the third and final time featured on the list. A casual Series B round of 10M USD led by European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with several angels including Fabrice Grinda (Airbnb, Uber), Lukasz Gadowski (Delivery Hero), plus the existing investors Point Nine Capital, Piton Capital, and RTAventures.
At the time, the press release suggested the funds to be used the new funding for continued expansion, focusing on Southern European markets. Seems like money well spent.
11. Packhelp
Round size: 10M USD, Series A
Date: March 2019
Investors: White Star Capital, SpeedInvest, PROfounders, Market One Capital, and Apostolos Apostolakis
Just eight months after raising 2M EUR seed round, Packhelp, an online platform for creating and ordering custom-branded packaging, has announced its Series A round of 8.8M EUR, with a new investor on board taking the lead — White Star Capital from New York, with the previous investors following-on, thus making it the largest round of 2019 so far.
12. Base
Round size: 9.8M USD, Series A
Date: May 2012
Investors: Index Ventures, Social Capital, OCA Ventures, I2A Fund
In times Booksy or Silvair did not even exist yet, Base had managed to raise almost 10M USD from globally-recognized brands. The press note released in mid-2012 makes one think how fast things are changing — what is a standard now seemed like a unique selling proposition back then “(…)it offers applications for the Android phone, the iPhone, Mac, and Windows.”
13. Brainly
Round size: 9M USD, Series A
Date: October 2014
Investors: General Catalyst, Learn Capital, Point Nine Capital, Runa Capital
Third time for Brainly as well. After the seed round financed mainly by Point9, three new investors jumped in, and General Catalyst, US-based fund with over 400 investments (e.g. Snapchat, Stripe, Kayak) took the lead. Learn Capital, a VC firm focused on the EdTech sector (as the name might suggest) and Runa Capital also committed, closing the round at 9M $.
14. SalesManago
Round size: 6M USD, Venture Round
Date: February 2016
Investors: 3TS Capital Partners
SalesManago offers an all-in-one automation software used by marketing and sales teams in over 10 000 companies of all sizes in 40 countries. After an angel/venture investment in 2014, the founders convinced 3TS Capital Partners to solely undertake the next, $6 million venture round.
15. PerfectGym
Round size: 5.3M USD, Series A
Date: August 2017
Investors: 3TS Capital Partners, Trigon TFI, Innovation Nest
Founders of PerfectGym, a SaaS system for fitness club membership management, have succeeded to find their place in the ~$90B health club industry, as they serve as the product of choice for over thousand facilities in 50 countries, claiming to reach 1 million end-customers.
In 2017, a year after the seed round of $1.1M from Innovation Nest and Daftcode, the company has added 3TS Capital Partners and Trigon TFI to the bunch of its investors, as they jointly closed Series A round of $5.3M to accelerate its growth in Europe, Middle-East and Asia, as well as continue development of its technology platform. As there are over 200k fitness and health clubs globally, there is still plenty of room to grow.
16. Kontakt.io
Round size: 5M USD, Series B
Date: December 2015
Investors: Credo Ventures, Heartcore Capital
Quite interestingly, Kontakt.io is another firm on the list focused on beacons technology. Its proprietary Bluetooth-enabled beacons sensed by the company’s software allows users to develop mobile applications for an array of uses, like indoor and outdoor navigation, retail selection and payments and healthcare monitoring.
Credo Ventures, a well-known Czech Republic fund with investments in i.a. UIPath, the first unicorn from the CEE region, led the $5M round with Heartcore Capital, a consumer-only VC fund from Denmark that raised four funds totaling €350 million in AUM, as the co-investor.
17. UXPin
Round size: 5M USD, Series A
Date: July 2015
Investors: True Ventures
UXPin is a product design platform that allows product and design teams to easily design, collaborate on, and present both high- and low-fidelity, fully-interactive wireframes, and prototypes.
The Series A round of 5M USD happened at the end of 2015 thanks to True Ventures, Palo Alto-based billion dollar fund with almost 500 investments in total. Even more fascinating is the fact, that the previous round included legends such as the Andreessen Horowitz, Freestyle Capital or Gil Penchina — have a look at it on your own!
18. Elmodis
Round size: 4.9M USD
Date: April 2017
Investors: Intel Capital, Innovation Nest, SET Ventures
Elmodis offers an end-to-end IoT solution that monitors performance and improves the operating efficiency of industrial machines. Founded in early-2015 in Krakow, the company operates in a SaaS model, charging per each connected unit.
The company raised $4.9 million of Series A venture funding from SET Ventures, Innovation Nest, and Intel Capital, a CVC fund with numerous unicorns among its investments.
19. Silvair
Round size: 4.8M USD, Seed
Date: December 2015
Investors: Hedgehog Fund, CyberAgent Ventures, Paul Papadimitriou
Featured for the second time on the list, while also being the only seed round in the top 20, Silvair managed to fundraise almost 5 million dollars from three investors, including Polish Hedgehog Fund, Japanese CyberAgent Ventures, and Paul Papadimitriou, business angel and co-founder at Intelligencr, an innovation scouting firm based in Tokyo.
20. CallPage
Round size: 4.5M USD, Series A
Date: July 2018
Investors: TDJ Pitango Ventures, Market One Capital, Innovation Nest
CallPage began in 2015 when the founders, Ross Knap, Sergey Butko, and Andrew Tkachiv, tried to figure out why website visitors would leave their sites. (…) Instead of messaging users, they thought, why not let managers talk to them on the phone?”
With this seemingly simple tool, the founders convinced three local VCs, TDJ Pitango Ventures and Market One Capital from Warsaw, as well as Krakow-based Innovation Nest, to allocate their funds in a $4.5M USD round, making it the second largest deal of 2018.
Runners-up:
Also, here are some of the further places:
- Tylko - customizable shelves manufacturer, 4.5M USD in 2019
- SentiOne - multichannel CS automation platform, 3.5M USD in 2016
- Displate - marketplace and producer of metal posters, 3M USD in 2018
That’s it! Hope you have enjoyed getting familiar with some of the most successful startups from Poland. Most of the largest deals happened within the last few years and I strongly believe that mega rounds (>100M USD), famous in the US or Western Europe, will soon come to Poland and the CEE region. Feel free to share the article, as well as suggest who will be the first one to achieve it or earn the unicorn status!
Note: also, please keep in mind that the list may have its flaws — as previously mentioned, several sources propose different rounds, amounts or investors.
Some of the companies/deals proposed by the databases that are not included in the article: Huuuge Games (despite having the primary office in Poland I’ve decided to exclude it, as founded by non-Pole and outside of Poland), Busfor (again, not enough links to Poland in my opinion), Synerise (a round of $5M proposed by Crunchbase and €10.5M by PitchBook — I could not confirm any of them), Estimote (two rounds of $6.5M on Crunchbase, which I could not verify as well).
Staying open for your feedback!
