This year may turn out to be record-breaking in terms of venture capital investments on the Polish market. The startups will receive a total of about $0.6B, which is almost 20% more than last year and over ten times more than five years ago. The latest report shows that funding for the largest ones has more than doubled in the first half of 2021. Among the 30 most valuable technology companies in the region, as many as nine, the most significant number is from Poland. The list of leaders includes e-commerce and logistics giants, such as Allegro, InPost and Eobuwie, and video game producers such as CD Projekt, Techland and Ten Square Games.
Poland leads also in the number of transactions on the young innovative companies market. In the third quarter of 2021, as many as 111 were in Poland, while in Estonia – 26, and Lithuania – 13. In total, 193 rounds of financing were carried out in the entire Central and Eastern Europe in this period, of which 57% concerned investments in Polish companies. Most money from investors went to the Romanian UiPath ($750M), Estonian Bolt ($600M), Finnish Vinted (EUR 250M) and the Polish platform Eobuwie (EUR 110M). The Google report indicates that the so-called mega-funds constitute 55% of the financing of technology companies in this part of Europe. All these investment increases are driven by foreign VC funds, which since 2017 have been responsible for as much as 90% of investments in the region.
The most valued young innovative company in Poland (over $1B, which qualifies it as a “unicorn”) is DocPlanner, which offers access to an internet platform for arranging medical appointments (more information is here ). It is followed by Booksy, which in turn offers a platform for arranging visits to hairdressing salons and beauty salons (more information is here).
Right behind them is Brainly, LiveChat, Cosmose AI, Uncapped and Packhelp, which recently broke the record on the Polish market, obtaining $47.5M from investors. New information about further investments in Polish technology companies appears almost every day. A good example is CountMe, which recently boasted that it has already acquired over $7M this year. The company negotiating the takeover of the listed Groclin is developing an online Less platform, which allows you to buy and sell used items from other users. Robert Lewandowski (famous Polish footballer) and Krzysztof Pawiński (co-founder of Maspeks) invested in the business founded by Dawid Urban and Mateusz Oleksiuk.
In turn, SentiOne has just registered a company in Dubai, 20% of which has gone to one of the members of the Dubai royal family. The company, developing advanced tools for analyzing customer opinions based on AI, wants to carry out four pilot implementations on the local market by the end of this year. Work is already underway on new natural language comprehension algorithms for Arabic, which the company wants to implement in the banking and real estate sector companies. However, it does not forget about the Polish market, preparing to debut on the Polish stock exchange. Due to the thriving settlements of many tenders, it plans to enlarge the development team by another 30 people (more information is here).