SMOK Ventures

🇵🇱 Poland’s SMOK (that's us!) closes $25m second fund. We want to invest in 25-35 early-stage SaaS, AI and gaming startups from across Central/Eastern Europe and the region’s diaspora abroad with cheques of $100k-1m. sifted.eu/articles/smoks…

Principle wins the KPMG Enterprise Innovation award at @sxsw - congrats to our portfolio founders Artur Kiulian & Anton Polishko, PhD. Principle 🇺🇦 is bringing Pentagon-style wargaming to the corporate boardroom. Source: startupreporter.eu/principle-wins… #smokportfolio #ceevalley

Many investors fuck around and waste your time. Mine: quick decision, wire the money, let me cook. Shoutout to @fdotinc & @smokvc: @michuk @hthieblot @tomasz_k97 @FurqanR @ruslanjabari @bragiel @adriannalakatos @mdjshin @stavan & the entire team

Want to scale globally & secure smart investment?🌍 Join Diana Koziarska, Founding Partner at SMOK Ventures, on Mar 26 for a Fireside Chat at WITW. Learn how investing with care can help women-led & early-stage startups thrive. 👉 Join: luma.com/nbl2a5jd #WITW# #VC#Startup

"When ChatGPT launched, I didn't see a chatbot; I saw the missing piece for building worlds where everything's alive and every behavior emergent to the player" says our portfolio founder @crislenta who's building the Sims for AI. techtimes.com/articles/31509… #gdc #gamedev

@sifted @smokvc The competition for tier-one founders in Poland is reaching a fever pitch. It’s a privilege to be in the trenches with these visionaries from Day 0. The #CEEvalley momentum is just getting started. 🚀 Check out the full @Sifted list here: sifted.eu/articles/polis…

Great to see three of our portfolio companies intoDNA 🧪 @Authologic 🛡️ & Juo 💵 named by top VCs as the Polish 🇵🇱 startups to watch in 2026! Our own @dianakoziarska named our top anti-portfolio companies AI Clearing & VitVio. Congrats to all founders! sifted.eu/articles/polis…

We're invested in 17 startups across CEE since launching the network in July 2025. Namely: Lysk, @BioCamAI, @IntoDNA, Proximity, Skyline, Petsy, Proteine Resources, @TasteRay, @ShenAI_tech, Kocia Szamka, @inStreamly, SmartGuest, Fusiomica, Aleet, Pupilmed, Fresh32 & @Reason8ai

I am thrilled to share that I’m a speaker at the upcoming CEE VC Summit, hosted by @vestbee_com in Warsaw on March 24-25! If you care about where European VC is heading, this is the room you want to be in. #CEEvalley

The real takeaway A great pre-seed deck is: Short. Clear. Narrative-driven. Easy to remember. If an investor can retell your story after one meeting — you’ve won. michuk.medium.com/8-slides-that-…

Not Just Pierogi 🥟 When I’m deep in the startup world, I find that some of my favorite discussions about CEE talent also include the tangible world outside the tech bubble. The region is full of iconic products that deserve the global spotlight. A thread:🧵

That's why you choose angels or micro funds like ours for your pre-seed round. We invested $200-300k in 10 deals last year, in none of which we own more than 10% of equity (most are SAFEs that would convert at 2.5-5%).

Early user testing now open for Defguard 2.0 Alpha! Highlights in this release includes reversed core gateway model, redesigned UI, built in mTLS CA, guided deployment and much more. Release notes & details: defguard.net/blog/defguard-… Video guide: youtu.be/DWQlyHmqMlo

1/ SF isn’t a city, it’s a mindset. 🧠 For many CEE founders, the Valley feels like the "final boss" - expensive, intimidating, and worlds away. But the truth? It’s just a high-density neighborhood where your next "yes" is a coffee walk away. 🧵👇

@crislenta @odysseyml Can I be a VC in this world, too?

Real-time World Models x Multi-agent reality simulator with @odysseyml

Consulting firms like McKinsey used to have a monopoly on predicting the future and preparing top managements of the corporations of the world for different scenarios. Principle by an exceptional Ukrainian🇺🇦 team led by co-founders @arturkiulian, @AntonPolishko and @yfilipch changes the above bringing Pentagon "wargaming" to corporate boardroom strategy planning for a fraction of the price of the Big-3. I'm very happy to co-lead this new investment of @smokvc with our friends from Ukrainian fund SMRK VC by @VladTislenko , especially that it finally allowed me to make this Perl regexp joke in the graphics that I'm sure only the geekiest of my followers will get. I'm equally excited by the quality of the 20+ angel investors who joined the round -- including current and former co-founders, founding engineers and VPs of companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, AMD, Nvidia, Whatsapp, Petcube, Ability AI and others. Thank you Oleksandr Yatsenko 🇺🇦 for scouting the deal and convincing such an experience team of repeat founders & ex Google Brain engineers to take our money! Go Principle! hashtag#ceevalley hashtag#smokportfolio hashtag#investments

CEE nations Poland 🇵🇱, Romania 🇷🇴, and Bulgaria 🇧🇬 are top 5 globally in Informatics Olympiad total medals won. Expect more AI superpower companies like @elevenlabs or @OpenAI coming out of the region in the coming years. Incidentally CEE is where I invest via @smokvc 💪🏻

4/ It was great to yet again co-invest with amazing angels from our @smok_angels group including Bartosz Majewski @RichardLucasKRK Krzysztof Langer & Agata Wierzbicka. Read the Slickshift story as told by its founder: founderspond.com/p/slickshift-2… #smokportfolio

3/ Where are they now? 🔸 Started monetizing in Q1 2025. By Q4 they crossed $100K ARR. 🔸 More than 1K people are using Slick weekly. 🔸 400K messages are being sent via Slick monthly. 🔸 Slick is already handling fleets much larger than 100 trucks for many its customers.

1/ New investment alert! 🚚 🦄 We've led the pre-seed round at Slickshift, a new company by the ex Base CRM (acquired by @Zendesk) crew of @kiszal, @akulbei & Michał Bugno.