SMOK Ventures

Our partner Borys Musielak is warning founders not to take money from unverified investors.

"Always due diligence your potential investors just like they due diligence founders".

Watch the whole Forsal.pl interview (in Polish):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1rGJcm5eMo

FOUNDER vs INWESTOR – kto wygrywa? Jak to jest być founderem i inwestorem? 🔥W tym odcinku – Obiektywnie o Biznesie na Forsal.pl Szymon Glonek, rozmawia z Borysem Musielakiem z Smok Ventures o...

"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 Cris Lenta who is building the Sims for the LLM world, an AI-native life simulation platform in which players can develop their own characters, place them in open-ended worlds, and watch those characters develop personalities, form relationships, and make decisions based on their specific attributes.

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/315092/20260311/munich-san-francisco-how-cris-lenta-building-ai-powered-sims.htm

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 Bart Kiszala, Aliaksei Kulbei & Michał Bugno.

Slickshift is automating communication for trucking and logistics companies, saving thousands of dollars every month by cutting unnecessary ex*****on costs and resolving the moment they occur.

Where are they now?
🔸 First customer started paying 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.

It was great to yet again co-invest with amazing angels from our SMOK Angels CEE group including Bartosz Majewski Richard Lucas, Krzysztof Langer & Agata Wierzbicka.

Read the Slickshift story as told by its founder:

https://www.founderspond.com/p/slickshift-2025-traction-funding

Slickshift 2025: Traction, Funding, and the Path to 1M ARR From bootstrapped MVP to seed round and 100K ARR.

💡 What does it mean to be a VC in Kyiv today?

In a compelling new interview with Resilience Media, our Principal Sasha Yatsenko 🇺🇦 shares firsthand what life and investing look like on the ground in Ukraine — from unexpected blackouts in Kyiv to the under-invested defence tech ecosystem right in the middle of a real conflict.

Despite war-driven challenges:
🔹 Innovation is happening now — from autonomy to aerospace and cybersecurity.
🔹 But defence tech funding remains tiny relative to opportunity, with only ~$100M invested in 2025 and a handful of active VCs.
🔹 This gap is not just a hurdle — it’s a chance for early believers to support tomorrow’s unicorns.
🔹 Western investors must show up, physically and financially, to unlock real deal flow.

Sasha’s view from Kyiv isn’t abstract — it’s shaped by the realities (and resilience) of building companies where war is not a backdrop but the context for innovation.

A must-read on why Ukraine’s tech and defence ecosystem deserves serious attention now:

👉 https://resiliencemedia.co/power-outages-and-small-checks-the-perils-of-being-a-vc-in-kyiv/

Power outages and small checks: The perils of being a VC in Kyiv When I called Sasha Yatsenko, the power had just cut out. No sirens, no warning, just a few minutes of

2025 was the year SMOK Ventures fully committed to a direction we had been testing before: becoming the go-to early-stage fund for Central and Eastern European founders building anywhere in the world.

We've made 12 new investments, half of them in the CEE diaspora.

Read about our plans for 2026 and beyond:

https://medium.com//smok-ventures-in-2025-doubling-down-on-the-cee-diaspora-e5bfe8fef9fc

SMOK Ventures in 2025: Doubling Down on the CEE Diaspora 2025 was the year SMOK Ventures fully committed to a direction we had been testing before: becoming the go-to early-stage fund for Central…

In today's Puls Biznesu, a leading business newspaper in Poland, you can read about our new initiative "Smok Angels", an angel network of entrepreneurs actively supporting early stage startup founders across Central and Eastern Europe.

If you're actively writing angel checks in Poland or CEE and you'd like to join, email our founding partner [email protected].

https://www.pb.pl/aniolowie-w-gniezdzie-smoka-1246205

Borys Musielak ze Smok Ventures buduje sieć aniołów biznesu Borys Musielak, znany zarządzający funduszami venture capital, założył nieformalną sieć aniołów biznesu pod nazwą Smok Angels. Chce pomóc okazjonalnym inwestorom dotrzeć do dobrych start-upów. W kilka tygodni przyciągnął 160 osób gotowych do zakupów.

If you're not yet tired of podcasts with our founding partner 🌈 Borys Musielak here is one more by Giordano Tovo of .

In this one Borys talks about:

🚀 His leap from coding in Poland to selling his startup Filmaster to Samba TV, a U.S. company

💸 How he raised SMOK’s first fund when no one wanted to give him money

🎮 Why he’s bullish on game dev, dev tools, and Eastern Europe’s untapped talent

🌍 The rise of post-Soviet ambition and Europe's urgent need for tech independence

🤖 Whether engineers will be replaced by AI or supercharged by it

📉 Why betting on American VCs isn't the only way to go global anymore

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w5HS7TwtSQ&ab_channel=VCTalk

Our portfolio company Proteine Resources secures €9.5M EUR in funding for its autonomous factories of beef replacement protein.

We don't always do deep tech but when we do it's quite epic!

Congrats Bart Roszkowski & Konrad Włodarczyk!

Polish Proteine Resources Secures €9.5M in EU EIC Accelerator Funding Polish biotech startup Proteine Resources has raised €9.5 million in blended funding from the EU EIC Accelerator program, making it one of 40 companies

Proteine Resources with €9.5M in funding!

Only two companies from Poland and 40 in Europe were able to pass the rigid EIC process.

Congrats to our portfolio company for this remarkable achievement!

Congrats to our portfolio companies Authologic and Shen AI for being names Poland's top 10 startups of 2025 by Forbes!

Full list: https://www.forbes.pl/najlepsze-polskie-start-upy-2025/ey7z9mq

New investment alert!

We're happy to announce we've joined the seed round of Defguard, a Wireguard-based open-source zero-trust enterprise VPN with 100% European tech.

As geo-politics is getting crazy, technology is now more national than ever. Transparency and openness are becoming crucial for enterprises to choose their cybersecurity solutions.

Robert Olejnik and Michal Gryczka have transformed teonite into a product company 100% focused on building Defguard and we're super happy to be a small part of their journey, together with Hard2beat (Maciej Zawadzinski), S20 (Marcin Fejfer) and amazing business angels Łukasz Jesis, Tomasz Karwatka, Piotr Karwatka & Maurycy Prodeus.

Congrats to our portfolio founders Ksenia Iliuk and Andrew Kusyy of LetsData for making the European Forbes 30 Under 30 list!

LetsData 🇺🇦 helps brands and institutions safeguard their interests by detecting early signals of .