What are the best Polish startups in 2019?
By: Borys Musielak
Tags: Venture Capital, Startup, Gaming, Poland, Fintech

Update 9.5.2021: Note that an updated version of the list is now available: What are the hottest Polish tech startups in 2021?

I’ve been constantly updating my list of hottest startups in Poland over the last decade on Quora and I finally decided to make it into a blog post as well, so here you are — I’m presenting the list of the most valuable, interesting, groundbreaking and popular Polish startups as of September 2019.

I only included the startups (and scale-ups) that work globally on a product, which eliminated some very successful local companies providing services to the home market. I have decided to divide the startups into categories based on what seems to be Poland’s specialties: gaming, consumer hardware (especially beacons and 3d printing, health devices), big data and AI, medtech, fintech, blockchain and more.

The Witcher by CD Project RED

Hottest of the Hottest

Those are the clear global market leaders in their respective categories, companies that we’re the most proud of as Poles.

Fintech

Cinkciarz sponsoring Chicago Bulls basketball team

Blockchain & Bitcoin tech

Golem is building a worldwide supercomputer on blockchain

Health & Wellbeing

Docplanner (mentioned in the hottest)

Telemedi.co — online consultations with doctors (raised 200k EUR from Docplanner founders)

Infermedica — pre-diagnose, triage, and connect your patients with the appropriate medical services. Raised 3.7M (as of Sept 2019)

MySpiroo — ultraportable peak flow meter that connects to your smartphone (TechCrunch article)

Harimata — turns gagdets into health monitors

GLOV by Phenicoptere — products for makeup removal and home SPA

Sidly — wearable medical device that monitors your health

Emerald — clear the air around you

Egzotech — your robot physiotherapist

vBionic — prosthetic hand

StethoMe — hardware to examine your child’s health. Raised $4.2M (Sept 2019)

UnitDoseOne — takes care of hospital drugs logistics

biolumo — point-of-care diagnostic machine for general practitioners (GPs) to help them select proper antibiotics by Olga Grudniak (graduate of Startupbootcamp Berlin Digital Health 2017

HoloSurgical — synthetic vision for surgeons

MySpiroo in action

Consumer Hardware

Photon is a robot that evolves with your kid

3D Printing Tech

According to Predictions 2015: 3D printing is a revolution | by Deloitte, 10% of world 3d-printers are designed and manufactured in Poland, making us the market leader in that category.

Zortrax 3D printer

IoT and beacon-related tech

Estimote (mentioned in the hottest)

Silvair (previously seedlabs.io) — smart lighting platform by Rafał Han

KONTAKT.io — another iBeacon company (backed by Sunstone Capital)

Fibaro (Z-Wave) — home automation, recent valuation: $40m

MorAmp — tech for e-mobility (scooters, bikes) and cloud service for predictive maintenance. Raised $2M in 2018.

Estimote LTE beacons

Video, Augmented & Virtual Reality

Bivrost VR cameras

Customer Service Automation

LiveChat (mentioned in the hottest)

Tidio — chatbot builder for websites

CallPage — livechat for call backs

LiveCall — another livechat for calls. I know.

User.com — Intercom competitor

Sugester — customer support and ticket management by Marcin Stefaniak

Migam — building communication between the deaf people and everyone else, customer service for the deaf

Sales and Marketing Automation

Martech, Advertising Tech, PR Tech

Brand24 Internet monitorsing panel

Internet Monitoring

Brand24 (mentioned in the hottest)

SentiOne — Brand24 competitor, very similar product and traction

Sotrender — Social media analytics & optimisation by Jan Zajac

NapoleonCat — all in one social media dashboard

PricePanorama — real-time price monitoring by Marek Małachowski

PackHelp packages

Company Management Software

Customized furniture by tylko

Design and Fashion

4F — sportswear brand

ANSWEAR.com — online multibrand store that operates in Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Hungary (as of late 2016)

SHOWROOM — marketplace for independent fashion brands and designers (backed by hardGAMMA Ventures, Hubert Burda Media)

tylko — customized furniture

Intiaro — visualization and configuration tool for furnishing products online (kind of like tylko but white label)

MISBHV — fashion boutique (Rihanna wears them!)

Displate — metal posters (they are really cool!)

LESS_ — marketplace for second-hand clothes

Consumer Apps & Marketplaces

Brainly (mentioned in the hottest)

Audioteka — audiobook platform running in Poland, Czech Republic, France and other EU countries (backed by Giza Polish Ventures and K2 Internet)

Nozbe — popular getting things done tool

Betegy — football prediction tool to help betting

Listonic — a popular smart shopping list app with a nice ad-powered business model by Filip Miłoszewski

DailyArt — mobile app with a daily dose of art on your phone and a BuzzFeed for art (DailyArtDaily.com) by Zuzanna Stanska

Explain Everything — collaborative whiteboard app

FinancesOnline.com — top 3 in the world in SaaS software comparison and reviews by Sebastian Lambert

AirHelp — helps passengers get refunds for delayed or canceled flights. yCombinator graduate. Raised $12.2M. Profitable with tens of millions in ARR as of Sept 2019. 90% of the staff is Polish and based in the country.

Human Resources

Apps for Designers and Engineers

Image and Speech Recognition

Big Data & Automation

Oktawave — computing cloud (backed by K2 Internet)

Elmodis — improves efficiency of industrial machines (backed by Innovation Nest)

Fogger — big data for predictive maintenance (previously Enteye)

deepsense.io — big data science powered by Apache Spark (competes with IBM, SAS Institute)

Deep.BI — real-time big data analytics (aka your big data co-founder)

DataWalk (previously Pilab) — find and leverage hidden connections between data sets to gain new insights

Perovskite material by Saule Technologies

FFoodtech, Biotech, Hardcore Scientific Stuff

Saule Technologies — company working on the commercial application of perovskites by creating a new generation of photovoltaic cells by Olga Malinkiewicz (backed by Hideo Sawada and NCBiR — Polish innovation government agency)

XTPL — ultra-fine printing of a variety of nanomaterials for

LCD manufacturers, photovoltaic cell manufacturers, glass, touch screens

LCD manufacturers, photovoltaic cell manufacturers, glass, touch screens Syntoil — transform rubber into valuable resource. Finalist of Chivas Venture 2019.

Insignes Labs — novel antimicrobial components

HiProMine — food from insects & more eco-friendly stuff

Sundose — personalized supplements

Nextbio — DNA-based plant protection solutions for agritech,

Space stuff

Creotech — spacecraft components, quantum computing

SatRevolution — nanosatelite systems and solutions, launched their first two satellites in 2019

SatAgro — sattelite monitor for farmers (monitors land, manages crops, saves money)

Dying Light 2 coming soon by Techland

Game development and publishing

Honorable mention

Those are some of the biggest internet companies that are specific to the Polish-market. You’ve never heard about them if you’re not Polish yourself, but the list would be incomplete without them:

Allegro — Polish ebay (acquired by Naspers)

Gadu-Gadu — Polish ICQ (acquired by Naspers)

Nasza-Klasa — Polish ClassMates (acquired by Odnoklassiki, now part of Onet group)

Onet — Polish Yahoo by Piotr Wilam (acquired by Ringier Axel Springer Polska)

Wirtualna Polska and O2 by Michał Brański — two more Polish yahoos, now merged into one company

Interia — yet another Polish Yahoo (owned by Grupa Bauer Media Polska)

GoldenLine — Polish Linkedin by Mariusz Gralewski

Niania.pl— connecting families with caregivers, specialists

Pracuj.pl — biggest Polish job portal

Other resources

Innovation Nest came up with this Landscape of Polish b2b software companies in February 2020. Very insightful!

Sifted has a list of Top Polish startups to follow in 2020

Startup Poland published a report The Polish Tech Scene: 5 Years with a lot of insights into the Polish startup ecosystem and its growth between 2014 and 2019

Know of another list I should link here? Ping me at borys@smok.vc with a title “Hottest Polish Startups”.

Final words

I intend this post to be live and frequently updated, so please frel free to comment, suggest edits, both adding new amazing startups and removing those that died or did not reach their expectations.