Bridging Silicon Valley to CEE. Founded by @bragiel @michuk @dianakoziarska. Investing €50k-1M in devools, gamedev & AI startups in Poland, Ukraine & CEE
Warsaw, Poland
Joined February 2018
- Tweets905
- Following479
- Followers1.4K
- Likes2.6K
Pinned Tweet
🇵🇱 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-sec…
SMOK Ventures retweeted
My US trip starts tomorrow in Miami 🏖️🇺🇸
Exited to meet CEE diaspora folks over the next few days and experience the Vice City during the new GTA launch.
Also, let's hope 8 see Giannis 🔥🏀 win their first game this season against Pacers on Friday.
See you around!
SMOK Ventures retweeted
Cursor x SpaceX Grok Bot are taking over Poland 🇵🇱
2 events in the next 2 weeks 🎉
🇵🇱 Warsaw meetup: Thu 29 Oct, 17:30 at SMOK Ventures
👉 luma.com/spacexai-918j
🇵🇱 Wrocław hackathon: Thu 5 Nov, 17:00 at Callstack
👉 luma.com/spacexai-gjig
Pick your city or come to both ✌️
In Warsaw for #PolandTechWeek?
Join our Wednesday event with 5 @ycombinator founders from CEE on whether you should apply to YC.
Sign up:
luma.com/sde7u7ib
On Thursday we're co-hosting a @bot meetup with @SpaceX . Register: luma.com/spacexai-918j
You can also check out all the events this coming week at: polandtechweek.com/
What our portfolio shipped in September featuring @MagdaKordon @RobertOlejnik @maja1308 @KoscielnyRemi
More products shipped in September by our portfolio founders including @alinaprelicz @sebastian_szc @FINMAP_online
Hackers!
Together with @SpaceX we're organizing a @bot meetup in Warsaw on October 29th.
Sign up here:
luma.com/spacexai-918j
cc @frankterpo 🤌 @tomasz_k97
SMOK Ventures retweeted
I'm in the US this Fall visiting Miami🏖️, San Francisco Bay Area🦄 and NYC👔.
Let's meet if one of the below is true:
- you're building something groundbreaking,
- you invest in people that do,
- you'd like to hear what I'm planning with @smokvc III - our upcoming new fund.
Bonus points if you care about Poland🇵🇱, Ukraine🇺🇦 and the CEE.
DMs are open!
SMOK Ventures retweeted
Why we say no at @smokvc: usual suspects like broken cap table, market too small, not thinking big enough.
But the most legit reason is odd founder vibes. If it feels off in the first 20 minutes, it won't get better after the wire.
#ceevalley
SMOK Ventures retweeted
This is @ShenAI_tech growth BEFORE getting an EU medical certificate for its health diagnostic software.
Bullish on this team @KoscielnyRemi @premjaworski & Anna Harris
@smokvc invested pre-seed / pre-revevue in 2021
SMOK Ventures retweeted
If you don’t want to build it yourself, just use @tasteray_app
I have my @Muse trained on my movie and TV preference.
Every week it looks at movies in theaters and on the streaming services I own, and curates a feed for ones I might enjoy.
Then I can review and up / down vote to further tailor the feed.
When I want to go see a movie, it’ll book the ticket for me using its wallet via the link integration.
(What you’re looking at is an artifact that muse built, updates and maintains for me)
SMOK Ventures retweeted
Son: "Dad, what does product market fit look like?"
Me: shows this chart
- @smokvc portfolio company, we led the pre-seed round in 2024
SMOK Ventures retweeted
I've analyzed 155 YC startups from Central & Eastern Europe.
Ukraine 🇺🇦 (37) and Poland 🇵🇱 (34) lead followed by Romania 🇷🇴, Bulgaria 🇧🇬and Slovenia 🇸🇮.
We funded 8 of them via @smokvc.
Reply "show me the data" if you'd like to see the sheet with source data of my report.
SMOK Ventures retweeted
Only 1/3 of @ycombinator startups from Central & Eastern Europe get a CEE fund onboard.
We're proud to be the most active backers of those at @smokvc.
Check out the other active CEE funds backing YC founders + my other insights at michuk.medium.com/the-hidden…
SMOK Ventures retweeted
Guess which CEE VC fund backed the most CEE YC teams?
@YCombinator directory lists 30 startups from Central & Eastern Europe.
I counted 155 (with the help of my agent).
The difference: YC tags companies by HQ, and most CEE founders move to California. 100 of the 155 are based in the US. @gitlab , @PeoplePlusAI, @gowithquo, @browser_use: all "American" by that measure.
So I went through all 6,267 YC companies founder by founder, then checked 260 CEE funds' portfolios and every funding announcement we could find.
A few things that surprised me:
🇺🇦 Ukraine (37) narrowly leads 🇵🇱 Poland (34), but 2026 was Poland's best year ever
🇸🇮 Per head, Slovenia is in a league of its own
📈 The count grows every few years, but CEE's share of each batch has been flat at 2–3% for a decade
💸 Only 53 of the 155 have a CEE fund among their known investors. @pioneer_fund, @RebelFund_VC and @svangel back more of them than almost any CEE VC.
Full write-up, with all the charts, the fund ranking and the method: michuk.medium.com/the-hidden…
Did I miss your company, or your fund? Tell me in comments. I'll update the data.
SMOK Ventures retweeted
Jev scaled to $100M in <7 days.
Today we release the same type of frontier AI model, but specifically trained for agentic social interactions:
LifeSim-Social-1:
• 5-10x faster
• 5-10x cheaper
• synthetically trained on proprietary data
LifeSim-Social-1 runs on our own GPU infra.
This enables new levels of play between agentic swarms and humans.
After co-inventing ChatGPT, I kept asking myself: why have superhuman chat models not led to AGI?
I’ve spent the last 2 years in stealth building a new way to train models (RLCD), and a new type of frontier AI model that we are releasing today: Jev
• 20-200x faster
• 40-400x cheaper (w/ output tokens free)
• Frontier composable intelligence optimized for decisions
AFAICT the shortest path to AI-based economic revolution
Together with @kaya_vc & @ycombinator we invested in @stormy_hq by @Karmedge
Service businesses still run on a ringing phone. Stormy is building the layer that runs the work, starting at the front desk, installed by engineers who stand in the shop.
stormy.ai/blog/stormy-raises…
Huge congrats to our portfolio founder @MagdaKordon from intoDNA for being the only Pole on the list of Top 100 Women in Tech by Sifted!
We were the first VC firm to support the company early on.
#pride #biotech #omgkrk
sifted.eu/list/100-women-in-… – at Krakow, Poland
SMOK Ventures retweeted
Meet Stormy. You hire it like anyone else: in a meeting.
- Walk it through your business, live call
- Runs your front desk and back office ops
- Answers calls and texts
- Fully generative software which builds itself as u use it
Mini demo: Stormy on a rental shop's front desk:
Eastern Europe is rising and we're in the center of it investing in the top minds from the region. Exciting times ahead!
