Polish VC's record is mainly two mega-rounds. What's left for the rest of the start-ups?

Polish start-ups raised PLN 5.03 billion in three quarters, more than in any full year before. But three quarters of that amount comes from just two deals, and the rest of the market is smaller than a year earlier.

A record made by two deals

From January to September 2026, Polish start-ups raised PLN 5.03 billion from venture capital (VC) funds, that is, high-risk capital invested in young companies in exchange for equity. That is more than in the whole of 2021 (PLN 3.6 billion), previously the record year, and nearly half more than in 2025 (PLN 3.37 billion). The data come from a report by PFR Ventures and Inovo.vc.

This amount, however, is distributed extremely unevenly. Two mega-rounds from the first half of the year, ICEYE (PLN 1.913 billion) and ElevenLabs (PLN 1.81 billion), account for a combined 74 percent of all the capital. ElevenLabs, a company developing AI-based speech synthesis, raised $500 million in a Series D round in February at a valuation of $11 billion. Polish-Finnish ICEYE, a manufacturer and operator of observation satellites, announced a Series F round in June: €450 million from investors at a valuation of more than €10 billion, and more than €1 billion in total including the buyback of shares from existing shareholders.

Both companies have Polish roots and teams in Poland, but their rounds were led by global investors: Sequoia Capital in ElevenLabs and General Atlantic in ICEYE. That is why it is worth asking whether this record says anything at all about the condition of the whole market.

Without mega-rounds, the market is shrinking

After subtracting the two biggest deals, about PLN 1.3 billion remains. That is 13 percent less than a year earlier and 35 percent less than in 2022, the record year by this measure (PFR Ventures data cited by “Rzeczpospolita”). At the same time, the number of funded companies rose by 9 percent. So more companies are getting money, but on average each receives less.

This is also visible in the third quarter itself: 60 funds invested PLN 407 million in 48 companies, clearly less than in the second quarter, when excluding mega-rounds it was PLN 594 million. The average deal value fell from PLN 13.8 million to PLN 8.5 million, while the median (the middle value, less sensitive to individual large rounds) rose from PLN 4 million to PLN 4.6 million. The biggest amounts went to Pathway (PLN 130 million in a round being raised since 2022), Sportano (PLN 65 million from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, EBRD), Pstryk (PLN 30 million in Series A) and F13 (PLN 19 million).

Karol Lasota of Inovo.vc explains this picture with the power law principle: in VC, a small number of companies generate most of the profits for the entire portfolio.

From a fund's perspective, this logic is coherent. In our view, however, the record is real as a total, but misleading as a description of the market. For the average Polish start-up, this year was weaker than the previous one, and two successes do not change the conditions on which the next hundred companies raise money.

Wide at the start, narrow in the middle

The earliest stage looks the best. In the third quarter, 37 pre-seed and seed rounds were completed (initial, early-stage investments), compared with 32 a year earlier, along with nine Series A rounds, meaning the first large rounds for growth, compared with four. Aleksander Mokrzycki, vice president of PFR Ventures, links this to money from the EU FENG programme (European Funds for a Modern Economy), which raised the average number of seed transactions from 28 to 36 per quarter. There is also growing interest in dual-use technologies (with civilian and military applications): the US fund In-Q-Tel, controlled by the CIA, took part in DefendEye's seed round.

The problem starts one level up. According to DNA Rynków, in 2025 Polish start-ups completed 134 seed and pre-seed transactions, but only seven at the growth stage, that is, growth financing. In the second quarter of 2026, seed rounds accounted for 33 of 43 transactions. Lasota, quoted by “Parkiet”, put it plainly: “if you are not number one and you are not sending the right signals, it may be difficult for you to raise an A round”.

In practice, larger rounds require capital from abroad. International funds accounted for 55 percent of the value of investments in the third quarter, but, as Dmytro Golournyi of PFR Ventures notes, on their own they account for only about 15 percent of the market; they usually co-invest with a local partner. Public-private capital was present in 30 of the 48 rounds in the third quarter. The largest Series A in the history of Polish start-ups, $75 million (about PLN 274 million) for Viktor.com in May, was led by California-based Accel. Piotr Cymcyk of DNA Rynków points out that the best Polish companies build structures in Delaware or London, like Booksy or Spacelift, because it is easier there to raise money for scaling.

The UK has a similar problem

This problem is not exclusively Polish. British university spinouts (companies spun out of universities) raised €1.8 billion in the first half of 2026, the second-best half-year result in a decade, of which €846 million went to just four companies. Later-stage funding rose by 165 percent year on year to €907 million, while first equity investments fell by 68.3 percent, from €176 million to €56 million (data from Parkwalk and Beauhurst). Moray Wright, head of Parkwalk, warns that companies important to the future of the British economy are finding it increasingly difficult to raise a first round.

The difference lies in where things get narrow. In the UK, the entry point is narrowing; in Poland, it is the middle, because the start is now financed largely by EU money. The common denominator is that capital flows primarily to companies that have already proven they can grow.

What this means for start-ups and their partners

Record headlines should not lull anyone to sleep. The data point to three practical conclusions for different sides of the market:

• A founder after a seed round should plan for Series A well in advance and with a foreign co-investor in mind, because domestic capital is rarely enough.
• A company that wants to work with a Polish start-up should check where the company is registered and who has the decisive say in it.
• A corporation considering an acquisition should remember that the best companies quickly attract capital from London or Silicon Valley, and then their valuation rises.

At the time of writing, the market is doing better at the entry point than a year ago, and worse in the middle. To the question of whether the Polish ecosystem is in record shape, the honest answer is: two companies are, the rest not necessarily. The real test will be whether today's pace - 37 seed rounds in the third quarter - translates in two or three years into more than just a handful of growth rounds.