The Polish Start-up Scene

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If you were to ask someone to name the start-up hubs around the world, they’d probably name places like San Francisco, London, Tel Aviv or Berlin first. But if you’re an entrepreneur or investor, Poland should be on your radar. This is because over the past few years the Polish start-up scene has exploded. A recent report from StartUp Poland gives more insight into the country’s digital economy.

In a poll of 2,400 start-ups, 39% identified as software development enterprises, mainly selling their products as SaaS, e-commerce, mobile app development and IoT services. All of which share the dominant B2B business model. There are a decent number start-ups in the poll who are growing more than 50% annually. Most of these companies are in business with medium-sized companies and large corporations. Just over half (54%) of Polish start-ups are exporting their services abroad mainly to the United States and the United Kingdom. 60% of the digital entrepreneurs had bootstrapped their start-ups, and reported being profitable from the beginning. However, others have used funding from the EU as well as domestic and foreign VC funding.

Here are some of the top start-ups in Poland:

DocPlanner: an online healthcare platform that enables patients to book appointments with local physicians. They raised two impressive rounds of $10 million and $20 million in the last year and a half. The company plans to use their funding to expand internationally.
Brainly: is a social learning network and is one of the most promising and fastest growing within the EdTech space. They’ve raised $24.5 million in funding and have over 80 million monthly users. They are available in over 35 countries and have 12 language versions.
Brand24: provides easy to use, cost-effective internet monitoring. Hundreds of businesses like Panasonic, IKEA, and Air France are using Brand24 to get real-time customer insights and actionable intelligence that is relevant to their products and brands.
Growbots: founded only 2 years ago, Growbots is the first all-in-one outbound sales platform. It has attracted funded and has moved part of their team to San Francisco. They offer automatic lead generation and automated email drip campaigns that can integrate with your CRM. They allow you to set up your ICP access over 200 million quality leads.

With the start-up momentum continuing to grow in Poland, it might not be long before they are viewed as a powerhouse like San Fransisco, London Tel Aviv, or Berlin.