SpeedUP Venture Capital Group

Areas of interest: SpeedUp Venture Capital Group is interested in solutions in the areas of consumer internet, fintech, martech, IoT and hardware.

Activity: SpeedUp Venture Capital Group is a group of funds investing in the early stages of a company's development (seed, pre-revenue and early growth). The funds are interested in companies and entrepreneurs from Central and Eastern Europe who want to conquer the global market with their solutions. The investment horizon is between 3 and 8 years.

Origin: The fund was established in 2009 by Arkadiusz Piechocki, Michał Lehmann and Bartłomiej Gola, who had already worked together. The partners had previously founded BTL Group, a leading direct marketing company in Poland. While BTL Group was still in its infancy, they began to selectively invest their accumulated capital in individual ideas that they found interesting from a business perspective and that were related to their existing business. In this way, they made their first investments before the word 'startup' was even known. After the sale of the BTL Group to Omnicom, they decided to make investments in interesting business projects the main focus of their activities, and thus, in a nutshell, the SpeedUp Group was born.

The fund does not invest in projects that are only presented. It expects more from the founders whose projects it decides to invest in – at least an MVP, i.e. a minimum, basic version of the product that can be tested.

Investment amount: Depending on the project and its stage of development, we can invest from several hundred thousand to 5 million PLN in a single company.

Examples of investments: The fund's portfolio currently includes over 50 companies, including:

• Legimi (a company that provides access to ebooks on a subscription basis),
• Omni3D (a manufacturer of 3D printers for industry),
• ACR Systems (a company that produces stabilizers for cameras, so-called gimbals)
• Let's Deliver
•  

Advantages and disadvantages of Polish startups: Polish founders create really good technologies. We can compare it to Germany, where you can meet many people with experience in sales or marketing, for example, but there is a lack of technological knowledge that is needed to create interesting technologies. It is very positive that initiators are increasingly opening up and are not afraid to talk about the ideas they are working on. They see the value in talking about their ideas because it can help them improve them.

As for the disadvantages, there is a lack of complete teams, i.e. those that have an excellent technologist who does a great job, but also have a great person who is responsible for selling that technology.