SMOK Ventures

New investment alert! 🚚 🦄

We've led the pre-seed round at Slickshift, a new company by the ex Base CRM (acquired by Zendesk) crew of Bart Kiszala, Aliaksei Kulbei & Michał Bugno.

Slickshift is automating communication for trucking and logistics companies, saving thousands of dollars every month by cutting unnecessary ex*****on costs and resolving the moment they occur.

Where are they now?
🔸 First customer started paying in Q1 2025. By Q4 they crossed $100K ARR.
🔸 More than 1K people are using Slick weekly.
🔸 400K messages are being sent via Slick monthly.
🔸 Slick is already handling fleets much larger than 100 trucks for many its customers.

It was great to yet again co-invest with amazing angels from our SMOK Angels CEE group including Bartosz Majewski Richard Lucas, Krzysztof Langer & Agata Wierzbicka.

Read the Slickshift story as told by its founder:

https://www.founderspond.com/p/slickshift-2025-traction-funding

Slickshift 2025: Traction, Funding, and the Path to 1M ARR From bootstrapped MVP to seed round and 100K ARR.

💡 What does it mean to be a VC in Kyiv today?

In a compelling new interview with Resilience Media, our Principal Sasha Yatsenko 🇺🇦 shares firsthand what life and investing look like on the ground in Ukraine — from unexpected blackouts in Kyiv to the under-invested defence tech ecosystem right in the middle of a real conflict.

Despite war-driven challenges:
🔹 Innovation is happening now — from autonomy to aerospace and cybersecurity.
🔹 But defence tech funding remains tiny relative to opportunity, with only ~$100M invested in 2025 and a handful of active VCs.
🔹 This gap is not just a hurdle — it’s a chance for early believers to support tomorrow’s unicorns.
🔹 Western investors must show up, physically and financially, to unlock real deal flow.

Sasha’s view from Kyiv isn’t abstract — it’s shaped by the realities (and resilience) of building companies where war is not a backdrop but the context for innovation.

A must-read on why Ukraine’s tech and defence ecosystem deserves serious attention now:

👉 https://resiliencemedia.co/power-outages-and-small-checks-the-perils-of-being-a-vc-in-kyiv/

Power outages and small checks: The perils of being a VC in Kyiv When I called Sasha Yatsenko, the power had just cut out. No sirens, no warning, just a few minutes of

2025 was the year SMOK Ventures fully committed to a direction we had been testing before: becoming the go-to early-stage fund for Central and Eastern European founders building anywhere in the world.

We've made 12 new investments, half of them in the CEE diaspora.

Read about our plans for 2026 and beyond:

https://medium.com//smok-ventures-in-2025-doubling-down-on-the-cee-diaspora-e5bfe8fef9fc

SMOK Ventures in 2025: Doubling Down on the CEE Diaspora 2025 was the year SMOK Ventures fully committed to a direction we had been testing before: becoming the go-to early-stage fund for Central…

In today's Puls Biznesu, a leading business newspaper in Poland, you can read about our new initiative "Smok Angels", an angel network of entrepreneurs actively supporting early stage startup founders across Central and Eastern Europe.

If you're actively writing angel checks in Poland or CEE and you'd like to join, email our founding partner [email protected].

https://www.pb.pl/aniolowie-w-gniezdzie-smoka-1246205

Borys Musielak ze Smok Ventures buduje sieć aniołów biznesu Borys Musielak, znany zarządzający funduszami venture capital, założył nieformalną sieć aniołów biznesu pod nazwą Smok Angels. Chce pomóc okazjonalnym inwestorom dotrzeć do dobrych start-upów. W kilka tygodni przyciągnął 160 osób gotowych do zakupów.

Congrats to our portfolio companies Authologic and Shen AI for being names Poland's top 10 startups of 2025 by Forbes!

Full list: https://www.forbes.pl/najlepsze-polskie-start-upy-2025/ey7z9mq

Congrats to our portfolio founders Ksenia Iliuk and Andrew Kusyy of LetsData for making the European Forbes 30 Under 30 list!

LetsData 🇺🇦 helps brands and institutions safeguard their interests by detecting early signals of .