Borys Musielak
Founding Partner at SMOK Ventures
Borys Musielak
Founding Partner at SMOK Ventures
Warsaw, Mazowieckie
Overview
Work Experience
Founding Partner
2019 - Current
Founded SMOK with the goal to become a leading pre-seed fund in the CEE region. Invested in Alokai (YC W2021), inSTREAMLY, Sunroof, Authologic (YC W2021), Omnipack, 57hours, Finmap, MX Labs, Gotiva, Workee among others. SMOK Ventures is a venture capital fund created by former entrepreneurs with the aim to help early stage startup founders build multi-million-dollar global software enterprises from Central and Eastern Europe. We primarily invest in software and gaming startups in pre-seed and seed stages.
Co-Founder
2016
In 2016 together with Diana Koziarska we co-founded ReaktorX, a pre-acceleration program for first-time founders. In twelve batches we accelerated 100+ companies which include Vivid Mind, Linghos, Renderro, Hashiona, HiPets, Heroify, Redata, Funlo or Haip. Read more about our startups at https://angel.co/reaktorx
Co-Founder, Board Member
2014
Together with fellow entrepreneurs I helped found Startup Poland, an umbrella organization that quickly became the community voice of Polish startups to policy-makers, academics and media. The aim is to build better conditions within Poland’s entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem. For any inquiries about Startup Poland, contact our CEO Tomasz Snażyk at tsnazyk@gmail.com
Member of The Supervisory Board
2020 - 2024
I'm a minority investor and used to be a member of the supervisory board at Dziki 🐗 Warszawa 🏀, a basketball club run as a startup. Only 6 years in operation, we advanced to Ekstraklasa, the top Polish league, in 2023.
Co-Founder
2011 - 2020
In 2011 together with fellow entrepreneurs Anna Walkowska and Kuba Filipowski I co-founded ReaktorWarsaw.com, a startup community and a co-working space located in a Żoliborz mansion in Warsaw, Poland. We hosted monthly #OpenReaktor events that featured a number of great international speakers (Marvin Liao, Jerry Colonna, Paul Bragiel, Simon Cross...) and gather major figures of the Warsaw startup scene under one roof.
Director of Product Management
2015 - 2019
I joined Samba TV when the company acquired my startup Filmaster in 2015. During my 4-year venture, I built Samba's Warsaw office from scratch and helped it grow from 4 to 40 people. Simultaneously I was responsible for EU operations and international product bringing Samba's cross-screen media and analytics products to UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia.
Samba TV enables the next-generation TV experience powered by its first-party data and helps viewers engage with relevant media.
Raised $45,663,000.00 from Spring St. Group and Sand Hill Angels.
Founder & CEO
2009 - 2015
I co-founded Filmaster where we built Netflix-like personalization and analytics solutions for the entertainment industry helping cinema exhibitors and TV operators rapidly capture and analyse user preferences in order to deliver a comprehensive picture of the audience and drive incremental admissions / viewership. We raised ~€500k from international investors. The company sold to Samba TV in June 2015.
Founder
2005 - 2012
I created from scratch a media group related to GNU/Linux and open source software. Some of the websites like jakilinux.org and OSnews.pl became market leaders in their niche generating millions of page views per month.
Consultant
2007 - 2010
99 Bishopsgate was my home for a few years where I worked on a number of confidential projects for the investment banking division of Deutsche Bank as part of my work as a Rule Financial consultant.
DB Capital Ventures invests in early-stage and emerging growth businesses and is a venture capital firm based in New York.
Consultant
2007 - 2010
Being a Technical Consultant (tier 1) for various investment banks including Deutsche Bank and Barclays Capital I worked both as a software engineer, analyst and connector between different branches of the bank. A lot of projects I took part of were related to processing derivatives like swaps and swaptions in formats like FpML using software like Tibco Business Works.