This article is a part of Poland Unpacked. Weekly intelligence for decision-makers
The Heart, one of Poland’s best-known venture builders, is raising millions from investors and plans to launch its own investment funds, Maciej Marszałek, the company’s CEO and co-owner, tells XYZ.
For years, The Heart specialized in so-called venture building. Since its launch in 2016, the organization has focused on creating startups in partnership with corporations. These companies, built “to order”, had a ready-made path to commercializing their products from the outset. In 2025, The Heart was acquired by Maciej Marszałek and Jędrzej Iwaszkiewicz in a management buyout.
As Marszałek reveals, the new owners began changing The Heart’s growth strategy from the outset. The result is a funding round that has just been closed.
“Just before the summer break, we closed the first part of a new equity round. We will close the second part in the fall. In total, we want to raise about EUR 3 million for The Heart, and we have already secured one-third of that amount. That part is completed and closed, and we are now closing the second,” says Maciej Marszałek, CEO of The Heart.
As he says, the plan to raise the remaining capital is not currently at risk and will be completed in September this year.
Funding for The Heart: what the organization is planning
The money will primarily be used to expand the organization’s operational capabilities. The Heart currently employs more than 30 people who support the companies it develops in areas including venture building, finance, marketing, recruitment, legal support and sales. The company also provides startups with office space and long-term support from full-time teams.
Maciej Marszałek says the funding will go not only toward expanding the workforce, but also toward preparing the organization for its next stage of growth.
Among the new investors are Maciej Noga, co-founder of Pracuj.pl, and entrepreneur and investor Marian Popinigis, as well as a number of other individuals. The group will grow further with the second closing. Marszałek emphasizes that the company is not choosing investors based solely on access to capital. New shareholders are expected to bring experience in building businesses, managing funds, organizing subsequent funding rounds and evaluating technology in specific industries.
“These are not people who simply put money into the company. Every investor who joins The Heart brings specific expertise. They are entrepreneurs who have built large businesses, people from the investment world and top-tier industry experts,” the company’s CEO says.
Investor's perspective
Why The Heart
Poland has a strong scientific base, but historically it has lacked an institution capable of systematically and professionally guiding research teams through the commercialization process – from structuring a company and negotiating with investors to preparing for financing. The Heart has built expertise and relationships that cannot be replicated in a short period of time, giving it real, hard-to-copy scaling potential in deep tech.
Systematically expanding the base of scientific institutions from which projects are sourced will be crucial to the company’s growth. This is a prerequisite for building a predictable, repeatable pipeline, and without that discipline it is difficult to build a portfolio of companies that investors can rely on over the long term. I also hope that the next companies will consistently progress through successive stages of development, moving beyond scientific proof of concept toward genuine investment readiness.
I want to see more ventures among the projects that have truly ambitious scale – companies with the potential to transform an industry, rather than simply add another name to the portfolio. If, during this period, The Heart produces several such companies that emerge from Polish science and successfully compete internationally, I will consider the investment to have delivered on its objectives.
Institutional investors? Yes, but through a different structure
The Heart does not plan to bring institutional investors directly into the company. Maciej Marszałek says this is necessary to preserve an efficient decision-making process.
“The Heart’s key attribute is speed, including speed of decision-making. Building startups means making decisions quickly,” Maciej Marszałek explains.
In his view, institutional procedures could make it harder to quickly inject additional capital into the organization or respond to the needs of the projects it is developing.
Public and institutional funding, however, will be directed into funds established in cooperation with The Heart. The company has worked on projects with PFR, BGK and other institutions that provide financing and support for technology ventures.
Fireside chat
How do you make money from science?
Where is the biggest gap between Polish universities and the market?
The gap between Polish universities and the broader global market is multidimensional, but the difference is more pronounced in some areas than others. As far as the quality of research itself is concerned, Poland is performing well, and that is one of the ecosystem’s strengths. Intellectual property rights are a different matter: Polish universities often lack established procedures in this area, which makes the process of selling or licensing IP more difficult.
What about money? That must be a problem.
When it comes to financing, this is probably where the biggest gap with foreign ecosystems lies. In Polish biotechnology, at the seed stage and in the first investment rounds, we are dealing almost exclusively with funding from individual investors. In large Western ecosystems such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Switzerland, there is a highly developed VC market dedicated to biotechnology and life sciences. That makes a big difference because it provides substantial pools of capital willing to accept the risks associated with this type of investment.
Which direction are we heading in?
Poland’s biotechnology development and financing ecosystem is changing, and that is a positive trend. The Polish market now has its first venture builder with a strong focus on life sciences. Funds investing in the sector are also beginning to emerge, while several more life-science-focused funds are in the process of raising capital.
What most often blocks the transfer of intellectual property from a university to a company, and is a process that can take as long as two years considered standard in Poland?
The lack of established procedures for this type of transaction. In countries with highly developed biotechnology markets, universities have dedicated staff responsible for licensing research and predefined terms and conditions for such transactions. That greatly accelerates the sale or licensing of IP.
Sweden is a particularly interesting and positive example. There, intellectual property rights are granted directly to the researchers carrying out projects rather than to universities – a system known as professor’s privilege. As a result, potential investors do not have to negotiate with academic institutions at all, which makes commercialization much easier.
What risks are typically underestimated by investors in biotechnology projects?
In biotechnology projects, the science and the quality of preclinical and clinical results are crucial. They matter considerably more than in technology companies, where at an early stage we often invest more in the team than in the project itself.
Against that backdrop, we need to understand clearly what the company has achieved so far from a scientific standpoint, as well as how its projects compare with other competing programs targeting the same indications and therapeutic goals. These scientific factors are not only risks; they are also opportunities.
How attractive can this area be from a Polish perspective today, given that we remain far behind the West in terms of investment spending while the cost of developing technologies is rising sharply?
Because our ecosystem is relatively small, a well-informed investor or venture builder has an opportunity to get involved in high-quality projects with relatively little competition, on terms that are considerably better than those available abroad. I currently see Polish life-science startups with promising projects that nevertheless remain below the radar of most investors.
First fund to target about EUR 20 million
The first of the planned vehicles will invest at the pre-seed, seed and post-seed stages. The maximum investment in a single company will be PLN 5 million (about EUR 1.2 million).
The fund will be strategically affiliated with The Heart but will operate independently. It will have its own management team, which will make investment decisions autonomously. This will allow it to finance both companies developed by The Heart, to which it will have preferential access, and external projects.
“The fund should be operational at the turn of the first and second quarters of next year. We are aiming for the first quarter. It should have capitalization of around EUR 20 million,” Maciej Marszałek says.
This is only the first element of the planned family of funds. The next vehicle will invest in more mature companies at the growth stage. The Heart is also considering a pre-IPO fund to support companies preparing to enter the capital markets.
The company is making the launch of the latter project conditional, among other things, on the direction of changes at NewConnect and the Warsaw Stock Exchange’s offering for young technology companies. The fund would not only provide capital, but also prepare companies for the next stages of reporting, professionalization and a stock-market debut.
The Heart has 17 active projects
The Heart currently has 17 active projects in its portfolio. They are at various stages: preparing for a funding round, raising capital or having already secured financing. Half are biotechnology projects, while the remainder are technology ventures being built with founders.
“We currently have 17 active projects that are either just before investment, in the middle of fundraising or already funded. On average, we hold about a 17 percent stake in them,” says The Heart’s CEO.
The Heart’s offering is divided into three models. “Accelerate” is designed for companies with a finished product, initial customers, revenue or clear traction. Cooperation before a funding round typically lasts three to six months. In these cases, The Heart takes a stake of around 4–10 percent.
Under the “Incubate” model, the company works with founders who approach it at an earlier stage, sometimes with nothing more than a product concept. Preparing a project for financing typically takes six to 12 months. The Heart’s stake can be around 10–15 percent.
The third model, “Spin-off,” is designed for projects originating at universities. It involves transferring intellectual property to a company, clarifying ownership rights to the technology, validating the solution, developing a business model and recruiting key personnel, including the management team. The process can take as long as two years, with The Heart taking a stake of around 20–30 percent.
Nearly 1,000 research projects in the pipeline
The commercialization of research has become one of The Heart’s key growth areas. The company says it works with nearly 40 universities and research centers in Poland. Its database contains almost 1,000 research projects.
Projects are sourced through cooperation with scientists, universities and technology transfer centers. The Heart also analyzes information on patents, grants and licenses. The company has developed a system that automatically processes materials, conducts an initial scoring and identifies projects with potential commercial value.
Only after this initial screening does a more detailed analysis begin, including contact with the research team and validation of the solution against market needs. Some projects are subsequently turned into companies.
“In Poland, the appetite for commercializing research is relatively low, but not because there are too few good ideas. There are enough of them, as well as valuable patents. Scientists are often afraid to build companies because they do not know how to do it, and nobody teaches them,” says Maciej Marszałek.
In his view, insufficient communication between the market and the scientific community is another significant problem. Researchers focus on publications and academic career development. Unfortunately, they do not always know what solutions potential customers or industrial partners need.
The Heart wants to bridge the gap between university technology and capital ready to finance it.
“There is nothing to invest in not because there are no ideas, but because there are no vehicles and products ready for commercialization. We want to build companies with transferred and secured IP, management teams and products prepared in such a way that funds have something they can invest in,” Maciej Marszałek says.
Biotech, dual-use, robotics and energy
The Heart is currently focusing its search on four areas: life sciences and biotechnology, defense and dual-use solutions, robotics and Industry 4.0, and energy. One of the projects being developed under the spin-off model is Visiosurf, which is being prepared jointly with Jagiellonian University, with support from the University of Warsaw. The project involves an endoscopic system whose initial application is the administration of surfactant to premature infants.
The device is designed to enable doctors to deliver the drug to the lungs more precisely while reducing the invasiveness of the procedure. The Heart says it has secured a foreign corporate partner for the project that is providing financial support for its development. In the future, the partner will also participate in distributing the solution.
The second mature asset is VASBOX, which provides banks and telecom companies with digital value-added services and loyalty offers. The company has customers in Poland and its first international clients. According to The Heart, it is valued at several tens of millions of zlotys.
The company remains VASBOX’s majority owner and has no plans to sell it for now. Dividends paid by the company help fund The Heart’s ongoing operations.
Target: five to seven new companies a year
By 2030, The Heart aims to have the capacity to create five to seven new companies a year. Under the company’s criteria, each selected project must have the potential to reach a valuation of at least PLN 500 million (about EUR 117 million) by the time The Heart exits its investment.
To consistently create that many companies, the organization would need to begin work on around 20 projects a year. Most would be eliminated at subsequent stages of selection, technology validation and market assessment.
“By 2030, we would like to launch between five and seven new companies a year that meet our criteria and have the potential to reach a valuation of at least PLN 500 million when The Heart exits,” says Maciej Marszałek.
Over a three-to-five-year horizon, The Heart is also considering taking the entire group public. A potential listing would encompass both its venture-building business and the planned family of funds. It would not, however, be treated as a full exit for the existing shareholders.
“If we go public, it certainly won’t be in order to exit,” Maciej Marszałek says.
He says he intends to remain involved in The Heart’s development at least until the first major exits from the new portfolio. The company expects those to come no earlier than five to seven years from now.
Key Takeaways
- The Heart is changing its growth model after a management buyout by Maciej Marszałek and Jędrzej Iwaszkiewicz, and is preparing for a significant expansion. The organization plans to raise about EUR 3 million, one-third of which has already been secured. The money will expand its operational capacity, grow the team and prepare the company for its next stage of development. New investors include Maciej Noga and Marian Popinigis. The Heart says it is selecting shareholders not only for their capital, but also for their business experience.
- A key part of the new strategy is the creation of a family of investment funds. The first vehicle, with planned capitalization of about EUR 20 million, will invest in companies from the pre-seed stage through post-seed rounds. The maximum individual investment will be PLN 5 million (about EUR 1.2 million). The fund will be strategically affiliated with The Heart, but investment decisions will be made by an independent team. The organization is subsequently considering a fund for growth-stage companies, as well as a pre-IPO vehicle. Institutional investors and public funding are expected to flow primarily into these funds rather than directly into The Heart.
- The commercialization of Polish science is becoming another pillar of the strategy. The Heart works with nearly 40 universities and research centers and has almost 1,000 research projects in its database. The organization wants to identify technologies with commercial potential, put intellectual-property rights in order, build teams and prepare companies for financing. Biotechnology and life sciences are of particular importance. Other areas of interest include dual-use technologies, robotics, Industry 4.0 and energy. By 2030, The Heart aims to create five to seven new companies a year, each with the potential to reach a valuation of at least PLN 500 million (about EUR 117 million) when it eventually exits the investment.