This article is a part of Poland Unpacked. Weekly intelligence for decision-makers
Some built a platform that has become a cornerstone of European healthcare. Others revolutionized how people book hair appointments, while another launched radar satellites into space. All five have built businesses worth billions, and all have Polish roots. Here are five startups that have conquered global markets in just a few years.
For years, successful Polish startups tended to begin by focusing on their domestic market. Only when Poland became too small did they venture abroad. Examples include InPost, Allegro, CD Projekt, and older companies such as Asseco and Comarch. Today's generation of startups, businesses built around the pursuit of rapid growth, is different. And it is achieving success on a global scale.
ElevenLabs practically skipped the local business stage altogether. In just a few years, two Polish founders built a company that not only became a leader in AI-powered audio technology but also challenged giants such as Google – and won. Docplanner did start in Poland, but it is now a global business. Booksy has long regarded Poland as one of its smaller markets. Brainly changed how children learn around the world. And ICEYE developed hardware, sent it into space, and turned the technology into a business.
The stories of these five startups and their founders show that innovative Polish entrepreneurs can take on the world – and win. They can also make millions in the process, and not necessarily in złoty.
An audio unicorn
USD 11 billion, or approximately PLN 44 billion. That is the latest confirmed valuation of ElevenLabs, based on a funding round completed around the turn of 2025 and 2026.
It is roughly what Allegro, Poland's leading e-commerce company, is worth in its entirety. Allegro has been operating for more than 20 years, dominates its domestic market, and has repeatedly held off competition from Amazon and eBay in Poland.
ElevenLabs, by contrast, was founded just four years ago.
There is, however, a catch: that valuation is already becoming outdated. ElevenLabs is closing another funding round at a valuation of USD 22 billion, equivalent to more than PLN 88 billion. That is about half the market value of Orlen, Poland's largest publicly traded company.
And it all began with two young Poles who met in high school and enjoyed working on projects together.
Piotr Dąbkowski and Mati Staniszewski were hardly an accidental pairing of startup founders. Dąbkowski had engineering experience at Google, while Staniszewski had previously worked at Palantir. Their original ambition was to create a tool that would make dubbing films easier.
Four years later, their London-founded company had raised a total of USD 781 million, and its name was on the lips of leading figures in Silicon Valley. It has worked with entertainment icons including Stan Lee and Matthew McConaughey.
A year ago, ElevenLabs also began making a significant return to Poland, including the establishment of a research and development center.
Why did the founders succeed? They moved faster and executed better than their competitors. They also identified a niche that, in 2022 and 2023, had not yet become a priority for the technology giants.
And they thought globally from day one. They set their sights on San Francisco – and succeeded.
Expert's perspective
Polish founders can win
The brightest examples today are ElevenLabs, Viktor, and ICEYE. They succeeded because talented founders saw the future earlier than others and secured global capital before the market learned how to properly value their ambitions.
I look for highly technical teams building the hardest and most ambitious thing of their lives, with their own secret insight into the future, a huge potential market, and satisfied early users.
What matters most is speed, an obsession with execution, and how founders deal with problems. And the willingness to act despite uncertainty about the future.
Bringing doctors within reach
Docplanner followed a very different path. In Poland, it is better known as ZnanyLekarz.
Its founder, Mariusz Gralewski, became interested in healthcare after struggling to find the right doctor himself. He needed a specialist but lacked a simple way to compare physicians and read other patients' reviews.
Docplanner launched in 2012, developing its business around the ZnanyLekarz platform.
The underlying need was universal: patients wanted to know which doctor to choose and when an appointment was available.
Healthcare, however, is an intensely local business. Doctors work differently in Poland, Spain, Brazil, and Germany. Regulations, patient habits, payment systems, and medical practice software all vary.
Conquering Poland proved relatively straightforward. Going global required a combination of organic expansion and acquisitions.
In 2016, Docplanner acquired Spain's Doctoralia. Other businesses subsequently joined the group, including Italy's TuoTempo and Germany's jameda.
Rather than making one rapid leap onto the global stage, the company built a federation of local brands and teams.
Today, Docplanner says it is a market leader in 13 countries. Its websites attract around 100 million patient visits each month, generating approximately 25 million appointment bookings.
Since its founding, the company has raised more than USD 500 million from investors. That is less than ElevenLabs, but Docplanner has not raised additional capital since 2019.
Instead, it shifted its focus toward profitability – generating enough revenue to sustain its operations. It has now achieved that goal.
Expert's perspective
Why Polish founders succeed
Our entrepreneurs are increasingly combining deep specialist expertise with global ambitions.
Among the brightest stars to emerge from Poland, I would undoubtedly include ElevenLabs, which rapidly redefined the AI-powered speech synthesis market, as well as Docplanner, Brainly, Booksy, and Ramp.
We should also remember that Poles have achieved enormous success by building companies abroad, including DeepL, OVHcloud, and even Politico.
Poland has unique human capital in areas such as artificial intelligence and computer science more broadly.
A recent study by Professor Ilya Strebulaev showed that the University of Warsaw ranks among the top 20 foreign universities whose alumni have founded unicorn companies in the United States.
Unfortunately, the problem is what happens to our graduates afterward. Polish academia cannot afford to compete with global trends. It is underfunded and suffers from structural problems, including an excessively hierarchical system.
The creation of new, agile research institutions such as the IDEAS Research Institute offers some hope.
Changing the world of hairdressers
Booksy also started with a scheduling problem, although its approach to growth was somewhat different.
Stefan Batory, a mathematician, entrepreneur, and ultramarathon runner, has explained that the idea emerged from his frustration with booking massages after training sessions.
Calling a service provider only worked when both parties happened to be available. Yet customers already carried smartphones in their pockets around the clock.
Together with Konrad Howard, Batory built Booksy as a platform for the beauty and wellness industry.
On one side, hairdressers, barbers, and beauty professionals gained a system for managing appointments and customer relationships. On the other, consumers received an app allowing them to find services, compare reviews and prices, check availability, and book appointments without making a phone call.
Batory also targeted the American market very early on. From the outset, Booksy was intended to become a business much larger than Poland's domestic services market.
It was not the founders' first business together. They had previously created and developed iTaxi. Before that, Batory had run a company that left him in debt.
Today, Booksy not only dominates its Polish market but has also become a major US-based business.
Acquisitions played a role in its expansion, including the purchases of American companies GoPanache and Genbook.
More than 30 million consumers worldwide use the platform.
Since its founding, Booksy has raised USD 120 million from investors. Its last funding round took place in 2021.
The company no longer needs additional capital, but its executives have identified their next major ambition: a listing on America's Nasdaq stock exchange.
Expert's perspective
How Poland is showing its strength
In an era shaped by some of the world's best programmers, we quickly demonstrated our capabilities in AI, quantum technologies, and space tech.
I feel that Poland has recently started to shed its inferiority complex. That matters enormously, particularly on the international stage.
We are joining the ranks of the world's 20 largest economies, and that is fueling the ambitions of a new generation of entrepreneurs.
But we still need genuinely effective accelerator programs. Programs that develop and connect the right people, not just within Poland but globally from the very beginning.
Talent that never encounters someone with an entrepreneurial mindset – or never develops such ambitions itself – represents a missed opportunity for our country.
Reinventing education
When Michał Borkowski, Tomasz Kraus, and Łukasz Haluch launched a website initially known as Zadane.pl in 2009, nobody could have imagined how rapidly the technology landscape would change.
Their idea was simple. One student asks a question, and another helps find the answer.
Knowledge was supposed to be created and circulated within the community. This gave Brainly the potential to scale in a way that a traditional education company could not replicate.
It did not need to hire another teacher every time it gained a new user.
Within a year, Zadane had attracted one million users.
At the peak of its community-driven growth, the company reported more than 350 million monthly users across 35 countries. The United States became one of its most important markets.
Then came a problem: artificial intelligence.
The emergence of generative AI disrupted precisely the category in which Brainly had established its position.
The company responded by transforming its product. Today, Brainly is no longer merely a community built around questions and answers. It has become an educational platform combining AI with expert assistance.
The founders have raised almost USD 70 million from investors, with the most recent funding round completed in 2019.
One interesting detail: Brainly is among the standout investments in the startup portfolio of Sebastian Kulczyk, one of Poland's wealthiest individuals.
Expert's perspective
From supporting roles to leading the way
They were excellent in their technological fields but usually had little equity and limited influence over the direction of the companies they worked for.
Today, those same people want to take control of the projects they are involved in. This newfound courage to step forward has become our competitive advantage.
Founders who studied at the world's leading universities have also played a hugely important role.
For ICEYE, Finland's Aalto University; for ElevenLabs, Imperial College and Cambridge; for Viktor, Oxford; and for Pathway, École Polytechnique were the ecosystems that gave Polish founders their opportunities to succeed.
It is encouraging that Polish institutions are also appearing in the rankings.
The University of Warsaw ranks seventh globally outside the United States among universities whose alumni form founding teams of American unicorns.
It is no coincidence that most of the people in an early photograph of OpenAI are Polish, mainly graduates of a single university department.
Launching Poland into space
Compared with the businesses described above, ICEYE looks like a company from another world. Literally.
Rafał Modrzewski went to Finland on an Erasmus exchange. At Aalto University, he met Pekka Laurila.
Together, they began working on something long considered extremely difficult in the space industry: a small satellite equipped with synthetic aperture radar, or SAR.
This type of radar can observe the Earth's surface regardless of sunlight and see through cloud cover.
In January 2018, ICEYE-X1 entered orbit. It became the world's first SAR satellite weighing less than 100 kilograms.
Unlike the other companies in our selection, ICEYE has never positioned itself as an intermediary between consumers and businesses.
It is a space technology company that generates most of its revenue from contracts with major corporations and governments.
Initially, ICEYE saw potential applications for its technology in monitoring sea ice, floods, and other natural disasters.
Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, however, the defense applications of radar technology became increasingly apparent.
The company provided satellite imagery to Ukraine and subsequently expanded its cooperation with other governments and NATO.
In June 2026, ICEYE announced a EUR 1 billion funding round at a valuation exceeding EUR 10 billion.
The company says it employs more than 1,000 people and operates the world's largest constellation of SAR satellites.
Expert's perspective
Hunger for success is not enough
I would add a distinctly Polish talent for improvisation and finding ways around obstacles – in the positive sense. It means we can build a business in the middle of a desert, where there seems to be no opportunity at all.
Another Polish strength is our ability to combine European values – human rights, privacy, and democracy – with global financing and the ability to navigate different environments.
Soon, it will no longer be Silicon Valley setting the standards for technological development, but China, India, and Africa.
Living in Europe, we can benefit from a very secure environment and develop our businesses without constantly flying to the United States.
A Polish startup? Global ambitions are essential
ICEYE illustrates just how imprecise the term "Polish startup" has become.
The company was founded in Finland by a Pole and a Finn. It is headquartered there but operates in Poland and numerous other countries.
ElevenLabs is a global company founded by two Poles, but its main centers of activity are outside Poland.
Booksy has Polish roots, but the American market is one of the pillars of its business.
Docplanner emerged from Warsaw but now operates through local brands across more than a dozen markets.
Brainly began as Zadane.pl but quickly set out to conquer the global internet.
Today, most of the founders of these companies operate outside Poland. Yet they have not forgotten their Polish roots.
Rafał Modrzewski, for example, helped address the consequences of Poland's 2024 floods by providing access to ICEYE technology free of charge.
ElevenLabs recruits programmers in Warsaw.
Booksy co-founder Konrad Howard not only supports Polish startups but has also openly declared his commitment to strengthening Poland's defense capabilities.
This is what the Polish formula for startup success looks like in practice: courage and decisive action combined with creativity and problem-solving skills. But with ambitions firmly focused on the world. Without that global outlook, there are no billions.