It’s hard not to believe in the potential of “emerging markets” when you grew up in Poland. I watched my entire life what determination and a series of smart decisions can do to an economy.
When communism fell in 1989, Poland was rationing sugar and flour, and Poles earned about a tenth of West German wages. In 1990, GDP per capita was 38% of the EU average. By 2025, it was 85%, roughly level with Japan (IMF figures, adjusted for cost of living). Last year the economy passed $1 trillion in annual output for the first time.
The Poland I grew up in is a completely different country to the one I’m in now. Warsaw in particular. I left the city during COVID, and since then, Warsaw has a completely different vibe.
It’s very entrepreneurial, and the numbers bear that out. Q1-Q3 2026 saw Polish startups raise about $1.3bn, well above the previous full-year record of about $0.9bn (PFR Ventures and Inovo.vc).
I never had a real sense of national pride. Last week, though, I was in Dublin running a fundraising workshop for a group of global entrepreneurs, and one attendee mentioned they’d gone from Wispr Flow to ElevenLabs: Wispr Flow is a dictation app: you hold a button, you speak, and clean text appears wherever your cursor is - this founder built his own version of that using the ElevenLabs model.
The fact that a Polish-founded company came up in a room that had absolutely nothing to do with Poland made me somehow very happy :)
Today is Polish Independence Day, and so I thought I’d share the 3 Polish startups that I can’t live without.
(1) DFIRST AI
DFIRST describes itself as “the creative workspace for people building brands”. It’s one place where you teach an AI agent your brand and get campaigns, visuals and content back. There are over 60 image, video, text and voice models behind it (ElevenLabs is one of them).
I met the founders at a conference in Dubai in 2021, and I kept coming back to the tool. To be brutally honest, it only really started to feel usable to me this year (I’m not a professional marketer by any means and I don’t design campaigns for a living). I use DFIRST for visual brainstorming for our VC fund and my Substack. In fact, I did the cheesecake.vc rebrand using it.
I used to do the majority of this in Canva. As the models improved, having them all in one place became incredibly handy, and DFIRST still feels intuitive and easy to use. Also, it’s incredibly consistent, and the branding is on point.
I do have a comparison. I tried the “glorified” Higgsfield, and I must say - using Higgsfield felt like flying Ryanair. I got it free as part of my Lenny’s Newsletter subscription. It was a bit much for what I needed, and it looked very cheap. There were constant pop-ups with banners. No way.
(2) ElevenLabs
It would be a crime to write about Polish startups and not mention ElevenLabs, which is currently valued at $22 billion.