Vastpoint is a $22 million PFR Ventures-backed fund investing in category-defining AI, techbio, and infra companies with links to Poland. The firm was launched by partners Aleksandra Pedraszewska (previously ElevenLabs and a deeptech entrepreneur), Zuzanna Brzosko, PhD (previously Eli Lilly and a YC founder), and Karolina Kukiełka (previously InReach Ventures and a D2C entrepreneur).
Vastpoint has offices in Warsaw and New York and draws on a strong network that includes unicorn founders such as Mati Staniszewski (ElevenLabs) and Thomas Clozel (Owkin).
Fund strategy overview
- Geography: companies with links to Poland, including the Polish diaspora and international teams operating from the country. Offices in Warsaw and New York
- Preferred industries: generalist fund with a sharp focus on AI, techbio, infra, and B2B software
- Investment ticket: €200,000–€750,000
Company stage: pre-seed and seed - Product type: software, agentic systems, infra
- Product stage: pre-revenue to early revenue with a concrete demand signal
- Revenues: from zero to hero:)
Q&A with Aleksandra Pedraszewska, Partner at vastpoint
What are the 5 main things you look for in a startup?
At pre-seed and seed, vastpoint backs great teams above all; it prioritises founders with strong technical backgrounds and is not afraid to write the first cheque for first-time teams, provided they demonstrate:
- Grit: the kind that survives a 24-month grind to first contract, not just a clean demo day.
- The ability to iterate quickly, with feedback-to-product cycles measured in days, not quarters.
- A deep understanding of their domain. The founder has lived the problem long enough to see what the obvious answer gets wrong.
- Client obsession, with the willingness to ship what is good rather than wait for what is perfect.
- Strong potential to raise from top-tier investors — both the substance and the narrative that let founders make full use of vastpoint’s network of tier-1 VCs.
What disqualifies a startup as your potential investment target?
Capital intensity. Medtech with Class IIa regulatory work and hardware with multi-year capex cycles are structurally out of scope for a micro-fund like vastpoint, even when the team is top class.
Wrapper mentality. Markets where the foundation model labs or first-party stacks will absorb the value layer a startup is building on. The fund looks for founders whose moat compounds with their data and distribution, not for ones that depend on a feature gap a model release will close.
Lack of a Polish connection. The thesis rests on a strong belief that the next unicorn will be built from Poland or by a Polish founder.
What, in your opinion, differentiates the best founders from the rest?
The best founders show numbers, not adjectives. They name their competitors precisely and respect them. They take harsh feedback as input rather than as something to defend against. And they do not need to be the smartest person in every room; they know which rooms to walk into.
The single biggest tell, though, is intensity married to focus. The best founders work the hardest, but the real differentiator is not the hours — it is the discipline to treat time as the only resource that cannot be bought.
Pre-seed and seed capital start a compounding process, and it requires founders to move fast enough to produce a business worth raising again at a higher valuation. The ones who understand this from the first conversation are very different from the ones who treat each round as a finish line.
What should startups take into account before making a deal with a VC fund?
Three things that matter more than valuation:
- Follow-on capacity
Can the fund actually write the next cheque, or are you signing up for a partner who will not be at your Series A table?
- Partner time and reactiveness
The partner who pitched you the term sheet is the partner who will sit on your board. Ask portfolio founders how fast that person responds when something is on fire. The vastpoint team has lived the early-stage grind firsthand — Zuzanna as CEO of a YC-backed startup, Aleksandra as COO of a deep tech venture spun out of Cambridge, Karolina building and scaling her D2C business — so the fund is biased toward partner intensity, not toward treating portfolio companies as “tasks to manage.”
- Cap table mechanics
Does the structure the fund wants let you raise the way you say you want to raise? Or are you locking yourself into a path that limits the funds you can talk to in 18 months? US C-Corp incorporation before your first term sheet is the most common version of this trap; what looks like a clean signal to American investors quietly closes the door on half your European investor base.
What is your approach to startup valuation and preferred share in the company?
Vastpoint does not anchor on valuation as a starting point. Leading with a number tends to get the conversation backwards and produces figures disconnected from what the business actually needs.
The fund prefers to work the equation from the other direction. The first question is the capital required for the company to hit its next set of meaningful milestones — the amount that genuinely de-risks the path forward without over- or under-capitalising the round. From there, the discussion moves to a dilution range that makes sense for the stage, the team, and the cap table dynamics going forward. Valuation falls out of those two inputs.
This approach keeps the conversation grounded in the fundamentals of the business rather than in market comparables or negotiation posturing. It also tends to produce outcomes that both sides can defend twelve months later, when the next round comes around.
As for preferred ownership levels, that is a conversation vastpoint is happy to have directly. It depends on the specifics of the round, the fund’s role in it, and what the team brings alongside the capital.
How do you support your portfolio companies?
Vastpoint is operationally involved where it matters and out of the way where it does not.
- Gateway to a global network
The fund’s Warsaw–New York presence and its network of top international founders and VCs are what bring Polish founders closer to the global tech ecosystem. Vastpoint has been deepening ties not only with leading investors but also with major international tech firms, which lets the fund support founders with business development opportunities, access to global talent, and concrete introductions to potential partners and buyers.
- A playbook for every stage
The partners have built and scaled companies themselves. They know the highs, the chaos, and the grit it really takes. They also know how crucial it is for a team to focus on product and customers as quickly as possible, rather than spending energy on a prolonged investment process. The fund wants to be a partner, not just another task to manage.
On mentorship specifically, vastpoint takes its cue from Y Combinator. Zuzanna went through YC in 2018 with Sixfold Bioscience, back when Sam Altman was still actively working with the teams, and that experience shaped the fund’s approach. Portfolio founders get opportunities to learn firsthand from top entrepreneurs, and the fund extends that beyond the tech bubble, drawing on experienced operators from other industries who can act as sounding boards on issues such as team building or well-being.
What are the best-performing companies in your portfolio?
It is early in the fund’s investment cycle, so this is more about momentum than realised performance. Vastpoint’s first published investment is Replenit — the fund co-led their $2.5M pre-seed in April 2026 alongside Movens Capital, joined by Logo Ventures, DigitalOcean Ventures, Finberg, Caucasus Ventures, and Mati Staniszewski as an angel. Replenit is building an AI decision engine for retail, turning customer signals into real-time, individualised decisions, and is exactly the kind of international team rooted in Poland that fits vastpoint’s thesis.
There is one more investment closing this month in the AI agent infrastructure space, and a couple of others actively in diligence. The fund will share more publicly once each round is closed.
What are your notable lessons learned from investments that didn’t work out as expected?
The pattern vastpoint sees most often is not bad ideas. It is great founders who optimise for fundraising as the goal rather than for building the company. Poland produces a particular flavour of this: founders who are extremely good at securing grants and clearing checkboxes, but who have not yet been forced to tell engaging stories and sell their product to major enterprise clients.
There is a separate, harder lesson the partners carry from before the fund. There were deals they passed on as angels and investors in other sectors that went on to achieve incredible results.
The takeaway, which has shaped how vastpoint underwrites teams ever since: when a team gives you a very strong signal, the sector and the idea are secondary.
What are the hottest markets you currently look at as VC, and where do you see the biggest hype?
Where vastpoint sees a real signal:
- Agentic AI infrastructure for the enterprise — the workflow orchestration layer above the model, not the model itself. The unit of work in generative AI is shifting from a single model call to a multi-step workflow, and the application layer is where defensibility lives. The fund is watching context and memory infrastructure for AI agents, particularly closely.
- Vertical AI applications in regulated workflows, where the moat compounds on proprietary data plus distribution rather than on the underlying model.
- Voice and audio AI. The first wave belongs to ElevenLabs and the wider foundation layer; the second wave is being built in distribution layers and vertical applications.
Where vastpoint sees hype: generic “AI for X” plays with no clear mechanism for why the foundation labs will not eat them, consumer AI tools competing on visual quality alone, and any pitch where the deck contains the word “moat” but the moat itself is nowhere visible in the unit economics.
In your view, what are the key trends that will shape the European VC scene in the coming years?
Four shifts vastpoint expects to play out:
- The unbundling of “the VC stack”
European founders are increasingly building rounds out of specialist funds — a deep tech anchor here, an angel syndicate there, a strategic operator-LP for distribution — rather than chasing one generalist lead. This rewards funds with a clear point of view and punishes generalists who arrive without one.
- The death of premature C-Corp incorporation
European founders who registered in Delaware before their first term sheet are now realising it has locked them out of half their potential investor base. On top of that, the US tax treatment of capitalised costs in early-stage companies is genuinely punishing in ways most European founders underestimate — you can find yourself owing tax while still losing money. The smarter pattern is to incorporate locally and convert at the priced round.
- Polish tech diplomacy is maturing
As a country that has joined the G20 in terms of GDP size, Poland is ripe for greater global tech recognition. “Made in Poland” stops being a marketing problem and becomes a sourcing advantage as global VCs realise Polish founders have been quietly underpriced for a decade. Polish startups still trade at a 20–40% valuation discount to peers from the UK or Germany, not because their team or product is weaker, but because the country behind them has not yet built a recognisable technological identity. That gap is closing.
- The policy backdrop catching up
The 28th Corporate Regime, EU Inc, and the broader push around startup-friendly company law in Europe are finally landing in real legislation, and that will change the calculus on where founders incorporate and how funds can deploy across borders. Closer to home, one of the most overdue reforms Poland needs is a proper digital share registry. Today’s analogue process is one of the biggest avoidable frictions in the Polish startup and broader business ecosystem, and it is a fixable one.
The Polish Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of European Funds will also have to revisit the rules constraining domestic VCs from international co-investment; the current framework for how publicly funded VCs can deploy is not yet matched to how the global VC market actually operates, and that gap is something several fund managers, including vastpoint, are actively pushing to close.
If all four had to be compressed into one line, 2025 was the year capital came back to the Polish VC market. The 2026–2028 window is when we find out whether the founder's ambition is to use it well. Capital alone is not enough.
