Market One Capital

Co-founders and Managing Partners Marcin Kurek and Jacek Łubiński lead all investment decisions. Both bring a mix of operating and investing experience from the CEE ecosystem. The firm runs a concentrated partnership structure with no external investment committee, allowing term sheets to go out within roughly two weeks of a partner meeting.

Sourcing relies on a decade of angel investing by the partners before the fund existed, which created a network of repeat founders and technical talent across Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. The firm also maintains relationships with CEE-focused accelerators and local university spinout programs. This embeddedness converts to proprietary flow because many founders take their first institutional check from Market One Capital before any Western fund sees the deal.

The firm focuses on pre-seed and seed stages, writing initial checks of €500,000 to €2 million. It typically leads or co-leads rounds and reserves capital for follow-on investments. The mandate targets the institutional gap between angel syndicates and larger Series A funds, making it the first institutional money into many CEE founders.

No. The firm is deliberately focused on B2B software, AI/ML applications, FinTech infrastructure, digital health platforms, and marketplace models. It avoids hardware-heavy businesses, consumer-social, and biotech — areas where the CEE cost advantage is less decisive or regulatory complexity blunts speed.

Market One Capital operates exclusively as a direct investor into operating companies, not as a fund-of-funds. It does not allocate to other venture managers. The entire deployment model is built around taking equity positions in seed-stage startups, though it has co-invested alongside other CEE-focused funds when rounds require larger syndicates.

The European Investment Fund's commitment in June 2023 (per the European Investment Fund, 2023) provides institutional validation that expands the firm's LP base beyond family offices and high-net-worth individuals. It also signals that the fund has met the governance, reporting, and compliance standards required by a public European institution, which tends to unlock further commitments from pension funds and funds-of-funds across the EU.

The firm actively syndicates with Western Series A funds seeking CEE exposure without establishing regional offices. By writing the first institutional check, Market One Capital becomes the natural local partner for international firms evaluating follow-on rounds. This intermediaries role is central to the firm's strategy of helping portfolio companies bridge from Warsaw or Bucharest to Berlin, London, or US-based growth capital.