Kaya VC has been backing technical founders in Central and Eastern Europe since 2011, when there was almost no startup ecosystem here to speak of. Five funds and over $500M under management later, the work hasn't changed: we write first cheques for people building from CEE and its diaspora, often before anyone else is willing to look.

The ecosystem CEE has today, we helped build. We led Rohlik's seed in 2014, when online grocery was a category most investors wouldn't underwrite — the unit economics looked impossible, the region too small. It now delivers across Europe and is one of the most valuable companies ever built out of CEE. Soon after, we extended into Poland and were early into Docplanner and Booksy, before vertical SaaS and services marketplaces were theses anyone was funding here. All three became unicorns.

That instinct still runs the firm. We wrote one of E2B's first cheques when "AI agents" still sounded like a chatbot variant. The market caught up about a year on. The job, as we see it, is to back what looks wrong today and obvious in retrospect — and to underwrite it before the room agrees.

The early call, made well, compounds. Accel, Index, and Bessemer have all led later rounds in Kaya companies.

We invest at pre-seed and seed, $500K to $2M, with reserves to follow on. We sit in Prague, Warsaw, London, and San Francisco, networked into the places companies go when they scale beyond the region. Founders don't need a weekly check-in — they need the right answer at the right moment. We try to be useful that way: available when it matters, out of the way when it doesn't.

If you're building something the room doesn't agree with yet, we'd definitely like to hear from you.