The hidden CEE founders of Y Combinator, and who funds them
YC’s directory sees 30 startups from Central & Eastern Europe, but counting founders, there are 155. SMOK is #1 in CEE in terms of backing them, but two-thirds have no CEE fund among their known investors.
TL;DR
- 155 of the 6,267 companies Y Combinator has funded have at least one founder from Central & Eastern Europe. YC’s own location data shows only 30.
- Ukraine (37) and Poland (34) lead. The ex-Yugoslav countries together are a third bloc (30). Per head, Slovenia is in a league of its own.
- CEE’s share of each YC batch has been flat at 2–3% for a decade, even as the absolute numbers grew to about 20 a year.
- Only 18 of 210 CEE founders are women, and the share is falling: 19% in the 2016–19 batches, 4% since 2023.
- CEE founders in YC build B2B (59%) and almost no fintech (3% vs 11% across YC).
- 26 have raised a Series A or later. Among batches up to 2023, that’s almost 1 in 4, and Ukrainian-founded companies convert best (33%).
- Among CEE funds, SMOK has backed the most CEE-founded YC companies (8), followed by Kaya (6) and Zaka (5).
- Only 53 of the 155 have a CEE fund among their known investors. The investors that show up most often are US seed funds: Pioneer Fund, Rebel Fund, SV Angel, FundersClub.
Why we did this
At SMOK we’ve backed 8 Y Combinator companies, all with founders from our region. A simple question followed: is that a lot? Does any other CEE fund have more?
Nobody had counted. And the obvious source, YC’s own company directory, can’t answer it: it lets you filter by location, and location turns out to hide almost all the founders we care about. So we built the dataset ourselves.
How we counted
1. Every YC company. We started from the open mirror of YC’s directory (6,267 companies through the 2026 batches) and pulled the founders’ names and bios from each company’s public YC page.
2. Founder origin. Simple rules flagged any founder with a possible CEE signal: CEE-specific letters (ł, ř, ș, ő…), surname endings (-ski, -enko, -escu, -ić…), first names, or CEE cities, universities and employers in the bio. An AI model then judged every flagged founder and wrote down its evidence; Russian and Belarusian founders were excluded by definition. Finally, people who know the ecosystem reviewed the results. Our colleague Sasha went through the Ukrainian list and found 8 teams we had missed and 7 that were Russian, not Ukrainian.
A company counts if at least one founder was born or raised in CEE: Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and the ex-Yugoslav countries. Second-generation diaspora counts only with explicit evidence, such as a CEE university.
3. Fund portfolios. We took the 260+ CEE-focused funds in our CRM. For each one we rendered its website, found the portfolio pages, clicked through “load more” buttons and pagination, followed links to individual company pages, and used an AI model to read company names off logo-only portfolio walls. Every company was matched to YC by its website domain or exact name.
4. Funding announcements. Websites miss deals, so for every one of the 155 companies we searched press releases, news and portfolio databases for named investors. For the 17 most YC-active CEE funds we also searched from the other side: “which YC companies has this fund backed?”
Every fund number below is therefore a lower bound: what’s public, not everything that happened.
1. The hidden founders
YC’s directory tags each company by where it’s headquartered. Filter for CEE countries and you get 30 companies. Count founders instead and you get 155.
The difference is migration. Of the 155:
- 100 are headquartered in the United States,
- 31 elsewhere (mostly London, Berlin, Toronto, Amsterdam),
- 24 are still based in CEE.
That’s the YC playbook working as intended: you move to San Francisco for the batch, and most companies stay. But it means any count of “CEE startups in YC” based on HQ misses about 85% of them. GitLab, People.ai, Quo (OpenPhone) and Browser Use are all “US companies” in that view.
2. Where they come from
- Ukraine: 37
- Poland: 34
- Romania: 15
- Bulgaria: 11
- Slovenia: 10
- Hungary, Serbia, Czechia: 9 each
- Croatia: 7
- Slovakia: 4
- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania: 3 each
Ukraine and Poland together account for 71 of the 155. The Balkan countries (Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo) add up to 30, more than Romania and Bulgaria combined.
Ukraine vs Poland
Poland led early: a 2012–13 cohort that included Estimote. Ukraine caught up and pulled ahead in 2016, and has stayed ahead every year since. By the 2026 batches the totals are Ukraine 37, Poland 34.
But 2026 was Poland’s strongest year yet: 8 Polish-founded companies in a single year’s batches, the best year for either country.
Slovenia leads per head
Adjusted for population, the picture flips. Slovenia, a country of 2 million people, has 10 YC companies with a Slovenian founder: almost 48 per 10 million people, more than twice anyone else. Estonia, Croatia and Bulgaria follow. Poland and Ukraine, the leaders in absolute numbers, sit mid-table at about 9–10 per 10 million.
3. The trend: more companies, same share
The absolute numbers are near record highs: 22 CEE-founded companies in the 2021 batches, 21 in 2025, 20 in 2026. But YC’s batches grew too. As a share of each year’s YC companies, CEE has hovered between 2% and 3% for a decade.
We’re keeping pace with YC’s growth, not catching up.
4. Women founders: fewer than a decade ago
Of the 210 CEE founders in our dataset, 18 are women (9%). Across all YC founders, our name-based estimate is about 12%.
The trend runs the wrong way. In the 2016–19 batches, 8 of 43 CEE founders were women (19%), above the YC average at the time. Since 2023 it’s 3 of 79 (4%), while YC overall stayed around 11%. Only 3 of the 64 CEE-founded companies from the 2023–26 batches have a woman among the founders.
The numbers are small, so a single founder moves a period by a few points. But the direction is hard to miss: the region sends more founders to YC than ever, and fewer of them are women.
5. What they build, and how it went
CEE-founded YC companies lean harder into B2B than YC overall (59% vs 51%). The most striking gap is fintech: 3% of CEE-founded YC companies, against 11% across YC. For a region full of payment and banking engineering talent, that’s a surprisingly empty category.
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Outcomes so far: one IPO (GitLab), 12 acquisitions (including AXDRAFT, YouTeam, Momence and Two Tap), 32 shut down, and 110 still active. The acquisition rate (8%) is below YC’s overall 13%, partly because the cohort is young: a third of these companies are from the 2024–26 batches.
6. Who made it to Series A
From the same funding announcements, 26 of the 155 CEE-founded YC companies have raised a Series A or later. Counting only the batches up to 2023, which have had at least two years to raise, it’s 24 of 103: almost one in four.
Ukrainian-founded companies convert best: 8 of 24 (33%). Czechia (2 of 7), Poland (5 of 19) and Slovenia (2 of 8) are close to the average. Romania (0 of 11) and Bulgaria (0 of 8) have no public Series A from these batches yet. With groups this small, one round moves a country’s rate by 10–15 points, so read these as directions, not rankings.
By money raised, GitLab leads with $426M before its 2021 IPO, followed by People.ai and Veriff (about $200M each), Asher Bio ($163M), and Aerones and Bitrise (about $100M each). AfterQuery (W25) raised a Series B at a reported $3.2B valuation in September 2026. The amount isn’t public, so it isn’t ranked here, but it will likely join this list.
7. Who funds them: the CEE funds
Now to the question that started this. We found out that SMOK is actually the leader among CEE-focused funds in funding YC startups. This includes both pre-YC investments (like Alokai and Authologic in our case) as well as investments that we’ve done during and after YC.
CEE-founded YC companies backed, per CEE fund:
- SMOK Ventures (Poland): 8 CEE-founded, 8 YC in total
- Kaya VC (Czechia): 6 CEE-founded, 8 YC in total
- Zaka VC (Czechia): 5 CEE-founded, 27 YC in total
- Dnipro VC (Ukraine): 4 CEE-founded, 6 YC in total
- Credo Ventures (Czechia): 4 CEE-founded, 5 YC in total
- Silicon Gardens (Slovenia): 4 CEE-founded, 4 YC in total
- Digital Future (Ukraine): 4 CEE-founded, 4 YC in total
- Horizon Capital (u.ventures) (Ukraine): 4 CEE-founded, 4 YC in total
- SID Venture Partners (Ukraine): 3+1 CEE-founded (one via GP), 6YC in total
Counting all YC companies regardless of founder origin, the picture is different. Zaka VC (27) is in a category of its own: a Prague- and Silicon Valley-based seed fund that invests mainly in US companies, with a strong health and deep-tech slant. N1 (9) and E2VC (7) are also YC-active mostly with non-CEE founders.
The funds, briefly
- SMOK Ventures (Poland): 8 YC companies, all CEE-founded: Alokai, Authologic, Slicker, Prox, No Cap, Stormy, and two yet unannounced startups from the S26 batch.
- Kaya VC (Czechia): the most YC-focused CEE fund on CEE founders after us. Supernova, Stormy, Yoneda Labs, TrueClaim, Sensible Biotechnologies, MediSearch, plus Frontier Computing and Mesmer.
- Zaka VC (Czechia, global mandate): 27 YC companies, from WonderTx and CellType to Sygaldry and Human Archive. Five have CEE founders, including MediSearch and Sensible Biotechnologies (both co-invested with Kaya).
- The Ukrainian cluster:
- SID Venture Partners: AiSDR, Awesomic, Fluently, Datrics (via GP) plus Vendora, Relari and Sepal AI.
- Flyer One: AiSDR, Awesomic.
- Dnipro VC: Phases, AtlasGrid, People.ai, Cardamon, plus BeeSafe AI and Lamar Health.
- Digital Future and Horizon Capital’s u.ventures: Petcube, Sixa, YouTeam, AtlasGrid, outloud.ai.
- Five Ukrainian funds with at least two CEE-founded YC companies each make Ukraine the densest YC-investing ecosystem in the region. - Credo Ventures (Czechia): Archbee, Deepnote, Supernova, NFTScoring.
- Silicon Gardens (Slovenia): the Slovenian founders’ network behind Povio, Flaviar, Juicy Marbles and Popsy.
- E2VC (formerly 500 Emerging Europe): 7 YC companies, mostly with Turkish founders (BillionToOne, Ubicloud, Polymet, Patientdesk.ai); CEE-founded Mandel AI and Yoneda Labs.
Who invests together
A few CEE-founded YC companies attracted several CEE funds:
- Veriff: Change Ventures, Lemonade Stand, Siena and Specialist VC.
- Supernova: Credo, J&T Ventures, Kaya and Reflex Capital.
- Alokai: Bek Ventures, Movens and SMOK.
- Petcube: AVentures, Digital Future and Horizon Capital.
- Turing College: FirstPick, Iron Wolf and Spring Capital.
- Datrics: ICU, QP Digital and SID (via GP).
And some pairs keep showing up together: Digital Future and Horizon Capital (3 deals), and Kaya + Zaka, SID + Flyer One, and Fil Rouge + Silicon Gardens (2 each).
Which countries’ funds do YC deals
Of the 195 CEE-headquartered funds whose websites we could check (the rest of our 260+ are CEE-mandate funds based elsewhere, or had no working site), 65 have backed at least one YC company. Poland (12), Ukraine (11) and Czechia (10) have the most YC-active funds; Estonia (8) punches far above its size again.
8. The uncomfortable number
Here is the finding we didn’t expect. For only 53 of the 155 CEE-founded YC companies could we find a CEE fund among the investors. For the other 102, the public record shows no CEE capital at all.
Who backs them instead?
Put every investor on one scale and the picture is clear. The most active backers of CEE founders in YC are US seed funds and syndicates that specialise in YC companies: Pioneer Fund (11), Rebel Fund (9), SV Angel (9), FundersClub (7) and Liquid 2 Ventures (6), with Alumni Ventures, General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures at 5 each.
Only a handful of CEE funds make that list: SMOK (8), Kaya (6) and Zaka (5), then Credo, Digital Future and Dnipro VC (4 each).
Two caveats. Announcements miss angel checks and undisclosed rounds, and many CEE angels are surely on these cap tables. But even generously, the pattern is clear: the best founders from our region get into YC and get funded, mostly without CEE venture capital.
What this means
For founders from CEE: the YC path works, and you don’t have to be headquartered here to be part of the CEE ecosystem. There are CEE funds that know YC and invest alongside it; the list above is a good start.
For CEE investors: the deal flow is real, about 20 YC companies a year with CEE founders, but it’s invisible if you filter by HQ. Most of these founders are in San Francisco by the time they raise their seed round. You have to know them before, or follow them there.
For us at SMOK: this is the gap we started the fund to close: backing CEE founders who build global companies, wherever they’re based. Two-thirds of the YC cohort still raises without a CEE fund on board. That’s the opportunity.
Caveats, and help us fix the data
- Founder origin: name-based classification can be wrong both ways: anglicised names and empty bios are missed, shared surnames can mislead. The Ukrainian list was fully reviewed by hand; others partly.
- Fund counts are lower bounds: they cover only what’s on fund websites and in public announcements.
- Our universe is the 260+ CEE funds we track. A fund we don’t know about can’t appear. If that’s you, tell us!
If you spot a missing founder, a wrong country or a fund deal we didn’t find, write to borys@smok.vc. We’ll update the numbers. The full list of 155 companies is available on request.
Data as of October 2026. Thanks to Sasha for the Ukrainian review, and to every fund that keeps an honest portfolio page.
