Hard2beat is a new €20 million early-stage VC fund founded by entrepreneurs and technology investors based in Poland. It focuses on deeptech companies with a strong technological edge — teams solving complex technical problems across multiple fields. Hard2beat primarily invests in Polish companies or those with a clear connection to the Polish ecosystem.
The firm’s Founding Partner, Maciej Zawadziński, told Vestbee more about its fund strategy and investment approach.
Fund strategy overview
- Geography: mainly Poland or EU and UK-based startups that plan to use our funds in Poland
- Preferred industries: anything deeptech. As a generalist fund, Hard2beat invests across a wide range of technically demanding fields, including advanced software (e.g., cybersecurity, devtools, AI/ML infrastructure), hardware-enabled software, robotics, industrial systems, biotech, medtech, and dual-use technologies. If it involves real engineering or scientific depth, it’s within the fund’s scope.
- Investment ticket: initial up to 3 million PLN, with follow-ons up to 8 million PLN in total
- Company stage: pre-seed (core focus) and seed
Product type: companies with a real technological moat: software, hardware, biotech, or hybrid systems (no B2C apps, no marketplaces, no “ERP for everyone”) - Product stage: prototype/MVP up to early commercialization. Hard2beat wants to see technology or scientific validation
- Revenues: pre-revenue or early revenue
Q&A with Maciej Zawadziński, Founding Managing Partner at Heart2beat
What are the 5 main things you look for in a startup?
- Founders who stay close to the problem and the customers, move quickly, and aim to build something significant.
- Defensible technology moat: engineering or science that is difficult for competitors to copy.
- Large or fast-growing market that gives the company room to grow and develop a large business.
- Technology or scientific validation: prototypes, experiments, benchmarks, or proof that the core technology works and has the potential to be a world-leading solution in its field.
- Early market validation: PoCs, pilots, and commercial conversations with potential partners and customers that demonstrate genuine demand.
What disqualifies a startup as your potential investment target?
- Companies outside our core focus, with no technological moat or real competitive advantage, e.g., shallow “AI for X” products built on someone else’s API; SMB all-in-one tools that target everyone and no one.
- Teams that lack focus or execution speed, chase different opportunities, avoid hard questions, or move too slowly.
- Technology with no customer path — impressive on paper or lab, but hard to monetize.
- Small markets or a weak ability to expand into larger ones.
- Service-heavy businesses where the product cannot scale.
What, in your opinion, differentiates the best founders from the rest?
We look for so-called hard-to-beat founders — resilient and resourceful entrepreneurs who know how to get a lot done with limited time and resources. They stay close to customers, iterate quickly, and push through technical challenges instead of getting stuck.
What startups should take into account before making a deal with a VC fund?
First, you are entering a long-term relationship — sometimes spanning a few years and sometimes even a decade. You’re effectively choosing a partner for the good times and the bad.
Secondly, remember that you’re not entering into a partnership with a logo, but with people. Get to know the fund's partners and the people you'll be working with, and see if you get along. Could you survive a 3-hour train journey with them? Would you be comfortable inviting them to dinner at your home? If the answer to both is yes, that’s a good sign.
Thirdly, ensure that they have a thorough understanding of your market and the realities of being a founder. Things rarely go exactly to plan, for better or worse, so you need a fund that will support you throughout your journey.
What is your approach to startup valuation and preferred share in the company?
We want the valuation to reflect the actual risk we’re taking: the stage of development, the technology's defensibility, and what needs to be achieved before the next funding round. Our aim is to build and maintain a meaningful stake in the company (with follow-ons), typically between 5% and 15%.
We don’t optimize for ownership at all costs, but we do care about cap tables that support future rounds. If there is an issue that needs fixing, such as significant 'dead' equity or a lack of ESOP for key people, we want to resolve the issue at the time of our investment to make sure that future fundraising goes smoothly.
From day one, we aim to align interests; we rarely agree to valuation adjustments that reduce the founders' equity. The valuation should make sense at the time of investment, based on the risk and future prospects.
How do you support your portfolio companies?
At Hard2beat, we combine two perspectives: deeptech investors and people who’ve actually built companies. Our support is practical and grounded in real-world experience.
We open up our network of customers, partners, technical experts, and the right VCs to help you raise funds. We also help you prepare for the next funding round. Having been on both sides of fundraising and exits, we know how the process works.
Operationally, we can help with GTM strategy, market positioning, early enterprise sales, building partnerships, hiring key people, refining materials, and pricing. We’ll support you where it matters, but you’re the one building the company.
We understand that building a company is chaotic. Things break, and plans change. We’ve been there before, so if you need us, we’ll always pick up the phone — we’re in this with you.
What are the best-performing companies in your portfolio?
We’ve only been operating for 9 months. We began investing in Q2’2025 and announced our first 3 investments in May of that year. By the end of 2025, we expect to have around 8 companies in our portfolio. It’s simply too early to identify the best performers - everyone is still in the process of building, testing, running pilots, or selling to their first customers, working through scientific studies and certifications. What matters to us is that all the teams are moving in the right direction and achieving the early milestones that actually count at this stage.
What are your notable lessons learned from investments that didn’t work out as expected?
A few things stand out from our earlier investments.
First, deeptech projects take time — often much longer than anyone expects. You need to consider runway length, the next funding round, and your equity story from the moment you invest, rather than 6 months before your funding runs out.
Secondly, it's better to ship than to overthink. Markets and competition move faster than the perfect solution that never leaves the laboratory.
Thirdly, focus is everything. Teams that try to do too many things at once usually struggle to complete any of them.
Finally, a deeptech project without real customers becomes a research project. Strong technology is important, but if there is no clear way to put it in users' hands, the company will fail.
What are the hottest markets you currently look at as VC, and where do you see the biggest hype?
Right now, we’re especially excited about a few deeptech areas:
- Robotics & automation. As we wrote in Robotics Startups 2025, the sector is finally taking off after years of “almost there.” Real deployments, improved hardware-software stacks, and clearer use cases make this a great time to start building.
- Photonics & next-gen compute. Our article on the photonic chip market explains why we’re watching this space closely: AI workloads are exploding, energy costs are very real, and new computing architectures will be more important than ever.
- Cybersecurity & dual-use tech. Strong engineering, defence-grade reliability, and security-first thinking are becoming essential, and Poland has exceptional talent in these areas.
- Biotech & medtech. With strong scientific teams and growing lab infrastructure in Poland, this space has real potential, especially for founders combining biology, hardware, and software.
- Spacetech & aerospace-adjacent deep tech. We talked about our interest in spacetech on our podcast and believe that this frontier is underappreciated in our region.
While we try to avoid hype-driven areas with low technical depth, when the engineering is real, and there is market demand, we’re interested.
In your view, what are the key trends that will shape the European VC scene in the coming years?
We can see a real wave of deeptech VC funding forming in Europe. While there remains a lack of capital for founders solving hard engineering and scientific problems today, more funds are entering the space, and public programmes are beginning to close that gap. The key now is to maintain this momentum - if we want to build globally relevant companies rather than simply following what others do, Europe needs much more deeptech investment across all stages.
But will there be a “deeptech bubble”? Too much money too quickly always carries that risk. Overall, we think the direction is positive. If this trend continues, the next decade could be the best time to start a deeptech company in Europe.
