Startup Booster Poland

If you have an innovative idea, product or service, your company has not been on the market for more than 5 years and you are looking for grant funding, the Startup Booster Poland program may be a perfect fit.

How Booster Poland works?

Startup Booster Poland is an acceleration program for innovative ideas, products and services. Participants of the program receive grants of up to PLN 400,000. Receiving a grant does not entail the obligation to provide an own contribution or to give up any part of shares in the company.

The grant can be used to fund expenses such as:

• salaries of the employees
• purchase of services necessary for achieving the milestones (including IT services)
• purchase of fixed assets or intangible assets
• costs of promotional and informational activities

Startup Booster Poland, is not only a grant, but also training and workshops offered by a given operator, as well as support from technology/corporate partners of a accelerator in the development and commercialization of an idea, or the opportunity to present your product to investors at events organized by the accelerator.

What does acceleration within Booster Poland look like?

The purpose of the accelerator program is to support a startup in commercializing or launching a product offered by the startup.

The Booster Poland program provides for the following acceleration paths:

• Industry Acceleration: product development in collaboration with one of the accelerator’s partners (the technology recipient). This may include implementing the product at one of the accelerator’s partners and jointly bringing the technology to market. The financial terms are agreed directly between the startup and the technology recipient.
• Investor Acceleration: preparing the startup to raise capital from private investors.
• Go-Global: preparing the startup with a ready product for international expansion in cooperation with the accelerator’s foreign partners.
• Sector Agnostic: allows product development without the involvement of a business partner from the accelerator (as mentioned above, this path involves a lower grant).
• Poland Prize: encourages foreign startups to move or develop their activities in Poland.

The grant available under the sector agnostic path is PLN 200,000. For the other paths it is PLN 400,000.

We discussed more during our webinar about the Booster Poland program and how to combine its funding with the most popular programme for startups i.e. Startup Platforms.

What are the application deadlines?

Each Booster Poland operator has planned around 4-6 application rounds for startups, with the entire program running until 2026. This provides a broad window of opportunities to prepare a solid application.

Each operator has different rules and regulations, different project advancement requirements for each track, or different industry preferences and other business partners (technology buyers). So regardless of the large pool of competitions, it’s worth monitoring the calls to fit yourself into the criteria of the proper accelerator.

What does the startup need to prepare?

First and foremost, the startup must prepare an acceleration application, and the level of complexity varies depending on the operator. The next step is to prepare an Individual Acceleration Program Budget (BIPA) and an Individual Acceleration Program Schedule (HIPA)—two key documents that regulate the acceleration process and specify what expenses will be financed by the Booster Poland grant. Both HIPA (which should include key product development milestones) and BIPA will be part of the contract with the accelerator. Therefore, it is crucial to carefully plan and draft not only the acceleration application but also these two documents.