Piotr Smolen

Piotr Smoleń is a Polish fintech founder, operator, and early-stage investor based in London. He is a graduate of the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH) and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and holds the CFA charter. Early in his career he worked as an analyst at NFI Midas before moving into building and running technology companies for the capital-markets industry.

He is best known for founding and serving roughly five years as CEO of Turbine Analytics S.A., a Warsaw-based fintech that built SaaS systems combining big-data tooling to automate investment, risk-management, and operational processes for funds and capital-markets institutions. Turbine grew into a leading provider in Central and Eastern Europe and was acquired by ProService Finteco (a transaction financed by global private-equity firm Oaktree Capital Management) in 2018, marking a notable exit for Smoleń. He also led the venture fund Data Ventures as CEO/Managing Partner.

Since 2018 he has been Co-Founder and CEO of Symmetrical.ai (founded with Maciej Noga and Daniel Wartołowski), a London-based fintech building an employer-financed "financial marketplace" / earned-wage and salary-benefits platform for employees in Europe. Symmetrical has raised in the region of $26M from investors including Global Founders Capital, Target Global, Partech, and Finch Capital. Alongside his operating roles, Smoleń invests his own capital as an angel, primarily into seed-stage technology startups.

• Invests at the seed / early stage as an angel, drawing on his background as a fintech founder and capital-markets technologist.
• Concentrates on fintech, financial and enterprise software, enterprise infrastructure/applications, AI, and blockchain — areas adjacent to his own operating experience.
• Brings a strongly tech-and-data-driven view of finance; he publicly argued the Polish capital market was "technologically backward versus Western markets by a good 10–15 years," and that technology should be built around real customer needs.
• In his own portfolio he favors Silicon Valley startups, blockchain projects, and passive index funds, and has said he avoids Polish public equities due to disappointments with management quality — signaling a bias toward high-growth, technology-led opportunities over legacy businesses.