Disclaimer: Unless noted otherwise, views and analysis expressed here are the author's own and based on public sources. The article is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. This is not financial advice. Please consult a professional for investment decisions.

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On this week’s episode of the Rollup of Tomorrow, I was joined by Piotr Smoleń, a Warsaw-based Fintech entrepreneur and the founder of Paycraft - a company that acquires accountancies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), starting from Poland, and rebuilds them as AI-native Back Office operating systems. 

I know this sounds like a load of mambo-jumbo, but Piotr’s logic for going after subscale Polish accountancies is highly compelling both from a competition perspective (little to none apparently) and from a value creation perspective. Specifically, Piotr and I discussed: 

Our conversation yielded the most comprehensive business case breakdown yet on The Rollup of Tomorrow series. There is real value for everyone, even if you’re not interested in Poland and/or professional services!  

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This issue is brought to you by Towards AI, RollUpEurope’s exclusive AI partner.

Piotr is leaning into AI with his own engineering team - but that’s not the only way. Founded by buy-and-build entrepreneur Denis Piffaretti, Towards AI helps Buy & Build platforms identify where AI can create the most value in your roll-up, then deploy the automations and custom agents to make it happen. Curious what AI could do for your platform? Reach out to Denis on [email protected]

Alex: Piotr, let’s give our readers some background. We first met 5 years ago when I ran Corporate Development at Bolt (Uber’s main competitor in Europe). We were looking for ways to accelerate payouts to ridehailing drivers. Your other company, called Symmetrical, offered that functionality. Today you are building Paycraft, which is an accounting rollup focused on Poland in the first instance. Help me connect the dots. How does one go from handling payroll for the gig economy to rolling up small Polish accountancy firms?

Piotr: Indeed, we started out by helping gig economy workers access faster payouts. In the process, we discovered several of our clients struggled with the logistics of payroll. Especially “quick commerce” players like Getir, Gorillas, and Weezy, who were hiring riders across Europe. At Symmetrical, we figured out how not only to pay those riders, but also how to onboard them, handle their taxes and so on. We grew extremely fast across a handful of jurisdictions that way. Suddenly, in 2022 the quick commerce industry shrivelled. Compounding the challenge was the widespread practice to outsource hiring to small business owners - who did not care about payroll. 

So, 3 years ago, after deciding this wasn’t the right market for us any more, we pulled out of everywhere except Poland. Why payroll in Poland? Because it was - and is - a notoriously tough industry to automate due to the constant need to maintain “a human in the loop”. To speed up learning, we acquired a small payroll “bureau” and gradually transformed it into a technology company. Retraining operators, building a new platform for the customers, automating processes. 

Fast forward to 2026, we had two major learnings. One, it’s  possible to increase margins to software-like levels, 70-80%. Two, it’s nearly impossible to scale a payroll business organically. We’ve tested all kinds of growth channels, and what we see is that the customer churn is minimal. And, switching vendors in Poland is incredibly painful. It didn’t matter that we had a superior product - our organic growth was capped at 50-60% YoY. We asked ourselves: is there another way to build substantial business? And that’s how we came up with the rollup idea. 

Alex: Very sensible! Accounting rollups, whether AI-powered or otherwise, is a hot topic. A couple of months ago on this very pod I interviewed Vlad Komnenović from Numeris Groupe, a Strada Partners-backed accountancy group in France which is doing incredibly well.  

Further reading: What’s up with folks buying accounting firms? Vlad Komnenović from Numeris opens up the books

What are key differences between Poland and other major European economies, like France, Germany, the UK? Are you seeing much competition in Poland?

Piotr: There are two major differences. 

Difference #1 is the level of fragmentation. Larger markets tend to house a handful of large players. The Polish accountancy market is 40,000 mostly very small firms chasing after a €5B TAM. The largest independent players are at €20-25M of revenue. That’s less than 1% of the market. The vast majority fall in the €0.5M to €3M revenue range. 

Difference #2 is the market structure, shaped by history. In CEE, the capitalist system started from scratch in the early 1990s. Western Europe had hundreds of years to create businesses. In our region, 90% of all small businesses were founded between 1990 and 1996 - by people who were young, 25 to 30. Why? Because if you were an experienced accountant in 1992, you’d be inclined to join a corporate as a chief accountant. The upshot is a massively concentrated cohort of business owners approaching retirement just now. This is unprecedented anywhere in the world. We estimate that €2-3B of revenue will switch hands in the next 8 years. 

And then on top of this, we have 17 ERP systems. It’s notoriously difficult and expensive to switch between those systems. The switching cost is 6-8x MRR… however, the service is the same! Bottom line, in this market it’s nigh on impossible to win customers organically, which explains the extreme degree of fragmentation. 

Alex: 40,000 potential targets, run by people approaching retirement, no obvious interlopers… This sounds like a dream! How good are the underlying companies though? Walk me through their unit economics. What margins do they run on? How many people do they employ? What do the churn rates look like?

Piotr: Let me unpack your questions one by one. Let’s start with customer distribution. Our typical target has 1-3 cornerstone customers. Accountants prefer to start with one larger customer whose fees help keep the lights on. Then, you have a big group of smaller companies with 5-50 employees. ACVs tend to be higher compared to France, Italy or the UK, since prices have not really compressed in the last 10 years, even though we’ve seen a number of technology companies trying to disrupt the industry. Even for tiny players ACVs are in the region of €5,000 to €10,000, growing in line with customer revenues. Finally, there's a long tail of one-person companies - freelancer, contractor - more B2C than B2B in nature. 

Our experience with churn has been minimal. Our first acquisition from 3 years ago exhibits 96% logo retention and 130% net revenue retention. Put differently, we bought a business with €300,000 in revenues, and now it’s generating €500,000. The customers are adding more services and they’re open to repricing. 

On the other hand, when clients switch vendors - and they rarely do so - negative selection bias is common. What I mean by that is when a customer is highly dissatisfied with the incumbent vendor, often the root cause is the operational chaos on the client’s side. We do not believe in aggressive customer acquisition because there's a high chance that we will  end up with customers that are prone to churn and have low profitability to begin with.

Poland’s decision to implement electronic invoicing, combined with new technology, means that everything can be automated. Eventually there will be margin compression, but for now prices are still going up. In Poland alone, the cost of employing 300,000 accountants adds up to €10B per year. Whereas the accounting software market is worth a mere €400M. For me, this is a clear signal that software vendors have not figured out how to meaningfully automate work and deliver value. A lot of insights and workflows remain in the heads and hands of people rather than run through software.

Alex: The theory of buying quality businesses and improving them is highly compelling. Can you talk about value creation in more detail though? Your thesis rests on being able to buy businesses at 1x revenue and subsequently lifting operating margins from 15-20% to 30-40%. It's a big uplift! How do you achieve that? Does Paycraft have a central team that stands ready to bolt on 100s of small acquisitions?