The Czech Republic remains a vibrant place for the Startup ecosystem. The combination of a strong educational system, particularly in technical areas, with a cosmopolitan environment, and a young traveling population has driven a rise in the number of startups being founded.
The country currently ranks 4th in Eastern Europe and 32nd worldwide according to the startup ranking from Startup Blink. 2022 was a very good year for startup investments in the country.
In the first half of the year, the country saw its second unicorn “born”, SaaS product management company Productboard, which reached an evaluation of $1.725B – also becoming the country’s most valuable startup. For the remainder of the year, though figures are not final, the country has received $1 billion in startup investments.
From tackling decarbonisation to AI and augmented reality, the diversity of startups is another strong point for the country. Due to the big footprint of big international companies, startups in the areas of infrastructure and DevOps are also on the rise.
To keep up with the current landscape, we’ve selected a list of 3 early-stage startups to watch for 2023, based on the investment they received in 2022.
Name: Deepnote
Founders: Filip Stollár, Jakub Jurovych, Jan Matas
Established in: 2019
The Czech-Slovak startup Deepnote develops a data science platform focused around notebooks for teams, allowing them to collaborate and visualise information from different systems. Use cases can range from analysing weather data to detecting credit card fraud.
For the year 2022, less than 4 years after being founded, the company raised 20 million dollars in its Series A round. The round was led by previous seed investors Index Ventures and Accel, joined by Y Combinator and Czech Credo Ventures.
This combined with the broad integration options and the fact that their platform is built on top of an open-source platform, makes it one of the startups to watch in 2023.
Name: Better Stack
Founders: Juraj Masar , Veronika Kolejak
Established in: 2021
Better Stack provides DevOps solutions that make it easier for software teams to monitor their application performance, aggregate data, and logs from multiple data sources.
The company, which was founded in 2021, raised an impressive 18.6 million dollars in its Series A round this year, led by early-stage Swedish VC fund Creandum. Other investors included Credo Ventures and Kaya, both from the Czech Republic.
With a solid roster of customers, comprising some of the biggest players in the IT field, the company has an exciting 2023 ahead and it is worth watching its next steps.
Name: Woltair
Founders: Daniel Helcl, Karel Náprstek and Jiří Švéda
Established in: 2018
Woltair’s mission is to make the new generation of energy devices easily accessible for everyone. It does so by offering B2C solutions for end-to-end management of power generators, e-mobility chargers, battery storage and other systems, managed by their own application. The offering covers procurement, installation and maintenance.
Founded in 2018, it raised 15.7 million dollars in its Series A round in 2022, led by investment firm ArcTern Ventures. Other participants included Movens Capital from Poland, along with Kaya and Presto Ventures from the Czech Republic.
As decarbonisation and energy prices will be a hot topic for 2023, this is one of the companies to watch for in 2023.
