At the beginning of this year, we took a look at a number of European countries and came up with a list of 5 startups for each country to watch in 2015. The Czech Republic is popular for its skilled and relatively cheap IT force among big corporates (Novartis established its global ICT hub in Prague) but also many interesting young companies are born here – GoodData, AVG, Avast, to name a few.
Here is a list of 5 Czech startups that are hot right now, in my opinion:
1. Mapinout: This map-based property management startup aims to map and manage the unknown and complex world of buildings! Geo software is not new to the two co-founders, who worked together for years and co-founded Geosense, the fastest growing young Czech tech company three years ago, according to Deloitte Fast 50. Mapinout is an easy tool for controlling and monitoring building equipment, maintenance, revisions and services. Mapinout is based at Wayra CEE (Prague), a Telefónica Digital technological accelerator (Update – May 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link).
2. Comprimato: A JPEG2000 compression software based on standard graphics processing units that deliver compression up to 10x faster than existing software at a fraction of the price. Comprimato delivers a unique compression solution for the digital cinema market, and has secured numerous major clients including Digimetrics and Stanford University. The team is in negotiation with major global players in various fields, including military and health applications. In September 2014 it raised €1 million from existing investors Credo Ventures and Y Soft Venture Capital (Update – May 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link).
3. Skypicker: This is one of my favourite websites for finding cheap flight tickets. In December 2014, Skypicker made it to the number one spot on ProducHunt. Following a EUR 500k investment in 2014, the firm plans to expand sales of tickets from Europe to the whole world and intends to become the market leader in sales of low-cost flights within two years. Its 2014 revenues grew 5 times from EUR 500k year before. Skypicker was backed with EUR 20k investment from a local angel investor 3 years ago and helped by the Czech leading business accelerator StarCube (Update – May 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link).
4. Portadi: The Czech team that is now based in Santa Clara (USA) created a dashboard where teams manage access to web applications. The problem of coordinating group access to cloud services is very real. Founded in 2014, Portadi gives centralized control over access rights and simplified onboarding. “Who were the last 5 people to sign in to MailChimp?” or “Who invited the people from our PR agency and gave them access to the Vimeo account?”. With Portadi, you will have control over employees’ acitivity and all passwords (Update – May 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link).
5. Apiary: The San Francisco- and Prague-based startup offers collaborative API building tool – collaborative design, instant API mock, generated documentation, integrated code samples, debugging and automated testing. In autumn 2014, Apiary crossed 100K APIs described and announced Apiary for Enterprise and larger teams. Apiary was used in companies like Akamai, BrightCove, Dell, GoDaddy, Nike, Rackspace or Target. In 2014, Gartner named Apiary as Cool Vendor in 2014 in Web Computing. In 2013, Apiary raised $1.63 million from US-based Flybridge Capital Partners and Baseline Ventures. (Disclosure: I was among the first investors at Apiary, investing in angel round, along few other investors such as Esther Dyson) (Update – May 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link).
By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out the Startup Sourcing Service of EU-Startups.com!
