The Czech Republic is known for a solid infrastructure, a highly educated and skilled workforce, and relatively low wage costs. No wonder that many interesting companies were born here – GoodData, AVG, Avast, Apiary to name just a few. In the beginning of this year, we took a close look at the Czech startup scene and created a list of 7 promising startups to watch in 2017. All of the companies we’re listing below were founded within the previous two years.
GreyCortex is a Brno-based startup which uses advanced methods of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining to help organizations make their IT operations more secure and reliable. The promising Czech startup was named the best early stage startup at recent CESAwards. GreyCortex was founded in 2016 and raised $1.3 million in its first round of funding from Y Soft Ventures last year.
Neuron Soundware can recognize broken machines using sound. Founded in 2016, Neuron Soundware uses artificial intelligence methods to gain understanding of audio signals. Neuron Soundware’s mission is bring machine learning and neural networks to sound and voice analysis- creating interfaces between machines and people, and between machines and mechanical devices, that are highly intelligent and adaptable to many applications.
Recombee develops recommender system as a service. The recommendations are provided via an intuitive RESTful API. Their product is one of the few that can be used in many domains thanks to sophisticated query language. Recombee is recommending positions a few Czech sites – for jobs.cz and prace.cz visitors, personalizing news at centrum.cz, recommending cultural events for goout.cz, movies for showmax or products in multiple e-shops. They employ an artificial intelligence to optimize ensembles of recommendation algorithms for every scenario in real-time. The service is affordable even for smaller companies such as e-shops.
Locaid.me: Born at IBM where the founding team failed to get enough support to grow, Locaid.me is an IoT startup offering indoor location-based solutions focused on occupational health and safety. Integrated indoor emergency preparedness & response safety system consisting of Smart Stickers mesh network detecting and mapping danger in real time (e.g. fire, shooting, gas leakage) and a mobile app notifying and safely navigating people inside step-by-step (e.g. to the nearest exit, fire extinguisher) and sharing indoor position to rescue services in case of lockdown.
TrendLucid is an evaluation engine for eCommerce sites. It shows which products people buy on competitors sites. TrendLucid aggregates current consumer and market data, including reviews, user visits and pricing, and provides eShops with sales projections for different products in any particular category. The Prague based-startup shows market trends and popular products in an easy to use visual datamap. TrendLucid was founded n 2015.
Apifier, a Y-combinator alumni, is a cloud service that enables extraction of structured data from any website. Or in plain words, it’s a robot that helps eshop owners to get a daily Excel sheet with a list of prices of their competition, enables startups to create aggregators of stuff like real estate offers, used cars or new shoes, and helps marketers to extract emails and Facebook links from any website. Although the service is primarily for developers, Apifier also offers consulting services to help non-techie clients. Apifier was founded in 2015 and plans to expand capabilities of its robot and scale the consulting service to a worldwide marketplace.
Zeerat is a customer experience analytics company focusing on in-page web analytics and conversion rate optimization. Zeerat helps people to understand visitors’ behaviour on websites, reveals bugs and errors of a website conversion strategy such as uncompleted goals (form and cart abandonment) or navigation and design problems. “With Zeerat you can record and watch customers on your site like on a camera, save your energy and time thanks to virtual assistant, who’s scanning the data and spots the problems for you,” says the firm’s founder Michal Repetny.
