The Czech business environment has been living the story of Beat Saber for 24 hours and will continue to live for many hours. Three guys who started drilling in virtual reality two years ago developed for them the most successful game over time and eventually sold it all to Facebook. Like a movie.
Similar stories tell each other about audio-visual processing, but above all they can kick others. It serves as living evidence that the Czech Republic can do great global things. So remember the five major Czech startup exits that have taken place over the past three years and in the shadow of massively busy successes, such as the sale of Slevomat or a part of Kiwi.com, may fit slightly.
Apiary
- Jakub Nešetřil
Apiary is undoubtedly the soundiest story in this period of time. The company bought by Oracle, the seventh richest man on the planet, Larry Ellison, develops so-called APIs for programmers (interfaces through which programs and applications can communicate). The key person is founder Jakub Nešetřil, who founded Apiary together with Jan Moravec and led as CEO.
- Established: 2011
- Sale: 2017
- Buyer: Oracle (market capitalization $ 186 billion)
- Amount: unspecified units of billions of crowns
What to do next: Jakub Nešetřil left Oracle after about two years and today he is primarily involved in the Česko.Digital project. It brings together a community of IT professionals who already want to improve the Czech Republic in their free time. “One of the things I realized in Silicon Valley is that programmers have a great deal of power to change things. There it is obvious on a daily basis. But this is a trend that is also increasing in other countries and it should happen here in the Czech Republic, ”said Neustil forbesu last autumn.
Ytica
- Šimon Vostrý and Květa Vostrá
They met, walked together, married, set up a business, and eventually sold it. Květa and Šimon Vostří are one of the most successful examples of how to successfully do business in a (married) couple. Their Ytica creates software tools for a segment called workforce optimization (WFO) in English. Essentially, it monitors, evaluates, and analyzes communication with customers in contact centers. Šimon Vostrý has been operating in this field for 20 years, so he had a lot to build on in Ytice.
- Founded: 2017
- Sale: 2018
- Buyer: Twilio (market capitalization of $ 14 billion)
- Amount: According to Forbes, slightly over one billion crowns
What’s next: Both spouses continue working for Twilio. “Simon was quite often asked why he worked with his wife, how he wanted to raise money in this way, and so on. But if you really believe in your tandem, there’s no need to explain – just say you’re doing it together, because that’s right. It’s a belief, ”Květa Vostrá told Forbes.
Stories
- Peter Fedoročko, Filip Doušek and Vojta Roček
“Stories are at the very beginning, pilot clients give the first feedback needed to tune the product,” we wrote on Forbes.cz in November 2016. Two years later, the company was already bought by the US Workday corporation, traded on Nasdaqu. The company, which is backed by Vojta Roček, Filip Doušek and Peter Fedoročko, is engaged in a field called business intelligence and analyzes large corporate data. The result is insights that can increase business revenue by tens of percent.
- Founded: 2016
- Sale: 2018
- Buyer: Workday (market capitalization of $ 40 billion)
- Amount: According to Forbes, lower hundreds of millions of crowns
What’s next: The three co-founders continue to work for Workday.
Brand Embassy
- Vít Horký
The Czech company Brand Embassy, backed by Vít Horký and Damián Brhel and creating a platform for digital customer care, is, like Ytica, another Karlín business growth. The company was used to growing by hundreds of percent per year, its founders working 16 hours a day. Thanks to its know-how, it has captured the world’s leading player in the digitization of customer care – the Israeli company NICE.
- Established: 2011
- Sale: 2019
- Buyer: NICE ($ 32 billion market capitalization)
- Amount: According to Forbes information, higher hundreds of millions of crowns
What’s next: Vít Horký and Damián Brhel continue to work for NICE. “I did not want to be one of the entrepreneurs who had missed their child’s first years of life because they had to work in careers. I have so many examples around me and I was really afraid, ”said Horký for Forbes about the change of his regime last autumn.
Melown
Startup of the founder of the List Ivo Lukačovič and his longtime colleague Ondřej Procházka has technology useful for 3D mapping of cities and landscapes. “Sometime in spring 2017 we started to show our technology at various conferences and fairs and in the summer we started to hear the first people,” Procházka recalls. “And as far as I remember, Leica was even the first of all”.
- Established: 2011
- Sale: 2019
- Buyer: Leica Geosystems (parent company Hexagon AB is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange and its market capitalization exceeds $ 20 billion)
- Amount: “Journalists guessed some prize, hit, but mistook the currency,” Lukačovič told CZpodcast.
What to do next: Ivo Lukačovič continues his inactive work in Seznam and is fully dedicated to his heart project Windy, which builds differently than the Internet giant in the past. “I burned out, exhausted. Now I’m more mature and I know that more rested people will perform better. That’s why I have absolutely free working time at Windy, and if I want to be home, there’s no problem, ”he admitted in the same podcast.
Also published on Medium.