• Prague-based VC investment firm ZAKA VC announced its Fund I, after years of acting as a family office
• The decision is based on an increasing demand for capital
• The firm will keep prioritizing the same verticals and geographies, leaning toward AI

ZAKA VC, one of Czech Republic’s most active VC investors, announced the creation of its first VC fund this July. Up to this moment, the partners have been investing from their own funds, but both their ambition and the demand for venture capital have now inspired them to level up in order to be able to do more for the startup world both regionally and globally.

The Beginnings

Peter Zálešák and Dr Ján Kasper, two seasoned investors and long-time friends, have started ZAKA VC in 2020. Mr Zálešák had prior experience of investing in startups beforehand. Dr Kasper, meanwhile, had been primarily interested in such sectors as retail, media, mobility, energy, real estate development, agriculture, leisure, and hospitality. He got inspired to turn his eye to venture capital by his daughter Valentina who introduced him to the startup world and the opportunities it could unveil. That’s when Dr Kasper decided to join forces with his old friend to expand their activities to venture capital and take their place at the forefront of innovation in the rapidly changing economy.

‘After conversations with Jan, we decided to do it professionally – to hire the right team and establish rules and processes for selection, evaluation, approval and managing the best companies that are emerging around us,’ Mr Zálešák recalls.

Over the years of functioning as a family office, ZAKA VC has been investing in Pre-Seed and Seed stages and put together a portfolio of over 55 startups. Altogether, the partners have invested EUR 11M

ZAKA VC and Its Portfolio Startups

‘We are building our know-how on insights that we gained over the years at the ZAKA family office and are looking primarily at founders who are clear-minded, aim to conquer a huge market and are able to move fast. The traction in the early-stage can have many forms – from product development and iterations, to customer interviews, beta users and monthly monetization,’ Mr Kasper comments.

According to him, ZAKA VC can boast about having nurtured a wide network of talents, scouts and co-investors, and garnered a reputation of a fast, flexible, reputable and founder-friendly investor.

We are at 10/10 satisfaction with their involvement. They trust a founder’s judgment and provide helpful resources and connections as necessary. They are one of the few VCs that understand that time is the most precious commodity that founders have, and as a result, they are not too actively involved in a startup’s decisions, which is great from my perspective. There is a reason that I have introduced many of my biotech founder friends with promising startups to the ZAKA VC team.

– Dr Shardule Shah, Co-Founder and CEO at Lime Therapeutics

ZAKA VC and especially Andrej Petrus have been really supportive of our efforts. Helping to make the right introductions and generally supporting our business. They have been mainly supporting the direction I am taking with Supliful and 100% trust my judgment.

– Mārtiņš Lasmanis, Co-Founder and CEO at Supliful

Where To Next?

The mentioned Andrej Petrus is ZAKA VC’s head of investment committee. He points out two factors that led the firm to the decision to double down on early stage investing and increase its capital base. The first one is the strong disbalance between demand and supply of early-stage funding worldwide, compared to the peak in 2021: scarce capital for an increasing number of newly founded startups.

‘The second and more exciting factor is a new technology paradigm. Advancements in AI are opening new, previously non-viable business cases across all sectors. Analog to the mobile and cloud era, we believe that current years will create new, category-defining future decacorns in the AI space,’ Mr Petrus states.

‘AI will influence all segments of our lives – education, the way we work, how we spend our time and entertain ourselves. At the same time, AI rapidly decreases costs and increases efficiency when it comes to development and usage of new products and tools. We believe that this new technological shift will generate a couple of generational companies with trillion-valuations,’ Dr Kasper continues.

The new ZAKA VC Fund I sized EUR 15M is now starting with a EUR 10.5M first closing in June 2024 with a minimum LP ticket of EUR 130K. With this capital at hand, the fund plans to remain agnostic when it comes to B2B and B2B2C software solutions and, naturally, look closely at the application of AI across various industries. ZAKA VC also intends to stay involved in the health and biotech industry in which it has already built up a strong portfolio of innovative companies.

Geographically, ZAKA VC will continue prioritizing its home region, as well as founders of Pre-Seed- and Seed-stage startups with CEE roots in other EU countries and in the US.

‘The US ecosystem remains in our interest, and we plan to enhance our presence there. It produces highly competent and motivated founders and offers a huge market to conquer. This is why the investment returns are extremely compelling, despite higher valuations compared to the CEE region,’ Dr Kasper states.

Even though the ZAKA VC team admits to realizing that they might not become champions from day one, they are very eager to learn and even nurture the culture of constructive failure.

‘Every experience – may it be positive or negative – moves us a few huge leaps further,’ Dr Kaspar concludes.