- DecisionRules raised EUR 1.6M to expand globally and scale its no-code decision automation platform
- Used by industries like finance and logistics for tasks like fraud detection and pricing, the platform empowers non-technical users to manage business rules without IT involvement
- Future plans include accelerated overseas expansion, AI enhancements, a rule marketplace, and ultra-fast edge decision processing
DecisionRules is a Prague-based cloud-native no-code B2B SaaS platform for automating business rules. This May, they announced their Seed round of investment, amounting EUR 1.6M. The well-known Czech VC fund Lighthouse Ventures (invested in Outfindo, among others) led the round, and other participants included Czech Founders VC, BD Partners (invested in Elin.ai, among others), Chilli Ventures, alongside Ory Weihs of Team Odeon and Michael Rostock-Poplar of VICf.cz.
The Need for Business Rules Automation and the Founders’ ‘Aha’ Moment
Václav Kandrnal, Co-Founder and CEO at DecisionRules
Business rules are structured logic for making consistent, automated decisions—like approving loans, detecting fraud, or applying discounts. Traditionally, this required complex, expensive Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) built for large enterprises with IT support. While BRMS platforms help define and manage decision logic, legacy solutions often involve long deployments, high costs, and heavy technical input. As a result, many SMEs have struggled to adopt decision automation, missing out on its potential benefits due to these barriers.
The startup’s co-founders Václav Kandrnal (CEO) and Petr Lev (CTO) come from deep inside the enterprise trenches. Mr Kandrnal was building scalable, high-performance systems, Mr Lev was leading architecture and automation initiatives, and both kept stumbling into the same bottleneck: decision logic buried in code, nearly impossible to update without dev cycles and risk.
The ‘aha moment’ came to the co-founders when they realized how much time teams wasted translating business rules into tech requirements and how often the logic drifted from what the business actually needed. They were convinced that the solution for the future had to be faster, smarter, and radically more accessible.
Technology Shift and Market Potential
Michal Zálešák, Managing Partner at Lighthouse Venture
‘Legacy rule engines were bloated and hard to use. Developers hardcoded rules because that’s what the stack allowed. The no-code wave changed that. APIs, containerization, low-code tools, cloud — they made it possible to reimagine what decision automation could be,’ Mr Kandrnal recalls.
Briefly put, the need for business rules automation existed, but the right approach didn’t. The tech stack wasn’t ready—and the mindset wasn’t either, until relatively recently. Having the technical depth and product mindset to make that happen, the two co-founders built DecisionRules.
‘The DecisionRules team have been building in this space for years before founding the startup. With the right mix of expertise and ambition, they’re poised to, not only scale the product in the BRMS market, but also shape the future of Decision Intelligence and Intelligent Automation,’ Lighthouse Ventures’ managing partner Michal Zálešák comments.
Milestones and Challenges
Jan Hergeth Posvar, Head of Sales and Marketing at DecisionRules
Since 2021, the team hit several key milestones—from writing its first lines of code and launching an MVP with early pilot clients to finding product-market fit in 2022, along with releasing its SaaS and Docker versions. The company scaled rapidly through 2023 and 2024, expanding into new regions, integrating with major platforms, and onboarding high-profile clients.
‘There’s been no shortage of challenges—building a flexible, lightning-fast rule engine is not trivial. The bigger hurdle was changing how teams think about decision logic. Helping them break free from hardcoded assumptions has been half the mission,’ DecisionRules’ head of sales and marketing Jan Hergeth Posvar tells ITKeyMedia.
Product Capabilities and Client Impact
DecisionRules offers a cloud-native SaaS platform that makes rule management affordable and accessible for businesses of all sizes. Designed for non-technical users, it allows teams to create, edit, and deploy rules in real time—without IT support. The platform easily integrates via API and scales with business growth. Unlike legacy systems that used to require long implementations and developer resources, DecisionRules enables fast, cost-effective automation. Key features include drag-and-drop rule creation, real-time validation and version control,—all designed to empower business users with complete control over decision logic.
‘Every business runs on decisions: Pricing, approvals, routing, compliance, etc. Most of these decisions can be automated—but only if your logic is clear, testable, and connected to your systems. Our Intelligent Automated Space is where that happens. It’s a digital workspace where you define rules in plain language, test scenarios, and connect them to your apps via API. It’s fast, controlled, and business-friendly. The win is taking decisions out of black-box code and putting them into a living, transparent system. That’s how businesses move faster—and smarter,’ Mr Kandrnal explains.
‘The relatively small DecisionRules team managed to deliver their service to a relevant number of clients in real time and turn them into active users,’ Chilli Ventures’ managing partner Jan Mareček notes.
Jan Mareček, Managing Partner at Chilli Ventures
‘Industries that live and breathe rules—think banking, insurance, logistics, e-commerce, public sector—are ideal fits for us. They have high-volume, high-stakes decisions that change constantly. Think credit scoring, fraud checks, discount engines, claims routing. These teams need control, speed, and visibility. We give them all three. It’s not that other industries can’t benefit. But where rules are business-critical and compliance-driven, the value shows up fast,’ the CEO continues.
DecisionRules platform is already used worldwide across the mentioned industries for tasks such as fraud detection, pricing, and risk management. Enterprise customers include Accenture, Boohoo, WizzAir, Wolford, and more. The platform helps them streamline operations and reduce dependency on IT teams.
‘DecisionRules are tackling a massive, overlooked market with a product that’s not just smarter, but actually easy to use for the people who need it most. Add to that a sharp, driven team with global ambitions, and it’s clear this is a company with the potential to transform how decisions get made across industries,’ BD Partners’ founding partner Jean-Pascal Duvieusart states.
Looking Ahead: Expansions and More
Jean-Pascal Duvieusart, Founding Partner at BD Partners
Mr Kandrnal outlines DecisionRules’ plans in view of the latest investment. Globally, the company is expanding with new regional teams and partner channels in the USA, UK, and LatAm, while enhancing localized onboarding and support. For regulated markets, it will offer private cloud and air-gapped deployments. On the product front, the AI Assistant will evolve beyond Beta, adding explainability, optimization, and guided authoring. New analytics capabilities will include rule insights, decision traceability, and simulation tools. Additional integrations like Kafka and SAP are on the way, along with low-latency processing and multi-org features to support large-scale enterprise governance.
Czech Founders VC’s managing partner Vaclav Pavlecka and his firm believe that DecisionRules are perfectly positioned to break into the US and other markets, and shares their excitement at the opportunity to support this journey.
Vaclav Pavlecka, Managing Partner at Czech Founders VC
‘Vašek, Petr, and their team from eppTec have spent years building mission-critical rule engines, and now they’ve channelled that experience into a frictionless SaaS. The result? A platform already trusted by banks, insurers, and e-commerce players to replace hard-coded logic with a visual interface that a business analyst can tweak in minutes,’ he notes.
More ambitious plans include launching a Rule Marketplace with shareable templates and industry-ready logic, introducing collaborative authoring tools for large, distributed teams, and delivering ultra-fast decision execution tailored for edge cases in fintech, supply chain, and IoT environments.
Accessible business rules automation enables organizations to make consistent, fast decisions without relying heavily on IT. It streamlines processes like pricing, fraud detection, and compliance, improving agility and accuracy. As industries face rapid change, automating decision logic is essential for staying competitive and adaptable.
Kostiantyn is a freelance writer from Crimea but based in Lviv. He loves writing about IT and high tech because those topics are always upbeat and he’s an inherent optimist!
