From Teenage Founders to Enterprise Compliance: FaceUp Raises USD 5M Series A, Targets Its Next Growth Phase

• Czech FaceUp evolved from an anti-bullying project into a global Ethics and Compliance platform.
• The company now serves over 3,800 organizations across more than 70 countries
• Trust, anonymous communication, security, and compliance workflows underpin FaceUp’s enterprise proposition
• Following USD 5M investment, FaceUp plans deeper US expansion, broader modules, and operational growth

From a student anti-bullying project to a global compliance platform, the Czech startup FaceUp is now expanding beyond whistleblowing as it targets larger enterprises and deeper growth in the US and other strategic markets. The company started with a problem that its founders knew personally: what happens when someone sees something wrong but doesn’t feel safe reporting it. Nearly a decade after launching an anonymous anti-bullying tool for schools, the Czech company has grown into an international Ethics and Compliance platform, and is now raising the bar for what it wants to become. This May, FaceUp closed its USD 5M Series A round led by Croatian-founded Fil Rouge Capital, bringing the company’s total funding to approximately USD 9M.

Personal Reasons Behind FaceUp 

The story behind that evolution is unusual even by startup standards. Jan Sláma (CEO), David Špunar (COO), and Pavel Ihm (Principal Engineer, ex-CTO) began building businesses while still teenagers, and launched FaceUp in 2017 as a non-profit project aimed at helping students report bullying safely. Today, the company serves more than 3,800 organizations across more than 70 countries.

‘The hardest thing wasn’t really a strategic decision so much as an emotional one,’ Mr Špunar describes the company’s eventual move from its nonprofit roots into commercial B2B software.

For Mr Sláma, the motivation for starting FaceUp was particularly personal. He had previously reported bullying to a teacher himself, only for the experience to backfire on him, and that memory stayed with him when he and his co-founders were looking for a project that was less about business and more about helping people.

‘That stayed with me long after the incident itself,’ Mr Sláma explains why the founders chose to build an anonymous reporting tool rather than rely on the traditional channels available to students.

The three founders already had a history of building companies together before FaceUp existed. Mr Sláma and Mr Špunar met at the age of 13 and started their first business together when they were 14 and 13 respectively, while Mr Ihm later joined Sláma on another venture. By the time FaceUp was founded, the three were only 16–17 years old. Mr Sláma had also been already building mobile apps, running an e-commerce business, and operating a digital agency from a young age, but FaceUp initially represented a deliberate move away from entrepreneurship for its own sake.

The first version of the product launched in March 2017, and more than 100 schools signed up during its first week. Within a few years, the free non-profit platform had reached around 1,800 schools, giving the young founders evidence that the problem they were addressing was much larger than their own experience.

The Moment When Customers Started Asking for More and the Pivot That Preserved the Mission 

Then businesses started approaching them.

‘In 2020 we pivoted to a commercial B2B platform after companies started approaching us on their own, asking for a similar tool for workplace reporting,’ Mr Špunar recalls.

The requests were not simply for another version of the school product: companies wanted employees to be able to report harassment, fraud, suspected criminal activity and other concerns anonymously.

That organic demand changed FaceUp’s trajectory without forcing the company to abandon where it had started. The school product continues to exist independently from the commercial platform, while the business increasingly focuses on corporate Ethics and Compliance, reflecting a shift from a single reporting channel toward a broader system for managing what happens after a concern is raised.

‘The real shift wasn’t about abandoning the mission,’ Mr Špunar tells ITKeyMedia. ‘It was accepting that you need a real business model to keep doing the work that matters.’

From a Reporting Channel to a Compliance Platform 

Today, FaceUp’s core product allows employees to raise concerns anonymously through online reporting, a phone line or voice messages, while companies can manage cases, investigations, and follow-up communication through the platform. The company is now extending that functionality with disclosure management for areas such as conflicts of interest, gifts, and external business activities, as well as policy management, with further modules planned for 2027.

‘FaceUp gives them a safe and easy way to raise a concern, including anonymously. And on the other side, we give companies the tools they need to actually deal with those concerns — investigate what happened, communicate with the person who reported it, and make sure things don’t just get reported, but actually get resolved,’ FaceUp’s CSO Ivana Obstová describes the product in simpler terms. In her view, that distinction is becoming increasingly important as companies move beyond simply having a reporting channel because regulations require one.

Trust and Two-Way Conversation at the Product’s Foundation

Importantly, the company is positioning trust as a central part of its product rather than a secondary feature. FaceUp uses end-to-end encryption, an anonymity architecture designed to strip identifying metadata, two-factor authentication, ISO 27001 certification and annual external penetration testing, while keeping the platform separate from the internal systems employees use under their real identities.

‘Trust is the whole game,’ Mr Špunar emphasizes, arguing that even strong technology will not make a reporting channel useful if employees do not believe they can use it safely.

One of FaceUp’s more distinctive features is two-way anonymous communication, allowing investigators to ask follow-up questions and reporters to provide additional information without revealing their identities. Mr Špunar believes this addresses one of the central reasons why people remain silent in the first place: the fear that reporting will expose them or simply disappear into an organizational process without any feasible outcome. The company also provides customers with communication templates, posters, email copy, and guidelines designed to help leadership establish a credible speak-up culture around the technology.

To Verify That Compliance Actually Works 

The question of whether compliance technology actually changes behavior is becoming increasingly important to FaceUp’s strategy.

‘Compliance can tell you that the process exists,’ Ms Obstová points out. ‘How people use it tells you whether they trust it.’

Rather than looking only at whether cases are processed within required deadlines, FaceUp encourages customers to examine reporting activity, employee awareness, reporter engagement and whether people continue to use the channel when they need it.

The regulatory environment is reinforcing this shift. The EU Whistleblower Directive has now been transposed across all 27 member states, while FaceUp points to the growing expectation in both Europe and the US that companies should be able to demonstrate that their reporting mechanisms actually work. For FaceUp, this is helping move the category away from a basic whistleblowing channel and toward a broader compliance workflow in which reporting, investigation, documentation, and follow-through are connected.

A Hard Lesson in International Expansion

The company’s development did involve some harder lessons about international expansion. After entering South Africa through a local partner, FaceUp discovered that the partner was simultaneously developing a competing product and eventually took local clients with her, prompting the company to change how it approaches new markets.

‘What it really taught us: don’t rely on a single partner when you enter a new market,’ Mr Sláma shares, adding that FaceUp now wants marketing, partners and sales to work together rather than depending on one route into a market.

Going Deeper Rather Than Wider

This experience is relevant to the company’s next phase, which is less about being present in as many countries as possible and more about going deeper in strategically important ones. FaceUp currently operates from Prague, Brno, Charleston in the US, and Dubai, and the company identifies the US as its primary strategic market for more in-depth expansion.

The new funding is intended to support that transition while accelerating the development of the broader platform.

‘The next two years are really about turning FaceUp into a true end-to-end Ethics and Compliance platform, not just adding modules for the sake of it,’ Mr Sláma states.

The company’s internal targets include reaching a customer base of 2,000–3,000, growing annual recurring revenue into the higher millions of dollars and improving operating efficiency, partly through greater use of AI.

Enterprise Potential, Credibility, and Defensibility as Investors See It

JIC has supported the company since its early days, and its new subdivision JIC Ventures made FaceUp the first investment in its portfolio. For these investors, FaceUp’s progress toward the enterprise market is already one of the reasons why the startup has become attractive.

‘Watching a student project grow into a comprehensive solution for safe reporting of unethical conduct and corporate compliance is exactly the kind of story we do this for,’ JIC Ventures’ managing partner Radim Kocourek remarks.

His colleague Miloš Sochor highlights a different milestone: FaceUp’s ability to win business with large corporations operating in highly regulated environments.

‘Getting through the security certifications those institutions require is a real barrier to entry. And they cleared it,’ Mr Sochor adds. For him, the interest from international investors is another indication of the traction FaceUp has built with enterprise customers.

For Fil Rouge Capital, which led the Series A, the company’s credibility in the market was central to the investment case.

‘We believed, credibility being the moat in this segment, having a big four behind you was the essential moat to propel the sales further and move into a land grab strategy with our investment,’ Fil Rouge Capital’s founding partner Julien Coustaury refers to FaceUp’s go-to-market relationship with PwC.

He also points to the company’s customer traction and its founder as reasons for the investment: ‘Last but not least, the founder Jan was extremely impressive in all our exchanges,’ adding that Mr Sláma had already established credibility in the sector and demonstrated a strong drive to build the business further.

Loyal investor Reflex Capital participated in this round as well.

‘It strongly fits our thesis: the founding team is stellar, that is the main thing,’ Reflex Capital’s partner Michal Táborský comments, additionally pointing to what he sees as a more structural form of defensibility: customers can have a reason to deliberately keep their whistleblowing system outside their internal infrastructure in order to preserve privacy and security.

The Numbers Behind the Transformation and the Next Level of Compliance Infrastructure

Such an external position may become increasingly important as FaceUp moves further into enterprise compliance. The company no longer has to prove that anonymous reporting can work. Instead, it is building the broader infrastructure around what happens after somebody speaks up: from investigation and case management to disclosures, policies and eventually a much wider set of compliance workflows.

The transformation has already produced measurable results. FaceUp now says it has processed more than 44,000 reports and covers approximately 1.3 million people, while the company ranked as the second-fastest-growing technology company in the Czech Republic and fourth in Central Europe in Deloitte’s 2025 Technology Fast 50, while also getting ranked #1 in G2’s 2026 whistleblowing category.

For a company that began with three teenagers trying to give students a safer way to report bullying, the current challenge has therefore evolved dramatically from the one they faced in 2017. FaceUp has demonstrated that a socially motivated reporting tool can become a global B2B business. Its next test is whether that foundation can support a much broader platform for the companies that increasingly want to know not only whether employees can speak up, but whether the organization is actually equipped to listen and act.