Who's Actually Writing the First Cheque? Inside Czechia's Venture Capital Bench

The largest fund yet

Credo Ventures, the Prague- and Kraków-based firm founded in 2009 by Ondřej Bartoš, Jan Habermann and Vladislav Jež, closed the first tranche of its fifth flagship fund in the first quarter of this year, raising more than €74 million toward a target that reporting has put as high as $88 million — the largest fund in the firm's history. Fund V is led by a six-partner team and plans to write initial cheques of $1–5 million across roughly 30 companies, maintaining Credo's sector-agnostic, pre-seed-to-seed focus on technical founders from Central and Eastern Europe and the region's diaspora. The firm's track record includes early bets on UiPath, the Romanian-founded robotic-process-automation company that reached a $35 billion valuation at IPO, as well as voice-AI company ElevenLabs and Prague-founded Productboard and Mews — meaning Credo's portfolio now includes at least two of the handful of billion-dollar-plus companies with genuine Czech roots.

Credo is not alone in the field, though it is the most internationally visible. Presto Ventures, investing out of a roughly €30 million second fund with a third in preparation, focuses on deep-tech and defence-adjacent early-stage companies — a sector focus that has become notably more fundable across European venture capital generally over the past two years. Reflex Capital and Day One Capital appear repeatedly as co-investors alongside Credo in later rounds, while KAYA, backed by a regional financial group, runs a roughly €90 million fund spanning fintech to climate tech across Central and Eastern Europe, and Purple Ventures has grown from a €15 million first fund in 2018 to a €40 million second vehicle focused on early-revenue startups with global ambitions.

What the money actually buys

The practical significance of a fund like Credo's Fund V is less about any single startup and more about sustaining the pre-seed and seed stage of the pipeline that later-stage growth investors — the EQT Growths and Tiger Globals that wrote Mews's Series D — depend on having something to invest in years down the line. Czech startups raised €173.1 million in 2023, the most recent year with comparable regional data, placing the country fourth in Eastern Europe by capital raised, with Keboola, IP Fabric and Woltair among the largest individual rounds that year. That places the Czech Republic well behind Poland and Estonia in absolute early-stage capital, even as individual Czech-founded companies have gone on to reach some of the highest valuations to come out of the wider CEE region.

The structural bet

Credo's own framing of its edge is explicitly regional: the firm argues that Central and Eastern Europe remains a fragmented market that is harder for larger international investors to navigate directly, and that a fund with deep local networks and an explicit mandate to write the first institutional cheque — before product, before revenue — captures deal flow that would otherwise go unfunded or get picked up too late by investors based in London, Berlin or San Francisco. That thesis has a reasonably strong track record behind it at this point, but Fund V is also a bet that CEE's supply of genuinely global-ambition technical founders keeps growing at a pace that can absorb an increasingly large amount of pre-seed capital — a bet the next two to three years of Credo-backed companies reaching Series A will start to test.