2019 in review
Michala Gregorová
There are several differences from our review of 2017, the last year for which a review was written. First, this review is not as witty as the one for 2017. Second, we didn’t have as large an exit as Slevomat. On the other hand, we have officially welcomed three new members to our family (there were more additions unofficially). And we started to post more information on Twitter, so you should already know everything.
In 2019 we welcomed three players from the real estate and hospitality sectors: Reas, Grason and Qerko.
- Reas helps you sell your apartment or house. It’s the easiest and most reliable way to sell real estate in 2020.
- Grason connects restaurants with tried and tested hospitality staff. If you’re interested in how work will look in the future, Grason is a neat piece of the puzzle.
- Qerko has found an elegant solution for settling bills at restaurants. Instead of waiting for the wait staff to bring your bill, you can scan the QRcode on the table and pay with the Qerko app.
Rossum and Twisto have been a part of our family for a few years. Rossum, which uses AI technology to ‘read’ documents the same way people do, has raised 3.5 million US Dollars in the largest Czech seed funding round to date – investors include us, StartupYard and the British venture capital firms LocalGlobe and SeedCamp.
The fintech startup Twisto, which makes everyday payments easier, has raised 11.5 million Euro in a Series B round. Here Twisto’s CEO Michal Šmída summarises what a big job this was. In addition, Twisto launched the first wave of Apple Pay in Czechia and successfully entered the tough Polish market.
Another big expansion was carried off at the end of the year by the Czech online supermarket Rohlík, which has started to deliver groceries in Budapest under the brand Kifli. The company’s future plans include additional European cities, a significant profit and more developments for even better customer service. To learn more, listen to Rohlík’s boss Tomáš Čupr in a recent Czechcrunch podcast.
With the arrival of the new CEO Pavel Vopařil, there are many things happening at Bonami, the furniture and home décor online retailer with annual sales of more than 40 million Euro. The opening of Bonami’s first collection point is just the beginning.
Driveto, the largest Czech online car retailer, also has a new CEO. The handover from František Peterka to Adam Szabó went smoothly, a proof of which are the 700 cars sold through Driveto Klub.
GLAMI isn’t resting either. This year they‘ve expanded to several new countries and launched visual search (just like the furniture search engine Biano), a materials guide and a sustainable fashion search engine at the domain .eco.
The toughest job this year was getting a group photo for a Czech Forbes cover page. We also revived our website and set up our Instagram account, so we’d have a place to post pictures of all the adorable animals lounging in our offices.
Seeing as we are mostly introverts, we don’t like going places for a chat. But we do want you to know about us, because Miton is a great place, and so we started our own podcast. It’s called Cinkátko and new episodes are cropping up … not at a regular, but at a determined rate.
Sometimes we like to meet in a larger group, like at our spring and fall founders dinners and our May off-site. We also like to invite guests to our Karlín offices, and we promise no video recordings! Last year we hosted Šimon Vostrý, Pavel Zima, Filip Brýdl, Tomáš Havryluk, Jirka and Petr Král, Alžběta Doležalová, Mendel Kaelen and Sebastian James.
We’ve also welcomed Anna to our team and we would love to find more smart people like her. Could it be you?
All the best for 2020, when we turn 20!
And in closing, a nice video from our offices:
Bonus: Monthly summaries
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August and September
October and November
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Of further interest
PangeAI emerges from stealth to democratize access to geospatial data
(press release) A startup founded by Johanna von der Leyen and Marek Miltner at Stanford is changing the way companies and public institutions work with geospatial data. Instead of needing to hire a team of GIS experts, PangeAI agents allow making complex analyses and decisions involving physical infrastructure as easy as typing a prompt. The goal is to make the physical world as searchable and understandable as the digital one.
Every company wants to become more efficient thanks to AI, and almost none succeed. Miton is investing €400k into a startup that wants to fix this.
(press release) Even though companies know very well that AI can significantly increase their efficiency, most never get further than paying for ChatGPT accounts for their employees. It’s not motivation they lack - most fail in the implementation phase. The problem lies in the approach companies take: they treat AI as if it were traditional software. And this is exactly where Bandits comes in, a new project by Jiří Štěpánek, Kryštof Mitka and Miton.
Building an AI startup: Discussion with Tomáš Gogár (Rossum) and Martin Schmid (Equilibre).
The guests of the Miton AI Times event were Tomáš Gogár (co-founder and CEO of Rossum) and Martin Schmid (co-founder and CEO of Equilibre), who joined to discuss the challenges of building an AI startup.