2019 in review

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