What's new Summer 2020

New additions to our project portfolio are always big news. In June we announced our investment into Boataround, the booking system for watercraft of all kinds. After we had reached our agreement with the Boataround team at the end of last year, the coronavirus pandemic got us thinking that hardly anyone would be interested in a holiday by the sea this year. In the end, it turned out that boat holidays were in high demand.

New team members at Miton are also big news. We don’t have new members joining very often, so we are very happy when they do. And this past summer we were pleased to welcome Tomáš Jiroušek to the position of investment manager.

And for a final piece of internal news, if you’d like to see what our summer founders’ dinner at the Vinohrady Výčep pub looked like, click here.

Biano has revealed its plans to the media for the first time, announcing its intentions to grow threefold this year. Biano has also launched an image-based furniture search function that will finally help you to compare prices across different retailers. This is the advertising campaign for the new search feature.

When you want to sell your flat, you have essentially two choices. Either you try doing it on your own, or you get help from a real estate agent. Both options can be quite lengthy with uncertain results. Reas is introducing a third option to the Czech market, known as an instant offer in the USA.

GLAMI has expanded to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and released an open-source tool called Cortex Serving Client, which facilitates work with machine learning.

Speaking of expansion, have you noticed how fast Rohlík has been expanding abroad? In Hungary the company is operating as Kifli.hu, in Austria as Gurkerl.at, in Germany as Knuspr.de, and now in Bulgaria as eBag.bg. Rohlík’s founder Tomáš Čupr is being supported in the expansion efforts by many new highly experienced managers.

Donio is about more than doing “good”. Thanks to the new Donio Plus crowdfunding platform, people can set up fundraising drives to start a new business, test consumer interest in a new product, or publish a beautiful book. Donio Plus allows fundraisers to offer prizes to contributors, and just as with the original “doing good” Donio platform, 100% of raised funds go directly to the organizer.

Driveto has emerged from the coronavirus pandemic stronger than before. Thanks to a growing interest from large city dwellers who are concerned about using public transport but don’t want to commit to owning a car long-term, Driveto has reached the milestone of 1,000 vehicles on Czech roads as part of its Driveto Club.

If you are interested in mental wellbeing, we have two more announcements: 

• On Facebook has been created the Psytech CZ group, which is open to anyone interested in the intersection between mental wellbeing, psychedelics, and technology.
• If you are interested in current research into psychedelics, read about the Czech Psychedelic Republic conference that took place on 28 September 2020.

What to read and listen to

• How people decide what to buy lies in the “messy middle” of the purchase journey
• An excellent a16z podcast about building developer relations
• Czechia’s largest online retailer Alza.cz wants to deliver goods by teleport (we told you that teleport is the future)
• Newsletter tiny cfo
• In case you feel you don’t have enough tools for your work…