KAYA enters the new investment phase with a strengthened team. One addition to the general partnership of the fund is a former startup founder Karel Zheng, who has been with KAYA since 2018 except for a period when he ran his own startup. “As a representative of Generation Z, I hope to bring a fresh perspective of someone who “grew up online,” is connected to global communities, and intuitively understands how today’s founders think about product, culture, and impact. We want to be able to recognize emerging trends more quickly within the team without losing the discipline and experience of our senior partners. It is the combination of these generational perspectives that I believe gives KAYA a competitive advantage and will help us find other exceptional companies,” says the new partner.
“The last decade has shown that there is a growing pool of technology talent in Central and Eastern Europe that has contributed to a number of global success stories – and KAYA has been behind many of them for almost fifteen years. We look for founders with big dreams and the courage to go global, and we want to be their first partners and long-term supporters: we enter at an early stage and stay on as the company grows into a truly global, impactful company.” says Tomas Obrtac, one of the four equal partners of the fund. A typical initial investment from KAYA ranges from one to three million Euro. For companies that are on a good path to realizing their potential, the fund keeps a capital reserve for follow-on rounds and through syndication with select investors, it can allocate up to EUR 20 million to a single company.
“Across the CEE region today, we see founders who are no longer just thinking locally. Whether in Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia or Slovenia, we find strong technical teams with the ambition to build global products. That’s why we’ve already expanded our investments beyond the Czech Republic and Poland in our fourth fund and are continuing to do so in our fifth fund. We believe that the most interesting CEE stories are still only emerging,” adds Obrtac. Part of the work is to know where the talent gathers, not only in the countries where the fund invested traditionally, but also in the key hubs of the startup world. The team spends a lot of time on the road, especially in London, San Francisco, Warsaw and Budapest.
KAYA not only invests in technology, but also actively uses it to improve its own operations. Since 2018, it has been developing a data platform that monitors the global startup scene in real time and helps capture early signals from promising companies. It was this digitisation opportunity that brought Vaclav Ryslink, then a student of mathematics and physics, to the team. Today, he is an investor. Thanks to his work, the platform has gradually become an important tool for identifying new opportunities. His technical background also allows him to better lead discussions about more technical aspects of products and thus naturally bridge the gap that can arise between technical founders and investors.
Unicorns and a promising portfolio of companies
KAYA has two unicorns in its portfolio, i.e. startups with a value exceeding one billion dollars. In addition to the Czech Rohlik, it is the Polish Docplanner. The former is a fast-growing European e-grocer, the latter is the world’s leading healthcare booking platform. There is a soon-to-be unicorn too – Poland’s Booksy, which crossed €100 million in revenue last year. Besides Better Stack by Veronika Kolejak and Juraj Masar, other hopefuls are SensibleBio by Miroslav Gasparek and Marian Kupculak, Upheal by Juraj Chrappa and Martin Horvath, TopK by Jergus Lejk and Marek Galovic, E2B by Tomas Valenta and Vaclav Mlejnsky, and Superlinked by Daniel Svonava. Some of the other stars of the current portfolio are Jutro Medical, Yoneda Labs, and ZetaLabs. Currently, KAYA has more than forty-five companies in its portfolio, the value of its holdings in these companies amounts to EUR 350 million.
“The life cycle of a VC fund usually lasts more than ten years, so we already know that our first three funds are delivering exceptional returns. As we launch the fifth generation of funds, we have a good feel for how to right-size the fund, so that it is appropriate for the number of investment opportunities available in the market while at the same time delivering strong returns to investors. We are working with a stable investor base and due to new names having been added, the aggregate interest in the fund was higher than we expected,” adds Tomas Pacinda. He joined KAYA in 2015, and worked, for example, on the boards of Slevomat and Twisto, and more recently Footshop and Upheal. KAYA’s investors include Central European entrepreneurs, repeat founders, as well as multinational funds, major institutions and regional banks.
From the very beginning, KAYA did not specialize in any particular industry or business vertical. “Our goal is to constantly think about the technologies and trends of the future. When we invested in Rohlik, the company was not understood and almost written off by traditional software investors, which we didn’t want to be the case for us. That’s also why we are actively looking at various less traditional VC sectors, such as biotechnology, new materials, healthcare, and others. We consider ourselves ‘generalists’, i.e. a fund that is not tied to any specific domain. We believe that we understand the sentiment of entrepreneurs coming from CEE and we want to support them wherever in the world they may be” says Martin Rajcan, who lives in London and works primarily with founders from CEE located outside of the region. Rajcan has previously worked his way through KKR, angel investing, and helping German software startup Priori Data to a successful exit in 2018 as C-level executive.
Young startups need help with growth and follow-on capital
Fourteen years of experience in the market taught KAYA that young companies need help in two areas in particular. The first area is access to experts who can effectively advise founders on a range of topics. KAYA offers its portfolio companies access to experts who have experience of running their own businesses or building and scaling global companies. This network includes, for example, entrepreneur Tomas Cupr who founded first Czech unicorn Rohlik, AI expert and founder of EquiLibre Technologies Martin Schmid, Juraj Masar and Veronika Kolejak from Better Stack, Michal Valko who worked with Mark Zuckerberg on Llama 3, and Jakub Jurovych who is behind Deepnote.
The second area founders need help with is to secure follow-on investments. As the process of building relationships and trust is a lengthy one, KAYA helps investee companies accelerate discussions with funds whom it knows well and with whom it has co-invested for many years. These investors include, for example, the British-American Index Ventures, the European Creandum and Goldman Sachs, and global funds such as EQT.
