Looking over his career, there’s no doubt about Roček’s fondness for hard numbers: “I’m a data analyst at heart. I love to work with data.” The data definitely seems to love him back: his first company, called Stories.bi and which analyzed business data, was sold to Workday, the HR platform. This gave Roček the means to buy into Presto Ventures’ second fund.
Not that he only invests: for a time, Roček also owned a pub until something many service industry veterans know hit him. “I realized I don’t want to face customers ever again. 10 percent of customers cause 90 percent of the issues, and you have no easy way out to get rid of them.” The choice for B2B ventures flowed naturally from that, probably explaining why the fund focused on those.
Focusing on “peace tech”
With the first two funds closed for investments, Presto’s third fund is aimed at defense and resilience. When asked about this pivot, Roček looks me straight in the eye and asks, “do you think the next five years will be safer than the last five years?” When I answer no, he nods and continues, “we see a lot of threats everywhere, and they are getting more and more hybrid.”
For most investors, dual use is the watchword, so making sure that any innovations developed should have another use case besides military ones. Roček takes a different tack, saying that it’s a “tough topic,” but one that Presto has already formulated a position on: “we are investing in dual use, but we are open even for single-use investments.”
He explains that defense tech needs to become “acceptable” again, not just be put into the corner of gambling, alcohol, or other vices. In his words, “defense needs to actually become ESG. And we can call it peace tech if it helps everyone. Defense tech, peace tech, whatever.”
To get deeper into the world of defense, Presto partnered with Czechoslovak Group (CSG), the local industrial powerhouse that is mostly known for manufacturing munitions and other defense-related materiel. CSG may not be the most obvious choice of partner for a technology fund, but according to Roček, “(CSG) were on their way to investing in tech startups and wanted someone who understands the venture part, so we met, and we clicked.”
As for what is being invested in, it’s “anything which increases the resilience of Europe and Western world in general.” As a result, investments are only being made in companies from NATO countries or those allied to NATO in some way. As a tech fund, the focus is, of course, on innovation, especially “cybersecurity, cyber warfare resilience, anything which helps communication to stay on.” Also included are more sci-fi technologies like quantum computing, lasers, and anything else with “interesting applications.”
Though he won’t go into details on the full portfolio, Roček is willing to talk a little about three investments. These are Vidar, which is working on a solution that can locate projectiles by sound alone, Bavovna AI, which is a navigational module for drones, and BlueQubit, which can simulate quantum computers and allows developers to get quantum ready.
AI naturally also pops up on Roček’s wish list. “AI will be weaponized for sure. I would love to see people creating AI offensive tools and, based on that, create AI defense tools. The end goal is being able to defend ourselves against AI threats.”
A place for Czechia
So far, most investments of the defense fund have been in foreign enterprises. However, according to Roček, there’s definitely a role set aside for Czechia in this new future. “Heck, we have one of the biggest automotive building capacities per capita in the world, maybe even the biggest. A lot of people here are employed in heavy industry. The industrial base is definitely here.”
He continues: “people are smart enough. People are inventive. This is what you can see in only a few nations around Europe. We like hacking things and improvising.” There’s also the question of mentality. “We never fully went the woke way, which a lot of Western countries did. The more woke you go as a nation, the less understanding you have for things like defense. We, with our experience, see it as yet another dogma. And there are still a lot of people here who lived through communism who understand the harm these kinds of dogmas actually cause to people.”
As a result, Roček says, “we are not that happy to hop on any cultural train of this kind. You can even connect it to the German elections (where the right-wing AfD did well, especially in the former East). There are two opinions on the issue. Either it’s a relic of communism and those people still need to learn how to vote, or they can spot bad things happening to the country earlier because of the experience they went through. You can choose.”
When asked what “woke” means, Roček thinks for a second, then answers. “It’s a victimhood mindset. Everybody is oppressed. Everybody is a victim of someone, of something and based on that, you are trying to create a society where everyone is a victim, essentially. In the victim mindset, you are not building anything new. You are not pushing things forward. You just see everyone as a victim, as someone who is oppressed, and you want to correct that instead of creating something meaningful.”
