Spotlight on Entrepreneurship in the Czech Republic

I have been watching a small corner of the technology entrepreneurship universe with great interest. It has come up phenomenally well, and the eco-system is producing wonderful and pragmatic successes.

Six years back, we covered AVG: Freemium, Conversion Rates and More: AVG CEO J.R. Smith.

Three years back, I covered Avast, at the time, a $300M security company focused on the consumer antivirus market. Read: Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler.

In 2016, Avast acquired AVG for $1.3 billion. Currently, Avast is valued at over $3.6 billion as a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange.

In consumer antivirus, the Prague area has become a hotbed of innovation.

Last April, I covered Y Soft, a hardware-software hybrid venture in enterprise print management.

Read: Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Czech Republic: Vaclav Muchna, CEO of Y Soft.

And last week, I interviewed Milos Sochor, who runs Y Soft’s tremendously effective corporate venture fund. You can listen to the podcast here.

From Milos, I learnt that currently there are close to a thousand startups active in that small region. A very small number of these receive venture funding (under 20), and some are going straight from bootstrapping to exit. I think these are all signs of a robust energy level.

I imagine, at least 100-200 of the 1000 are quality companies who could use support and acceleration to become success stories one way or another.

My question is: do you know if there is an entity in that eco-system (accelerator, VC, government, …) that could benefit from collaborating with us in supporting this pool of companies? [Re: Incubator In A Box (IIAB)]