Prague-based ZAKA, a venture capital firm, on Friday, announced the launch of its first regular VC fund at €15M to support early-stage startups in the US and EU.
The venture capital fund aims to invest in pre-seed and seed-staged startups across Europe (predominantly Central Europe, Baltics, UK, DACH) and the US, acting as a co-investor, with the ability to co-lead.
The main investment focus is on B2B software, cross-sectional application of AI in B2B, and biotech and health tech.
“The US ecosystem remains in our interest, and we plan to enhance our presence there. It produces highly competent and motivated founders and offers a huge market to conquer. This is why the investment returns are extremely compelling, despite higher valuations compared to the CEE region,” states Jan Kasper, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of ZAKA.
ZAKA VC: Investing in tech startups
Founded in 2020 by Jan Kasper and Peter Zalesak, ZAKA VC started as a family office investing purely private money in pre-seed and seed startups.
Since then, they have grown into a team of 6 core members, with more than 55 invested companies worldwide in their portfolio and over €11M invested.
Some of the notable investments of ZAKA: ExcepGen, Sensible Biotechnologies, Miros.ai, Supliful, Lime Therapeutics, and Webel.
Back in its beginnings, the VC firm primarily focused on its domestic CEE market but over time, it expanded its presence to the UK and US.
Unlike most CEE-based funds, ZAKA’s focus is to explore and fund the European diaspora in the US, US-based teams, or CEE-based teams with the ambition to scale to the US.
The demand from external investors to co-invest alongside ZAKA led to the creation of its first venture capital fund.
ZAKA VC Fund I sized €15M is now starting with a €10.5M first closing in June 2024 with a minimum LP ticket of €130k.
Andrej Petrus, Head of Investment Committee at ZAKA VC, says, “Two interesting factors led us to the conclusion to double down on early-stage investing in the coming years and to enlarge our capital base. Firstly, there is a strong disbalance between demand and supply of early-stage funding worldwide, compared to the peak in 2021. Capital is scarce but the number of new first-time or repeating founders is increasing. The second and more exciting factor is a new technology paradigm. Advancements in AI are opening new, previously non-viable business cases across all sectors. Analog to the mobile and cloud era, we believe that current years will create new, category defining future decacorns in the AI space.”
