Overview

Credo Ventures is a venture capital firm that seeks to invest in seed and early-stage companies in Central and Eastern Europe. The firm focuses on start-ups in the technology sector, typically investing between €50 K and €10 M in seed and Series A rounds. Credo Ventures looks to partner with outstanding technology founders from Central Europe with a bold vision to achieve their global ambitions. The firm has €170 M total assets under management (50% seed investments, 30% Series A investments, and 20% series B investments).

Brief History

Credo Ventures was founded in the Czech Republic in 2009 by Jan Habermann and Ondrej Bartos. As of September 2022, the venture capital firm has since invested in 93 start-ups, the most successful being Romanian-founded unicorn UiPath. The company has also made eleven exits, most notably the sales of Cognitive Security (advanced cyber threat detection) to Cisco Systems, Apiary (API design stack for developers) to Oracle and Brainient (design and deliver interactive campaigns) to Teads.tv.

Geographically

Credo Ventures was one of the first Anglo-Saxon mindset venture capital firms in Central Europe and supports entrepreneurs across Central Europe. The firm is headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, with a second location in Menlo Park, San Francisco. Ondrej Bartos, co-founder of Credo Ventures believes that start-ups should be where the big markets and most customers are, namely the United States, Asia, and Western Europe. With that, Credo Ventures has witnessed the start-up ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe grow over the past ten years, with numbers of incoming business plans increasing by 400%.

Significant Investments

Credo Ventures has successfully led 38 investments, with a recent investment in Better Stack, who raised $18.6 M in Series A round, as well as the healthcare facility digitization software, SurgLogs, and tenant management & experience platform, Spaceflow. Additional notable investments include the unicorn UiPath, the high-engagement gaming platform GAMEE which was eventually acquired by Animoca Brands, and Displate, the global online marketplace for metallic posters.

Credo Ventures in the News

In October 2021, EU-Startups published an article about the start-up, Resistant AI, raising €14.28 M Series A funding, naming Credo Ventures along with GV and Index Ventures as key investors for this round. The Czech Republic based AI and machine learning security company is a start-up that protects financial services from fraud, financial crime, and manipulation. This followed the start-up’s previous mention in an article titled “10 promising start-ups from the Czech Republic to watch in 2021”. EU-Startups also listed one of Credo Ventures other start-ups, Signall, in “10 Hungarian start-ups to look out for in 2019”. The same website published another article in April 2022 reporting the €7 M the Warsaw-based Mindgram successfully secured in one of the biggest seed rounds related to mental health in Europe. The fund round was led by Credo Ventures, with the participation of other venture capitals, as well as angel investors. The article quotes Guillaume Fournier, Partner at Credo Ventures, saying how impressed the firm was by the quality of execution in addressing mental health issues in the workplace.