Czech Startups Report

As part of the V4 Startup Survey our institute has implemented the Czech Startups Report 2016. Having created a database of 550 startups, we invited all of them to take part in the survey that ran in the summer of 2016. Moreover, the questionnaire was distributed via Czech incubators, acceleration programs, CzechInvest, and other popular channels for Czech startups, which maintain their own databases.

Based on the replies collected from 140 Czech startups we prepared an analysis of the Czech startup ecosystem. The report offers an overview of the startup founders and CEOs profiles, the business models they apply, and the innovation and export trends as well as the main challenges they face. Below you can find a brief summary; the whole report can be downloaded in English or in Czech. You can also look into the Polish and Slovak survey results.

Czech Startups 2016

  • Nearly 70% of the surveyed startups are in the early stages of development (pre-seed and seed stage), whereas only 15% of them are in the scale-up phase.
  • Slightly above 60% of the startups claim they offer new services or products, and almost 23% of them work on an improvement of an existing service or product.
  • 78% of the Czech startups surveyed have used finances from their own resources. Local business angels or the startup’s network (the so called 3F – friends-family-fools group) financially supported 13% of the surveyed startups.
  • Startups mainly operate in the following fields: SaaS (28%), web services (21%) and mobile software services (17%). Other often chosen areas are: analytics/ business intelligence (16%) and cloud services (12%). Interestingly, around 10% of startups mentioned Internet of Things and education as their fields of activity.
  • The vast majority of companies surveyed are micro-enterprises, employing up to 10 people. More than 65% of them increased their number of employees in the past six months by at least one person.
  • Among the surveyed startups, almost 25% do not export. Only 22% get more than half of their income from abroad.
  • Collaboration with universities and commercial R&D centers is not a common trend  and only a few of the surveyed startups began in academia or research centers. This is also reflected in the areas where the surveyed startups operate – most of them bring in new IT products and services rather than technological solutions.
  • When asked about the biggest internal challenges, the surveyed startups listed human resources (53% of responses) and finances/investments (43%) as the top two.

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