People of Prague — Stories and Interviews

Vít Schubert, founder of the consulting firm Unicorn Attacts, helps owners and managers scale their businesses and avoid fatal mistakes. His firm's motto is “Don't die stupid.” In an interview with Forbes, he explained w...

Zuzana Švecová has headed the Czech branch of the American technology giant Cisco for three years and has been climbing the company’s career ladder for 13. In an interview with Forbes, she says Czechia was not digitally ...

Brno-based company Tymbe is working with the Czech Chamber of Commerce on a “Labor Mobility Portal,” an app meant to make hiring workers from the Philippines simpler and faster. The process now takes about six months and...

Zdeněk Cendra, the 16th richest Czech and founder of the tech company CDN77, is entering the real estate market under the Keepers brand: the new firm is buying historic apartment buildings in central Prague, mainly in Vi...

Martin Frývaldský, CEO of the Czech studio Warhorse, the maker of Kingdom Come, says the team is working on a Lord of the Rings project in parallel with a new game set in the Kingdom Come world. According to him, it will...

The Czech group Actum Digital is turning thirty: a studio that began in a basement with no windows and no phone now helps Czech and global companies change their business with technology and data. CEO and majority owner ...

René Bystroň, a Yale graduate with Czech roots, has sold his US startup DeltaGen just two and a half years after founding it. The buyer is another American company, Worker.ai, backed among others by billionaire Ratmir Ti...

Daniel Beneš, chief executive of the energy group ČEZ, is leaving all leadership posts at the Confederation of Industry and Transport of the Czech Republic. The decision takes effect on December 31, 2026: he sent a forma...

In grocery retail, Radek Hovorka is a rare case. People at the top of retail usually grew up in the industry, but the Penny Market chief has had a far more varied path: consulting at PwC, the investment group J&T, th...

Groupon, the American discount coupon giant that Czech billionaires Dušan Šenkypl and Jan Barta are working to rescue, has fallen short of investors' expectations. Weak quarterly results and a lowered full-year forecast ...

Czech medical startup Kardi Ai has raised 130 million crowns in a Series A round, the largest round to date for a Czech medical technology startup. With the round closed, the company is valued at 600 million crowns, almo...

Czechoslovak Group (CSG), the defense group of the richest Czech, Michal Strnad, disappointed analysts in the third quarter: revenue came to €1.51 billion, down 12% year on year. The company’s shares reacted by falling 1...

Petr Paksi, founder of the Czech company JAP Future, received three offers to buy his business, all worth upper hundreds of millions of crowns, and accepted none. Two of the three offers came from abroad, but the entrepr...

Czech executive Petra Růžičková heads the Chinese brands Omoda and Jaecoo in Czechia, and in a little over a year she has made them the most successful Chinese car marques in the country. More than 5,000 cars from the pa...

Venture investor Jan Barta, chief investment strategist of the hedge fund arm of the Czech group Pale Fire Capital, has raised the group’s stake in the American education platform Coursera to 14.7%, making Pale Fire the ...

The owner of Prague's SaSaZu restaurant, Avihai Hadida, has invested in a new project together with the well-known Israeli chef Meir Adoni. The restaurant Samna, whose cuisine has already succeeded in New York, is openin...

Hedepy co-founder and CEO Lukáš Krčil has announced new funding: the investment company Orbit Capital has provided the Czech company with nearly 100 million crowns in the form of a loan. The money will go toward new inve...

Výstaviště Praha chairman Tomáš Hýbl told Forbes how the renovated Industrial Palace on the Prague exhibition grounds in Holešovice will live on: there will be fewer trade fairs in the old format here, and the focus is o...

Businessman Jaroslav Havel has become the majority owner of the investment company Cyrrus. Through his One family office Capital vehicle he raised his stake to 63 percent. The new platform for funds aimed at qualified in...

Billionaire Tomáš Čupr, founder and CEO of the Rohlik group, is considering taking the company public exclusively on the Prague Stock Exchange. He said so in an interview with Bloomberg. The company is already selecting ...

The Portuguese chain Element Gyms has opened almost twenty gyms in Czechia in two years and attracted more than 24,000 active members. That is only the warm-up: Bernardo Rocha Novo, CEO of the parent company SC Fitness, ...

The J&T investment group is strengthening its partnership with Czech entrepreneur Jiří Šmejc: J&T Arch II, a fund for qualified investors, has acquired about 8% of Emma Alpha Holding Limited, the main investment platform...

Miroslav Rech, CEO of MultiSport Benefit, told the Forbes Lepší Česko conference how, over ten years, sport as an employee benefit has gone from a pleasant extra to a tool that directly affects company profit. When he jo...

Jan Fabini, 28, founder of the designer cookware brand that bears his name, has taken his company offline for the first time: the first brick-and-mortar point of sale has opened in Prague. Until now, the business was bui...

Vít Horký, founder of the venture fund United Founders, is convinced that Europe still has a chance to play in the top league. To do so, it must stop underestimating itself and create conditions in which successful Europ...

The family-run Raječek Farm on the edge of Brno grows hundreds of tons of premium vegetables every year, using smart technology, artificial intelligence and a sharp-eyed robot. Matěj Sklenář is developing the farm togeth...

The energy group LEAG, controlled by Daniel Křetínský’s EP Group, has won the largest share of a German tender for building backup power plants. It is one of the most significant orders for stabilising Germany’s energy s...

Czech police are continuing to check suspicions of large-scale tax fraud at casinos formerly owned and run by businessman Leon Zukernik. The newspaper Hospodářské noviny has linked the case to the company King’s Entertai...

Jiří Koleňák, head of Newton University Group, warns that when companies make strong specialists managers without preparation, they risk losing both the expert and the money invested in the new role. In his words, manage...

Rastislav Havran, CEO of the Uniqa financial house, warned at Forbes’ “Best Czechia” conference that Czechs’ sense of security and stability is declining, and that this is already affecting the economy, the birth rate an...

Iva Welker heads the VML and Ogilvy agencies in Czechia, part of the global WPP holding: 450 employees and revenue of more than 1.2 billion crowns last year. She never set out to become CEO, but today she runs the strong...

Jiří Rösner, CEO of the Jungheinrich plant in Chomutov, has built the world’s most modern forklift factory in Chomutov. The Czech operation of Germany’s Jungheinrich group has grown by more than one hundred percent a yea...

Czech investor František Bostl, founder of the Starteepo investment group, has made a big bet on the comeback of the legendary Xerox brand. But after the third-quarter results, that bet took a heavy blow: since his first...

Czech billionaire Zbyněk Frolík, founder of the hospital bed maker Linet, handed operational management of the company to Tomáš Kolář in 2019, and it is one of the most successful examples of generational change in a Cze...

Lipoelastic, a Czech family company owned by the Hradil family that makes specialist compression garments for plastic surgery patients, is changing hands: a majority stake is going to Simona Kijonková’s JSK Investments f...

Simona Kijonková's fund JSK Investments is acquiring a controlling stake in the Czech company Lipoelastic, which makes compression garments for patients after aesthetic surgery and other customers. According to CzechCrun...

About six years ago, while discussing the renovation of residential buildings with Real Luxembourg founder Radek Slabihoud, Tomáš Hrec was sure that everything in Prague had already been refurbished. Inspections from the...

Robert Sekera, founder of the development group RS Group, believes Czechia lacks courage and a willingness to take risks. At the Forbes conference “Lepší Česko” (“A Better Czechia”) in Karlovy Vary, he pointed to James B...

Brno entrepreneurs Iveta and Rolf Steiner are betting on something many people have long forgotten: good sleep is an investment, just like education or technology. Through their brand Polštáře & Peřiny CZ, they are bring...

In just three years, the development company Svoboda & Prucha has delivered fourteen residential projects worth a combined 15 billion crowns. One of its co-founders, Ondřej Prucha, told the Forbes conference in Karlovy V...

When orders pile up, revenue grows and the company is hiring, that is precisely the moment for business owners to be on their guard. So said Pavla Vypěrová, a board member of the insurance and brokerage group Respect Gro...

Hailey Bieber, founder of the beauty brand Rhode, which she sold to e.l.f. Beauty for $1 billion, has reached the Czech market: within a few days, both Rhode cosmetics and a Gap jeans collection created with her appeared...

Jan Králík heads the Czech company ABS Jets, which operates private aircraft for wealthy clients and charters out others; by his account, the firm’s revenue exceeds four billion crowns. In a podcast from the Forbes Top C...

Czech billionaire Michal Strnad has offered about 30 billion euros (roughly 730 billion crowns) for Delfin, the Luxembourg holding that manages the legacy of the late Italian entrepreneur Leonardo Del Vecchio, founder of...

The owner of Brano Group, Pavel Juříček, who recently turned 70, has spent ten years preparing his son Václav to take over the business. The company, with a turnover of around six billion crowns, is passing to its heir, ...

Entrepreneur Ondřej Vlček, who made his fortune selling shares in the antivirus company Avast, and his wife Katarina have received the Medal of Merit for charity and volunteering from President Petr Pavel. The ceremony t...

Tomáš Karpíšek, founder of the Ambiente restaurant group, has received the Medal of Merit from President Petr Pavel for his contribution to the economy. The award was presented on Wednesday, 28 October, as the state's re...

Jakub Kodr, chief executive of the Czech arm of developer CTP, believes Czechia has everything it needs to attract investors, except an authority willing to fight for them. Speaking at the Forbes “Best Czechia” conferenc...

Twenty-six-year-old Czech Adam Čtverák has traveled from a school desk in Tišnov through Stanford to Silicon Valley, where he handles government affairs. Today he works at the startup Minerva Humanoids, which teaches rob...

The head of Microsoft in Czechia, Michal Stachnik, believes Czech public administration is lagging in adopting artificial intelligence not because it lacks geniuses, but because ordinary civil servants do not know how to...

Jana Kotalíková spent more than ten years alongside former prime minister Petr Fiala: nearly eight as spokeswoman for the ODS party, then as head of the Government Office. After last year's parliamentary elections she mo...

Social media advertising specialist Honza Bartos has helped companies invest more than two billion crowns in Facebook and Instagram ads. His main advice to online store owners: the success of campaigns has long depended ...

The Brno startup Meveri grows meat in a test tube, and its founder Roman Laus expects Czechia to soon allow tastings of such a product. According to him, by the end of the year the country will become the second in Europ...

Věra Komárová, who has shaped the face of the cosmetics brand Dermacol for more than twenty years, is leaving her post as marketing director. Her dismissal coincides with a conflict with her husband Vladimír Komár, the c...

The couple František and Michala Vašíček founded their own premium supplement brand, Nodzono, because they themselves were lost in the huge choice of vitamins. They put a few million euros of their own money into the pro...

The Czech investment group V-Sharp, led by entrepreneur Michal Menšík, will acquire a 25 percent stake in Innovation Lab, the company that runs the Eat Smart project. The project came about through a collaboration betwee...

Leoš Anderle, longtime chief executive of developer Sekyra Group, is leading the largest construction project in Prague since the revolution: Smíchov City. At peak load, the site will turn over 900 million crowns a month...

Alina Janovská and Pavel Vojtík, the founders of the Czech bag brand Loro Oro, are ending the business after nine years. Only a few months ago, they were planning to expand into foreign markets and were in talks with a s...

Martin Stibor, CEO of the Czech investment platform Bondster, explains why private credit is becoming one of the fastest-growing segments of investing worldwide. Bondster is among the pioneers of this approach for retail...

Pavel Rzhegak, one of the key people at Direct, has reopened Jim Collins’s book Good to Great after more than ten years. Together with his team, he wants to use its principles to plan the company’s next stage of growth.H...