Czech billionaire Ondřej Tomek invests in Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin

Czech investor Ondřej Tomek, who made his fortune selling the Centrum.cz web portal, has gained access alongside his partners to private investment in Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin for the first time. The funding round proved enormous: demand outstripped supply by nearly 15 times, and the company is now valued at $140 billion (over 3 trillion crowns).

Until now, Blue Origin had been financed almost entirely out of Bezos’s own pocket — since founding the company in 2000, he has poured in roughly $30 billion raised from selling Amazon shares. But the new round brought in outside investors for the first time: Amazon’s founder covered only about a fifth of the total, while the rest was subscribed by private individuals, including a group of Czechs led by Tomek.

“For the first time in our investing history, we became direct participants in a private placement so oversubscribed that fifteen buyers were competing for every dollar,” Tomek wrote on X. According to him, investors were selected by the issue’s organizer together with Bezos himself, with reputation and the size of the offered sum serving as the deciding factors — gaining a stake in a company that isn’t publicly traded was extremely difficult.

Tomek is not disclosing the size of his investment, citing an agreement among investors not to reveal deal details. The businessman manages his money through private fund structures closed to outside participants; his well-known brand Impulse Capital is indirectly linked to the Blue Origin investment.

After selling Centrum.cz in 2007, Tomek began investing in stocks and startups, including Shoptet (sold last year for billions of crowns), Kiwi.com, Audioteka, Safetica and Dataddo. About six years ago, he and his partners decided to gradually move away from SaaS software services and focus on space, data and artificial intelligence. Today, he says, they hold sizeable stakes in Nebius, Blue Origin, SpaceX, AST SpaceMobile and other companies in these industries, and the list keeps growing.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the current Blue Origin round has already raised $10 billion (215 billion crowns), with the latest $2 billion belonging to this stage. The company has about 15,000 employees, though it carried out major layoffs last year and paused its suborbital tourist flights. Dave Limp has led Blue Origin for nearly three years now and intends to speed up development and order fulfilment, including NASA contracts: the company’s revenue is projected to grow from $800 million last year to $1.4 billion this year and over $30 billion by 2030, driven mainly by rocket launches and satellite services.