Czech billionaire Ondřej Tomek invests in Bezos's Blue Origin

Czech tech investor and billionaire Ondřej Tomek has taken a stake in Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos. It is the first time in Blue Origin's history that the company has opened an investment round to outside capital, and Tomek managed to secure a place among the select group of investors let in.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the round valued Blue Origin at $140 billion, with Bezos himself putting a further $2 billion of his own money into the company. In total, Blue Origin raised $10 billion from Bezos and outside investors — demand was so far ahead of supply that only about one in every fifteen dollars requested was actually allocated.

Tomek, who ranks 19th among the richest Czechs and previously founded the Centrum.cz web portal, admitted the deal was a milestone for him personally. “For the first time in the history of our investment activities, we managed to take part directly in such a heavily oversubscribed private placement,” he wrote on the social network X.

According to the investor, the selection of participants was handled personally by the organizers of the share issue together with Bezos, with a candidate's reputation and the size of the proposed investment serving as the criteria. The two sides agreed not to disclose the details of the deal, however — the list of investors reportedly includes a number of people from the American billionaire's inner circle.

The investment in Blue Origin, whose space program includes development of the New Glenn rocket and lunar landers for NASA missions, fits into a strategy Tomek laid out roughly six years ago: gradually stepping back from the SaaS business to focus on space, data and artificial intelligence. Last year's sale of his stake in Shoptet for $210 million was further confirmation of that course.

Alongside Blue Origin, Tomek's portfolio currently includes Nebius, which builds data centers for AI, as well as SpaceX — Bezos's rival, owned by Elon Musk. The investor makes no secret of his ambition to keep investing in the space and technology sector, saying that “there is no limit.”

Tomek is not the only Czech businessman to have bet on space: even earlier, before the company went public, SpaceX drew investment from Jan Bednář, founder of the logistics startup ShipMonk and one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in Czechia.

By the Around Prague newsroom