Jan Beránek ditched his Prague ad agency to build AI agents

Czech entrepreneur Jan Beránek, who spent ten years living in San Francisco, made a bet on AI agents back in early 2023 — well before the mass hype around ChatGPT — and gradually wound down his successful agency U+, which had a turnover of almost a quarter of a billion crowns, to build a new product startup called FifthRow.

Beránek's story is a textbook case of entrepreneurial persistence. It all started modestly: at 14 he met an older colleague and the two of them began building their first websites together. The company — then still called Usertech — had to be formally registered because of a single invoice for 20,000 crowns: the client, ČSAD Ostrava, refused to work with freelancers and demanded a proper legal entity.

As the business grew, Beránek moved from Ostrava to Prague, and the company managed to catch the wave of tech outsourcing in time — starting around 2010, when advertising agencies realized marketing was no longer just about television and billboards. Usertech, which later grew into the agency U+, began working with players such as Havas, Leo Burnett and the innovation studio Creative Dock.

Beránek's original goal was to break into the American market, and he succeeded: physically moving to Silicon Valley helped him overcome his inner self-doubt, and an invitation to the Google Accelerator confirmed the quality of his work. The company shifted from building products for startups to serving corporate clients with far bigger budgets — a model that worked especially well between 2019 and 2023. In total, U+ helped launch 120 companies in the US with a combined value of more than two billion dollars.

Despite the impressive financial results, Beránek admits: “I was earning noticeably more than the developers, but I wasn't doing anything nearly as cool.” That feeling is what pushed him toward a radical pivot — he cut his team down to a tenth of its former size and focused on a new venture under the brand FifthRow, which uses AI agents to automate the work of consultants.

Today FifthRow already generates revenue of more than 50 million crowns and remains profitable without outside investors. According to Beránek himself, his current work brings him far more satisfaction, though it also demands much more energy — building a product startup from scratch after fifteen years in the agency business turned out to be harder than he expected.