How a small Czech backpack brand became an AI-native firm

Jan Boruta, co-founder of the investment group Leverage, has described how a small Czech backpack and bag brand, Playbag, with annual revenue of around 7 million crowns, turned into an internally fully automated business thanks to artificial intelligence. According to the entrepreneur, it was vibe coding and AI agents that let the company cut costs by tens of percent and build processes that until recently would have required hiring many employees.

Leverage's story began when its founders, at the age of 18, mortgaged their parents' house to raise capital for investment. Today the group manages a portfolio of companies worth more than 1.5 billion crowns, including Liftago, Aukro, Purple Technology, Luigi's Box, FérMakléři and NutritionPro. Three years ago the investors, who had traditionally backed internet businesses, made an unexpected move — buying a controlling stake in the small fashion brand Playbag.

“From the outside it's an ordinary Czech fashion brand. But inside we're building an AI-native company, where every task is designed to take less time next time, or to be fully automated,” explains the 35-year-old Boruta. He says Leverage invested in Playbag not because of its scale, but because the team liked the products and wanted to try working with something tangible. “And it ended up drawing me in far more than I expected,” he admits.

When Leverage took on the project, it turned out that founder Aleš Loch had been looking for investors for a tiny company that spent only a few thousand crowns a month on marketing. The brand didn't even have an accurate calculation of its margins or production costs. Boruta's team first “cleaned up” the business: it stopped producing and selling unprofitable items, dropped the commission model in the B2B segment — where a million crowns' worth of stock simply sat unmoved — and sold off the remaining inventory.

Then came the scaling stage: one leather backpack that used to sell just eight units a year, after some tweaks, began selling 500–600 units annually. The company gradually returned to the B2B segment too, but this time with a well-thought-out business model.

Boruta admits that at the start of the year he barely understood tools like Claude Code, yet today they are used to build processes that not long ago would have required significant resources and staff. Thanks to this transformation, he says, Playbag has become a fully self-sufficient business: “Now, even if we don't grow at all, the company is completely stable and self-reliant.” The entrepreneur himself sees potential for the brand to grow at least tenfold in Czechia.