Shoptet buys Czech AI startup Jarabot after its billion-crown sale

Shoptet, whose platform powers more than 45,000 online shops, is buying the young Czech company Jarabot, which develops AI-based chatbots, voice bots and e-mail bots. It is the first deal Shoptet has made on its own since its billion-crown sale to the Belgian group Team.blue. The parties did not disclose the price; CzechCrunch estimates it at tens of millions of crowns.

Shoptet’s new course is now led by Jan Hospodka, formerly its chief operating officer. His tasks include integrating Team.blue’s know-how and driving innovation in AI. Under him the company wants to focus on “shopping with AI”, and the acquisition of Jarabot is a logical continuation of that line. According to Hospodka, merchants need to save time, cope with peak loads and answer customers faster. “Jarabot brings to our ecosystem precisely the layer of AI-based automation that will help small and large online shops grow without immediately having to inflate their headcount,” he says.

Context of the deal. Team.blue bought Shoptet from the entrepreneur Ondřej Tomek in 2025. The sum was not officially announced, but the market talks of billions of crowns. The Belgian group, formed in 2019 through the merger of Combell, TransIP and Register, now serves more than 3.3 million companies in 22 European countries. It has bought up assets in Czechia before: after 2020 it took Webnode, Active24 and Websupport, in December 2025 it added the AI startup Macaly, and this year the company Imper of the entrepreneur Tomáš Berger (Saleskit, Leady and Merk).

What Shoptet gets. Once the deal closes, Jarabot will gradually be built into Shoptet’s product line. Merchants are promised automatic handling of repetitive questions, faster support response and a calm passage through seasonal peaks. Jarabot will remain an independent brand and will keep selling its solution outside Shoptet too.

Shoptet in numbers. The platform hosts tens of thousands of small and medium-sized online merchants whose shops process 43 million orders worth CZK 91 billion a year. Shoptet’s own revenue last year, according to the company, was CZK 900 million (+25% from CZK 718 million a year earlier). Net profit for the year before last was CZK 140 million; there is no data yet for the past year.

What Jarabot is. The firm officially appeared only at the start of last year. It is owned by three founders: Jan Štěrba and Martin Baráš with 35% each, and commercial director Marek Duda with 30%. Štěrba also has the development studio DevGroot, Duda owns the small companies E-commerce Tools and Digital Technology, and Baráš previously developed the now-bankrupt crypto project Cryptelo. Jarabot does not yet disclose its revenue.

Jarabot’s software serves phone, e-mail, web chat, social networks, WhatsApp and marketplaces, and besides bots it offers an AI shopping assistant and AI search. The company says up to 75% of enquiries are resolved automatically. Its clients include Heureka, 4camping, Knihy Dobrovský, Pneumatiky.cz and, outside e-commerce, Skip Pay, Raynet and Smartemailing. Jarabot offered integration with Shoptet and Shopify even before the deal.

The company also works with the public sector: for the town of Říčany it first tested a voice bot and a chatbot, and then took over operating the AI voice bot. Operator licences start from CZK 420 a month on the price list, AI interactions are charged by volume, and deploying an AI chat costs at least CZK 50,000.

According to Duda, Jarabot came about because the AI boom outpaced the capabilities of old customer-support tools, which without deep AI integration could not cope with customer requests. The alliance with Shoptet should open the way to a far wider circle of merchants.