Czech founder Jiří Diblík quits unicorn Spring Health for AI

Czech entrepreneur Jiří Diblík sold his startup to the American unicorn Spring Health for millions of dollars, only to leave the company barely a year later, walking away from a sizeable chunk of his deferred bonus — so he could go back to building his own projects powered by artificial intelligence.

The 28-year-old Diblík is a well-known figure in Czech business circles: he was the first Czech to win legal emancipation as a minor specifically in order to run a business. Before he even turned twenty, he had already launched, closed and sold several ventures. His biggest success was VOS.Health, a mental-health app he built together with Ondřej Kopecký that was used by four million people worldwide. At the end of 2024 the billion-dollar unicorn Spring Health bought the project for several million dollars.

A standard condition in deals like this is vesting — a requirement that key employees stay with the company for several years to receive their full payout in cash and shares. In Diblík's case the period was three years, but he decided to leave after just one. “There's still a fair amount of money left on the table, but time is far more valuable to me,” he says, without disclosing the exact sum. “I'm 28, I have no children and no major obligations. This is the best stage of life to build something. I wouldn't want to look back one day and realize I spent my best years inside a corporation,” the entrepreneur adds.

While VOS.Health's other co-founder and the rest of the team remain at Spring Health, Diblík decided to go his own way and return to what he has always loved most — building new products. “I have the word Create tattooed on my leg. I've always loved making software. What's happening right now in the world with AI, and how much easier it has become to build programs, feels like a gold rush to me,” he says.

Diblík sees himself as strongest precisely in the early stages of building digital products. He has decided to pool his experience in developing, growing and scaling software under the brand The Bold Apps (TBA) — a structure that is building a portfolio of consumer (B2C) apps while also developing shared infrastructure for all of them. In concept, it resembles a venture studio focused on building companies.

“Once you've solved distribution, monetisation and growth for one app, a large part of the accumulated know-how can be carried over to the next one. I want to build a factory of successful apps,” Diblík explains. According to him, the model has already proven itself not only with VOS.Health, but also with Lively, a project he is building together with his wife.

The hugely popular US app for tracking the female cycle was created by his wife, Bára Diblíková (née Kubínová), drawing on her own experience with hormonal imbalance, with Jiří helping on business strategy from the very start. After leaving Spring Health, he threw himself fully into growing Lively, and today the couple are building it, along with other projects, together under TBA. “A year in, seeing how strong Lively's product-market fit had become, it was clear a big company could grow out of it. Today Lively is part of TBA,” he says. Only four people work full-time at TBA — AI agents handle the rest of the day-to-day operations.