Czech investor Jet Investment backs AI startup Hermetiq with $750,000

Brno-based investment firm Jet Investment, owned by billionaire Igor Fajt, has invested $750,000 (about 15.5 million crowns) in the American startup Hermetiq, becoming the largest investor in a $2.2 million funding round — the ninth investment so far by the Jet Venture 1 fund.

Hermetiq tackles a narrow but painful problem for the IT industry: it automates the diagnosis of software build failures. When a code build breaks, only a highly specialized engineer can figure out why — and such engineers are in critically short supply. While that specialist hunts for the bug, the entire development team sits idle.

“We want to build technology that can not only recognize why a build failed, but automatically fix the error too,” explains Hermetiq CEO Jake Newfield.

Jet Venture fund head Kamil Levinský sees the startup as infrastructure for a new era of AI-driven software development. “With the rise of agentic coding, AI is generating far more code, faster than ever, with minimal human oversight,” Levinský says. “Hermetiq is essentially the picks and shovels for the whole coming age of AI development.”

The round also drew well-known names from the tech world: Google’s Vice President of Developer AI Niranjan Tulpule, investor Jason Calacanis through his accelerator LAUNCH, and Gokul Rajaram, who sits on the boards of Pinterest, Coinbase and The Trade Desk.

According to Jet Investment, the Hermetiq platform is already in live use at one of the world’s four leading AI companies, while Etsy is testing it in pilot mode.

Jet Investment is a Czech investment firm founded in 1997 that specializes in Central European industry. Its four funds for qualified investors manage 17 billion crowns in assets. The Jet Venture 1 fund, which focuses on startups in the industrial B2B sector, was launched in 2024.