Vodafone CEO Della Valle makes a big bet on Czech technology

Margherita Della Valle, CEO of telecom giant Vodafone and the first woman to lead the company in its history, has made Forbes’ list of the world’s fifty most powerful women. In three years at the helm, she has taken the company — with 90,000 employees and 700 million customers — from losses to steady growth, and she is placing a special bet on Czech innovation.

Under her leadership, Vodafone turned from a loss-making business into a profitable one: an operating loss of €0.4 billion in 2024 was followed by an operating profit of €2.8 billion in 2025, on revenue of €40.5 billion. Della Valle joined the company 32 years ago, when it was a small Italian startup with fewer than thirty employees — and she has watched it grow into a global operator.

She started out as the company’s sole marketing person, manually working out where to put mobile towers by drawing coverage maps with colored pencils — specialized mapping software simply didn’t exist yet. According to her, those three albums of original maps are still kept somewhere in Vodafone’s archives.

In an interview with Forbes Czechia, given at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Della Valle spoke about her particular interest in Czech technology development. She came to Czechia to present Vodafone Verify — one of the first tools in Europe able to detect deepfake calls and videos in real time, that is, AI-generated fraudulent clips that look completely realistic.

“The idea completely captivated me. I immediately wrote to our chief technology officer saying I wanted to scale it to other markets,” the Vodafone chief admitted. The technology was developed by Czech AI expert Matyáš Boháček, a Stanford student and a Forbes “30 Under 30” honoree.

Besides Verify, Della Valle has also been impressed by another Czech project — the largest private 5G network for science and research, which Vodafone launched together with Brno University of Technology.

In the company chief’s view, rapidly scaling new technologies is the key to keeping Europe from falling behind the US and Asia in the tech race. “In today’s fast-changing world, we can’t afford to wait. It’s time to stop being afraid of risk and mistakes,” Della Valle urges.