Martin Kadlčík: Czech entrepreneur who sold Kupi.cz to Seznam

Czech entrepreneur Martin Kadlčík rarely appears in the media, but over more than two decades he has built dozens of online projects — from a mobile SMS service with hundreds of thousands of users to the price-comparison service Kupi.cz, a stake in which was eventually bought out in full by internet giant Seznam.

Kadlčík’s path into IT began back in school — he had no computer at home, so the headteacher let him use the school’s computer lab even during the holidays. That’s where he wrote his first business program — a payroll calculation system for teachers. Later, while still a student, he launched the SMS service Mr.X, which had hundreds of thousands of users, developed computer games, founded a hosting company, and ran the electronics store Itek.cz with turnover in the hundreds of millions of crowns. Riding the wave of coupon-site popularity, he also created the SlevyDnes portal, which quickly reached monthly revenue in the millions of crowns.

The flagship project in his portfolio became the supermarket discount-tracking service Kupi.cz, founded in 2012. Two years later Seznam, the largest Czech internet company, invested in it. Today Kupi.cz is among the thirty most visited websites in the country, with more than two million visitors a month. Kadlčík stepped back from running the service operationally several years ago, and last December he finally sold his remaining stake to Seznam. He does not disclose the terms of the deal.

The 42-year-old businessman now describes himself as a serial entrepreneur who “doesn’t know how to do nothing.” He founded his own incubator, through which dozens of projects have passed — some of them running successfully, others sold — while Kadlčík also invests his own money in other people’s startups. Among them is the already-sold kindergarten digitisation service Twigsee and the event-organising platform Eventee.

Last year Kadlčík ran an unusual experiment: he shut himself in his room and, with the help of artificial intelligence, wrote an app in a week, deliberately framing the tasks not as a developer but as a product manager. That’s how the portal AutavČesku.cz came about, combining data from the vehicle registry and the commercial register and offering a premium subscription. According to the entrepreneur, the service already processes hundreds of millions of records in a fast database — a product like this would once have taken months and millions of crowns to build.

“Development has become many times faster and cheaper — whoever doesn’t adapt will eventually die out,” Kadlčík is convinced.

Thanks to years of connections in the online entrepreneur community, all kinds of projects keep landing on his desk — some of which he finances personally or together with syndicates of business angels. At the same time, he admits that classic company management increasingly wears him out: once a business outgrows the stage of “a few people locking themselves away on weekends to build a new product” and needs to hire a fifth salesperson and a tenth marketer, the moment comes when it needs an experienced CEO ready to scale the company further.

That’s why Kadlčík is now developing a new direction — seeking out already-established companies that need a fresh impulse: ones whose founders are either losing focus, afraid of radical product changes, or simply stuck in stagnation. Together with colleagues, he has already managed to rescue one such project that was on the brink of shutting down.