René Bystroň sells startup DeltaGen with its Prague-based team

René Bystroň, a Yale graduate with Czech roots, has sold his US startup DeltaGen just two and a half years after founding it. The buyer is another American company, Worker.ai, backed among others by billionaire Ratmir Timashev. The price was not disclosed, but according to Bystroň the cash portion alone is enough for him and his partners to stop working.

Bystroň graduated from Yale, worked at the consulting group BCG and then went on to his own projects in the US. His first startup shut down in under three years; the second was more successful. He came to the US to study while still in high school and has lived there almost continuously since, speaking Czech with a slight American accent. He has not lost touch with his homeland: in 2016 he helped create the Meltingpot discussion platform at the Colours of Ostrava festival and became its first executive director. Today he visits the Czech Republic about every two months.

What DeltaGen did

The startup grew between Prague and San Francisco: the entire development and product team works in the Czech capital. Bystroň explains the choice by saying that Prague sits in the middle of Europe, not far in time from the US East Coast, and that the price-to-quality ratio of specialists in Czechia still pays off.

DeltaGen builds voice AI agents that listen to salespeople's conversations and make suggestions in real time. The company specialized in sellers of cybersecurity software: the agents answer only on the basis of technical documentation provided in advance. Besides Bystroň, minority stakes were held by co-founders Michal Studnička and Matúš Ondrejčka. According to Studnička, a client pays not for the speed of coding but for a solved problem.

In 2024 the firm started out in a different niche, building AI solutions to simplify corporate processes related to mergers and acquisitions. Then established players such as Crunchbase and PitchBook began actively using AI, and competition became too heavy for a small team. At the same time, interest was growing in the voice AI tools the team was developing, and DeltaGen changed course to help corporate salespeople.

In about a year and a half, according to Bystroň, the company reached annual recurring revenue (ARR) of half a million dollars. In an investment round in February last year, DeltaGen was valued at eleven million dollars.

Who is Ratmir Timashev

Timashev is a co-founder and former CEO of Veeam, a data management company that today employs more than seven hundred people in Prague. He founded Veeam with a university friend, Andrei Baronov, and in 2020 they sold it to the Insight Partners fund for five billion dollars. Earlier, in 1996, they founded Aelita Software, which they sold to Quest Software in 2004 for 115 million dollars. Timashev was born in Russia and has lived in the US since 1992, when he came to study at Ohio State University. He holds US citizenship and in 2024 renounced his Russian citizenship because of the war in Ukraine.

What's next

DeltaGen's solution will continue to develop under the wing of Worker.ai, which is now bringing to market a comprehensive operating system for small businesses. According to Bystroň, scaling would have been very hard without a large strategic investor like Timashev. He also said the parties do not want to name the sum because the buyer is planning other acquisitions, and a known price would complicate negotiations.

By the Around Prague newsroom