Init Intelligence Atlas

KAYA VC

5 min read

KAYA VC

DEAD — fundraise tier

Marked Lost 2026-05-13 — cold no-response, NOT a thesis pass. Juraj Masar intro’d Sazzad to GP Karel Zheng on 2026-05-05, but Karel never replied to Juraj. The lane simply went silent. Re-openable in principle (no rejection occurred), but de-prioritized given geographic mismatch (see below).

Firm Profile

KAYA VC (aka Kaya) — early-stage venture firm, HQ Prague, Czechia (Karlín) with a London presence, founded 2010–2011. Backs founders from Central & Eastern Europe and its diaspora. Closed Fund V at ~€70M (first close, mid-2025), expanding beyond core Czech/Polish/Slovak markets into Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, and beyond. Invests pre-seed → Series A in up to ~25 startups per fund; initial tickets €1M–€3M, with reserves up to €20M per company via follow-on + syndication. Portfolio 45+ companies / ~€350M portfolio value, including unicorns Rohlik (e-grocery), Docplanner (healthtech), and Booksy (~€100M ARR). Sectors skew AI, deeptech, fintech, healthtech, SaaS, security.

Partners

  • Karel Zheng — General Partner. (CRM POC.) Joined KAYA 2018, briefly left to run his own startup, returned as GP. Focus: CEE, AI, DevTools, Healthcare (personal site karelzheng.com). Frames himself as “someone who grew up online and is attuned to how today’s founders think.” (plain text)
  • Tomas Obrtac · Tomas Pacinda · Martin Rajcan — General Partners. Pavel Mucha — Founding Partner. Vaclav Ryslink — Investor.
  • Venture Partners include Juraj Masar — this is the init.inc intro source AND a confirmed init.inc angel ($10K soft commit). Juraj is CEO of Better Stack; his KAYA Venture-Partner role is exactly why the warm path existed. Other VPs: Tomáš Čupr (Rohlik founder), Martin Schmid, Michal Valko, Jakub Jurovych.

Recent pre-seed/seed activity (Pass-1 sketch — ≤5 deals; exhaustive 18–24mo pull is Pass 2)

  • KAYA flagged among the most active CEE funds in Q3 2025 (Vestbee CEE report) — high deal velocity across AI/cyber/health.
  • Active investor in a Hungarian non-human-identity (NHI) security startup ($3.3M seed, w/ PortfoLion, 2025). (cybersecurity/IAM)
  • New €70M Fund V capital (mid-2025) earmarked for ~25 new pre-seed→Series A companies across the broadened CEE footprint.
  • Specific named, dated, individually-verified KAYA-led 2025–26 rounds were thin in Pass-1 search — flagged for Pass-2 deepening (CEE coverage is fragmented across regional outlets: Vestbee, EU-Startups, The Recursive, TFN).
  • Full data → /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/kaya.csv.

Best data channels for this firm

Regional CEE outlets are the only reliable channels: Vestbee (quarterly “VC funding in CEE” reports — lists KAYA among most-active funds), EU-Startups, The Recursive, Tech.eu, Sifted, and TechFundingNews (TFN). KAYA’s own site (kaya.vc/we-are, portfolio page) is authoritative for team + portfolio. Crunchbase/PitchBook understate CEE deal detail. US aggregators are unreliable here — and beware name collisions: “Kaya Founders” (Philippines fund) and “ZAKA VC” (separate Prague fund) are DIFFERENT firms.

Fundraise Relationship (init.inc)

  • Status: DEAD this round. The warm path was genuinely strong (Juraj is both a KAYA VP and an init.inc angel) but Karel never engaged. KAYA is a CEE-focused fund (€-denominated, Prague/London, regional thesis) — a geographic/thesis mismatch for an SF-based US back-office AI lab. The silence may itself be a soft fit-signal.
  • Conversation log (newest first):
    • 2026-05-13 — Marked Lost (cold-no-response). Not a thesis rejection — Karel never replied.
    • 2026-05-05 — Juraj Masar sent the intro to Karel Zheng. No reply followed.
  • Mutual connections / warm path: Juraj Masar — KAYA Venture Partner + init.inc angel ($10K, soft commit) + the connector for Susa (Chad/Misha) and Creandum. He is the warm path to Karel.
  • Re-touch context: dormant given the US/CEE mismatch; Juraj is the only live lever into Karel.
  • Personal & rapport notes: Karel = founder-turned-GP, “grew up online” — responds to founder-native, technically-fluent framing; AI/DevTools is in his lane.
  • Competitor-conflict flag: No conflict vs init.inc’s 8 known AI-ITSM competitors. Clean-lane — closure is non-response, not conflict. ✅
  • Live stage: tracked in the CRM (Google Sheet).

Cross-check vs existing wiki

Not previously in cap-table-patterns-across-startup-competitors. No contradictions. Note the Juraj Masar dual-role (KAYA VP + init.inc angel + Susa/Creandum connector) — a relationship-graph node worth tracking across the fundraise (consistent with the synthesis’s Pattern 3, deal-partner-as-relationship-driver).

cap-table-patterns-across-startup-competitors · xfund · greatpoint-ventures (sibling DEAD-tier firms, same pod)

Pass 2 deal pattern (2026-05-27)

Verified (Pass-1 rows, all carried forward):

  • ✅ Fund V €70M first close (Jun 2025) — confirmed across Tech.eu / The Recursive / TFN.
  • ⚠️ Hungarian NHI security startup — Pass-1 row kept; light pull could not better-disambiguate the company name in regional press.
  • ✅ Portfolio context: Rohlik, Docplanner, Booksy — confirmed track-record (not recent rounds).

Net-new in Pass 2 (3 deals):

  • ✅ Viktor — €64.7M / $75M Series A, May 19 2026, Accel led (Zhenya Loginov, joined board), KAYA VC participated alongside Bek Ventures, Inovo, Tenacity. AI coworker in Slack/Teams (Warsaw/Munich; €12.9M ARR within 10wk of Feb 2026 launch). Adjacency: Viktor’s “AI agent inside Slack/Teams” framing is thesis-adjacent to init.inc’s positioning (not directly competitive).
  • ✅ TopK — $5.5M / €4.6M seed, Jul 2025, KAYA participated (Earlybird-led inferred); Karel Zheng quoted endorsing the team. AI-native hybrid search engine. KAYA had a prior pre-seed in TopK end-2024.
  • ✅ E2B — **11.5M seed backer). Open-source cloud runtime for AI agents (used by Perplexity, HF, Groq).

Lead-rate / check / stage pattern: KAYA is consistently a participant, not a lead, in cross-border AI rounds where a tier-1 international fund (Accel, Insight) takes the lead. Lead role appears only in CEE-local pre-seed/seed (e.g. TopK’s earlier 2024 pre-seed). Stage spread is wide — pre-seed to Series A — with €1-3M typical initial tickets per the fund’s own framing. Best data channel (Pass-2-confirmed): KAYA’s own newsletter (newsletter.kaya.vc) is the cleanest source — surfaces both the deal and prior position context. Tech.eu / The Recursive / EU-Startups / Vestbee remain the next-best regional outlets. CB Insights and US aggregators continue to understate KAYA’s CEE deal log.

Graph View

Backlinks