ZAKA VC

My high-level Reflections from YC Demo Day W25 after reviewing 160 pitches and speaking to the teams. TLDR AI Agents. 🚀 Autonomous AI Agents are here, here to stay, and poised to take over most jobs… and there’s nothing we can do about it. It hits really hard once you fully imagine what is coming. ❌ Not once did I hear the word SaaS (although the business model is still in place for many). 💡 More than 50% of the startups were focused on AI Agents and AI Infrastructure. It’s starting to feel like “AI agent for X” is the new “Uber for X.” But this AI Agent craze isn’t just hype—it’s delivering real value, fast. And the whole space is drastically evolving from one week to another, hard to keep-up with all news. MCPs and Manus just from last week. 🧠 AI Agent-to-AI Agent infrastructure needs to be built as well. 💰 Valuations have jumped to $20M caps, with some even hitting $50-60M. But there’s a noticeable split in fundraising momentum—some startups were oversubscribed, while others struggled with high valuations. 🤖 A quarter of the W25 batch has 95% of their codebase generated by AI. This is no longer the future—it’s the present. With AI, teams are moving much faster to a finished product and first sales, requiring less capital and smaller teams. 💻 "Vibe coding" seems to be the new preferred way of coding. Engineers becoming product people and systems thinkers. Thinking and reviewing -> 10x Engineering. 💥 Startups are showing surprising traction—reaching $500K to $1M ARR in just weeks or a couple of months. This was hardly achievable couple of years ago. 🏢 Even enterprise startups are hitting initial traction faster than ever. Enterprises are eager to adapt to the AI wave 🌊 before it’s too late, opening the door for partnerships with new AI teams. ⚙️ Hard-tech, hardware, robotics, spacetech, and biotech made strong showings. Think: fusion, semiconductors, pesticides, road robots, agro robots… the future is now. ⚙️ Still, I feel we need push for innovation on the atoms level more. 💼 Small, agile teams are the new normal. With AI, there’s no need for massive headcounts to scale. 💡For future founders looking for their next idea, would recommend to check regularly the Request for Startups published by YCombinator for every batch. Nice barometer of what is hot and what not in tech and where to focus in building. #YC #ycombinator #AI #AIAgents #vc

Last week, our Partner Andrej Petrus attended the Y Combinator DemoDay in San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. Great venue choice - celebrating entrepreneurship as a form of art? Y-combinator celebrated its 20th year of operation, having created over $800B in new startup market value since inception. That's quite something! A very important player in the early stage venture capital and a great barometer of what is hot and what is not in tech right now. ZAKA VC has 8 YC companies in portfolio and also partnered with Pioneer Fund investing primarily into YC Start-ups. And what is hot and what not? For future founders thinking about what to build next, we recommend checking the Request for Startups by YC published regularly with an overview of what use-cases/technologies/sectors might have their momentum right now. Where and what to build. Here are Andrej's Reflections from YC Demo Day W25: 🚀 Autonomous AI Agents are here, here to stay, and poised to take over most jobs… and there’s nothing we can do about it. It hits really hard once you fully imagine what is coming. ❌ Not once did I hear the word SaaS (although the business model is still in place for many). 💡 More than 50% of the startups were focused on AI Agents and AI Infrastructure. It’s starting to feel like “AI agent for X” is the new “Uber for X.” But this AI Agent craze isn’t just hype—it’s delivering real value, fast. And the whole space is drastically evolving from one week to another, hard to keep-up with all news. MCPs and Manus just from last week. 🧠 AI Agent-to-AI Agent infrastructure needs to be built as well. 💰 Valuations have jumped to $20M caps, with some even hitting $50-60M. But there’s a noticeable split in fundraising momentum—some startups were oversubscribed, while others struggled with high valuations. 🤖 A quarter of the W25 batch has 95% of their codebase generated by AI. This is no longer the future—it’s the present. With AI, teams are moving much faster to a finished product and first sales, requiring less capital and smaller teams. 💻 "Vibe coding" seems to be the new preferred way of coding. Engineers becoming product people and systems thinkers. Thinking and reviewing -> 10x Engineering. 💥 Startups are showing surprising traction—reaching $500K to $1M ARR in just weeks or a couple of months. This was hardly achievable couple of years ago. 🏢 Even enterprise startups are hitting initial traction faster than ever. Enterprises are eager to adapt to the AI wave 🌊 before it’s too late, opening the door for partnerships with new AI teams. ⚙️ Hard-tech, hardware, robotics, spacetech, and biotech made strong showings. Think: fusion, semiconductors, pesticides, road robots, agro robots… the future is now. ⚙️ Still, I feel we need push for innovation on the atoms level more. 💼 Small, agile teams are the new normal. With AI, there’s no need for massive headcounts to scale.

PLEASE MEET Filip Orth 🤝 Filip is our newest team member and he will lead our office in Silicon Valley as Principal. We have always been very open about our goal to be more present in North America, which it is not possible without a local team member. Filip's role is to build relationships with local startups and investors, represent ZAKA at local events and also build an effective bridge for European startups with the ambition to succeed in North America. 🌎 For more information about Filip's perception of this strategic move and his new role, see the link to an interview with AIN in the comments. #welcome #newmember #team #principal #expansion #northamerica #siliconvalley #investor #vc #startups

IN A GOOD LOAN COMPANY We are excited to share an official funding announcement of one of our recent investments - Yenmo (YC W24), alongside Pioneer Fund, Team Ignite Ventures, Y Combinator and other great angels investors. Yenmo is building India's first Good Loan company and has secured $1M in funding to fulfill that vision. India is a market with high credit demand and more often than not lending companies resort to malpractices to push customers into debt traps and then harass them to pay back the money. Lending in India is associated with a negative emotion with many people needing it but yet steering away due to fear of getting harassed. Yenmo aims to build a gold standard for lending companies, with ethical practices at its forefront. Their first product is a loan against mutual funds, which has been scaling really well. They now plan to use the funds to offer more lending products to help low cost loans penetrate the Indian market 🚀 Congrats Ashutosh Purohit and Aryan Agarwal 🎉

Why is the European Venture always a few steps behind Silicon Valley? 🤔 A bold question, an uneasy answer. Our Managing Partner Ján is a deep thinker and he recently shared hiw views with Tomáš Tržický. A summary definitely worth reposting!

Before we jump into the weekend, we are excited to warmly welcome a new company to our portfolio - please meet Superlinked 🙌 The company founded by Daniel Svonava and Ben Gutkovich is an AI-powered platform designed to help e-commerce, travel, and digital marketplace companies build intelligent search, personalization, and analytics experiences. By streamlining vector embeddings, query understanding, and ML infrastructure, Superlinked empowers product, internal tools, and analytics teams to quickly develop and deploy AI-driven solutions. As the company starts to work with multiple leading brands in e-commerce & travel, following top tier Silicon Valley investors Index Ventures & Theory Ventures, ZAKA VC invested into Superlinked to expand its AI/ML portfolio. Companies use Superlinked to enhance search relevance, boost recommendation effectiveness, and optimize user engagement across feeds, email, and ads. With a flexible architecture that supports both real-time and batch workloads, Superlinked seamlessly integrates into existing data stacks and provides a scalable foundation for AI-driven product innovation - in customers' own cloud or as a managed product. Whether improving search click-through rates, refining dynamic pricing, or enabling deeper behavioral analytics, Superlinked accelerates the adoption of AI across organizations, helping them unlock the full potential of their data. #investment #announcement #startup #AI #data

#proud to see our Co-Founder and Managing Partner Ján Kasper, PhD., MBA, PhD. starring 💫 in the #WorldOfForbes series by Forbes. In case you missed his bold and insightful interview with Simona Gulisova from Forbes Slovensko, we recommend this summary in English we posted on our blog some time ago: https://lnkd.in/dAa6W7gs Thanks Katherine Love and Gigi Zamora for your amazing work!

The event season is in full swing and we couldn't miss the Startup Wise Guys Investors Summit in Bilbao, Spain 🇪🇸Represented by our Managing Partner Ján Kasper, PhD., MBA, PhD., we dived into interesting insights from both VC and PE expert and discussions with top-tier investment partners. 🤝 #event #investors #summit #startupwiseguys #bilbao #spain

Starting the week with a shoutout-Monday 🙌 and continuing to present another batch of 🇸🇰 Slovak-founded early-stage startups in the Consumer, Education and Education industries you should know about. Researched by our team and curated by The Recursive, you can see the list in the summarizing article (link in the comments 👇 ) Featured startups in this issue: Boataround | Filmzie | Simplicity | sommify | Elia — Own your English! | meet'n'learn | Readmio | NEXINEO | Zooza | AdSpawn | SIMPLIO | SuperScale If you are a Slovak-founded startup and your pin is missing on the map, please let us know here: https://lnkd.in/derRW6aD Many thanks to everyone involved: Jozef Mačák | Natalia Sachova | Andrej Petrus | Ján Búza | Elena Ghiniță | Elena Vrabie | Etien Yovchev #startups #slovakia #earlystage #overview #map #innovation

Readmio was one of the first investments after establishing ZAKA VC. A few years later, the team led by Jozef Šimko and Ilya Novodvorskiy is still doing a great job with iterating the product, exploring new opportunities, scaling in European countries and successfully entering the Latin American market 🌎 The recent investment by Simpact Ventures will provide Readmio with additional fuel to keep dreaming big and spread their stories further to the Asian continent 🚀 Thanks Kostiantyn Tupikov from ITKeyMedia for the awesome article 🙌 #readmio #storytelling #edtech #investment #vc #startup