ZAKA

Andrej Petrus leads the investment committee. A Forbes 30 Under 30 listee and Newton Venture Fellow, he joined ZAKA after experience in venture building and M&A and strategy consulting. He is based in Prague and is the principal decider on capital deployment.

ZAKA maintains an active Silicon Valley presence through Filip Orth, a Santa Clara University graduate based in the Bay Area, and conducts periodic multi-week team trips for founder meetings across San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Stanford. The firm's general partners also draw on their operating networks from sectors including retail, ecommerce, energy, and real estate.

ZAKA does both. Its portfolio includes direct seed and pre-seed investments across 92 companies, as well as a fund investment in Startup Wise Guys, a B2B startup accelerator based in Europe. The blend suggests a willingness to gain exposure through both direct company equity and manager commitments.

The firm targets seed and pre-seed rounds in the US and Europe. Its deal flow spans early-stage through growth, with most disclosed activity concentrated at the earliest institutional entry points, often alongside or after accelerator programs and angel syndicates.

ZAKA explicitly highlights Health & BioTech and Industrial Tech as priority verticals, citing one of the best Healthcare & Life Sciences portfolios in continental Europe on its website. Beyond those, the portfolio reaches into space, quantum computing, AI, enterprise SaaS, hospitality, fintech, and mobility.

The wealth source is not publicly disclosed. ZAKA's founding general partners, Jan Kasper and Peter Zalesak, built their own operating businesses in retail, ecommerce, energy, real estate, and agriculture across Central Europe. Whether the fund pools wholly proprietary capital or accepts external qualified investors at a minimum $130,000 ticket has not been definitively stated.

ZAKA operates as a seed and pre-seed venture capital fund from a corporate structure in the Czech Republic. Its mix of operator-founders, an investment committee, and a disclosed minimum ticket size for outside investors suggests a traditional VC architecture rather than a single-family office.