The Prague and Krakow firm, whose earliest bets include UiPath and ElevenLabs, is doubling down on pre-seed in Central and Eastern Europe and its global diaspora, with a six-partner team and a $1–5M typical cheque.
Credo Ventures has closed Credo Stage 5, an $88 million fund raised in a single closing, continuing the Prague and Krakow firm’s fifteen-year strategy of writing the first institutional cheque for founders from Central and Eastern Europe and its diaspora.
The fund is the firm’s largest to date, stepping up from the €75 million fourth fund closed in 2022.
The firm’s founding partners Ondrej Bartos and Jan Habermann launched Credo in 2010 and have backed over 100 companies across four funds.
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The two headline outcomes, UiPath, the Romanian-founded RPA platform that listed on the NYSE in 2021 at a $35 billion valuation, and ElevenLabs, the AI voice company most recently valued at $11 billion, are the cases Credo leads with, and with good reason: both were pre-seed investments led or co-led by the firm before either company was widely known. Maciek Gnutek, now a partner at Credo, was an early backer of ElevenLabs.
The fifth fund is managed by six partners. Alongside Bartos and Habermann, the team includes Gnutek, who focuses on the Polish market and diaspora connections; Jakub Krikava, whose background spans public policy and the Czech defence ministry; Max Kolowrat-Krakowsky, with international investment experience and US networks; and Matej Micek, focused on infrastructure, AI, and developer tools.
The multi-generational structure is deliberate. Credo’s stated argument is that the new generation of GPs reinforces the firm’s positioning at a moment when the CEE ecosystem is maturing but its pre-seed layer remains structurally underserved.
The firm’s thesis for Fund 5 is a sharpened version of what it has always done. Typical cheques will fall in the $1–5 million range, though Krikava told start-up.ro the firm remains flexible.
Sectoral focus is deliberately loose, Credo describes itself as founder-first rather than theme-driven, but the team is specifically attuned to technical founders with global ambitions, and has a growing eye on AI companies after the pace of growth in its fourth fund portfolio.
The CEE region it covers has a combined population of around 170 million and GDP of roughly $2 trillion, and Credo argues that the diaspora element, particularly founders from the region building in San Francisco and London, is an equally important sourcing channel.
The competitive framing is quietly pointed. The firm notes that fragmentation and cultural divergence across CEE countries remain meaningful barriers for outside investors, creating a structural advantage for a firm that has built networks across the region for fifteen years.
Credo-backed companies have attracted follow-on from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Index Ventures, which the firm cites as validation of the quality of its early-stage sourcing. Around two-thirds of the capital in the fund comes from institutional investors, with no public funding involved.
The fund size increase, from €75 million to $88 million, is modest rather than dramatic, which suggests Credo is not betting on a step-change in the regional output but on the compounding value of being consistently the first name a breakout founder from the region calls.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
