During his trip to the United States, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš visited the VentureOut business incubator in New York. Accompanied by Minister of Industry and Trade Karel Havlíček and his deputy Silvana Jirotková, Babiš met with five Czech start-ups on Monday, 23 September 2019.
Thanks to CzechInvest’s CzechMatch project, the companies Pikto Digital, ProRocketeers with the Woodr application, Protoprint and Sentt Lab with the Brigr application are consulting their business plans with local experts and mentors in New York. At the end of their stay, they will present themselves to potential investors. The company YMC has been in New York since the beginning of September. Thanks to another CzechInvest project, CzechAccelerator, YMC is spending a full three months there gaining experience with the functioning of the local market.
Prime Minister Babiš was familiarised with the products and services with which the five start-ups set out for the New York market and listened to their observations and plans for the future. CzechInvest’s local representative, Jan Chmelík, informed the prime minister of the latest results of the agency’s activities aimed at supporting start-ups.
CzechInvest has been supporting innovative start-ups since 2011. The first start-ups travelled to New York in 2017. Since then, more than thirty have made the journey.
Conceptual support for start-ups is one of the basic pillars of the innovation strategy by means of which the government of the Czech Republic wants to place the country among the European innovation leaders by 2030.