Czech Startup Deals Tripled, Then Capital Crashed 79% in a Single Year

Capital tells a different story. It kept climbing a year longer than deal count, peaking at €1520.1M in 2022, a 17.9x increase since 2018. Then it fell off a cliff: €79% down in a single year, from €1520.1M in 2022 to €312.6M in 2023. Deal count barely reacted to the same shock, down only 24% over the same year. The 2023 funding winter hit the size of rounds far harder than it hit how many rounds happened at all. Capital has since recovered some ground without deal count following: €724.5M in 2025, 132% above the 2023 low, on a deal count that kept falling.

Splitting each year's deals by stage shows the same pattern from a different angle. Seed and pre-seed together have stayed the largest share of deals every year, ranging from 60.8% to 79.3% depending on the year, no clear trend up or down. Series A's share has stayed roughly flat too, mostly between 5% and 10% of deals. What has moved is the growth stage: Series B and later made up just 1.8% of deals in 2018 and averaged 10.5% in 2024 and 2025, 5.8x higher. Fewer brand-new seed bets are happening each year, while a larger share of what does happen is a bigger company raising a later round. That is a market with fewer new entrants and more graduated ones, not a market with less activity across the board.

2026 is not in the chart above because the year is not finished: through the data available so far, Czech startups have closed 37 deals worth €461.1M, with Series A at 16.2% of deals, the highest share of any year measured, though on a small enough count (6 rounds) that one large syndicate could move that figure. Worth watching as the year completes, not a conclusion yet.

Across the full 2018-2025 window: 862 deals into 547 distinct Czech startups, totaling €5.06 billion. The rest of this series digs into pieces of this picture: which funds are actually behind these deals, why seed round sizes have more than doubled since 2019, and what share of these seed bets go on to raise a Series A.