Not all investments start with a pitchdeck
At some point in 2019, I was dragged into the meeting room by my then colleague Karel. “You have to meet Patrick — one of my best friends since high school and a great entrepreneur” he insisted. And there it all began.
Patrick, now one of the founders of Accomango, started the meeting by explaining about his accommodation business for blue-collar workers. Since he could remember he has been helping around their family business, which incidentally employed a number of seasonal workers in need of accommodation. He found suitable apartments for them providing a much more dignified living than typical hostels or dormitories. Over time he expanded outside of their family business and across Czechia accommodating 1,700+ people in any given month.
Seemingly overlooked niche counting in hundreds of billions of EUR
It was an instant connection — We liked Patrick’s pragmatic approach to building his business. Spending a number of years in the accommodation space, he knew the market inside out, understood the pain points and dynamics of it. Something you don’t see every day in a twenty-two-year-old. But he also understood that being the accommodation provider doesn’t allow you to scale as easily as other business models do. We left the meeting positively surprised. Blue-collar workers’ accommodation was a niche that was seemingly overlooked. To our surprise, it was a huge space with a number of workers counting in double-digit millions just in Europe that need to be accommodated. A market that adds up to hundreds of billions of euros just in the accommodation GMV — let alone all ancillary businesses like transportation and insurance.
Customer UX 20 years behind
Surely everyone is on Booking.com these days, you would think. The opposite is true in this segment — it feels 20 years behind consumer travel online marketplace solutions and at least 10 years behind B2B solutions for white-collar travel and accommodation like TravelPerk. Most of the supply of accommodation in this vertical has a limited digital presence, bookings are still done through emails or phone calls. No standard terms, no easy way to check who is accommodated where. From procurement to HR to the Finance department — when in fact an average digitally savvy consumer would expect this to be just a few clicks away. Inefficiency is not the only problem worth solving here. Living conditions that workers are provided with in dormitories and hostels are often of questionable quality. We believe it would be great to see that consumers are becoming more interested in understanding how the products they buy are made across all verticals. Same as it started a few years back in the fashion industry.
We believe that one day Accomango can bring much-needed change not just in the efficiency of the workflows but in the improvement of quality of the living conditions for people that work hard to oftentimes make products of our everyday life.
Karel who spent two years with us at KAYA (f.k.a. Enern) felt his true calling was in being an entrepreneur. He decided the best time to start a business is now and joined Patrick as a co-founder of Accomango. We seconded his decision, although our team will never be the same without him!
Back to the r̶o̶o̶t̶s̶ pre-seed
Few months of ideation, thinking through various business models followed, we were lucky enough to be part of those discussions. It felt that Patrick and Karel were onto something and so Accomango was born. We decided to write the first check in summer 2020. We were their first investor — something we as a team haven’t done for a long time, since the founding of Rohlik, Twisto or Topite. We are happy that with the launch of our 4th generation fund in KAYA we made the decision to support entrepreneurs from the very beginning of their journey in the so-called pre-seed. A process that doesn’t necessarily start with a formal pitch deck in a meeting room. It can be just a discussion about an idea — no need for formal meetings. If you are like Patrick and Karel and want to talk about an idea that’s been bugging you if you can’t make that long pondered decision to start your own business — just come to us, we are always happy to talk.
