“It is difficult for us to continue to grow as we and our investors would like, in a purely digital way. Most hostels on the market are full or in very poor condition and no new capacity is emerging. We now see the way in a combination of good software and our own accommodation capacities, “explained the reasons for the fundamental decision of the company’s co-founder Karel Zheng.
Since its establishment, the company has focused on creating a digital marketplace with accommodation, mainly for agency workers from the manual professions. However, she decided not to continue the development, and therefore proceeded to significantly reduce the team.
–
–
“With the change of direction, we need a completely different composition of the team, which instead of business and development will be more focused on property management and digitization,” said Zheng. The startup has the ambition to operate over two thousand of its own beds within a year, which represents more than eighteen large-capacity, modern and digitized hostels.
The two largest investors, Kaya and Purpose Ventures, with whom the founders consulted on further developments, also agree with the founders’ decision. “It turned out that digitization is not the right way at the moment and that it is necessary to create accommodation capacities first and only then can we use the digital platform,” says Purpose Ventures investment partner David Šiška.
The same opinion is shared by the partner of the Kaya investment fund, Tomáš Obrtáč: “We will not be able to enter the market without owning the capacity ourselves. We spent a lot of time on the decision and unfortunately we will not use the existing team in further development. However, we will offer outgoing employees positions in other companies in our portfolio, because we value them and we do not doubt their abilities. ”
–
–
However, some smaller investors had no idea about the changes and only learned about them from the E15 daily. One of them is Václav Graf, who invested in Accomanga in its beginnings. But he agrees with the founders’ decision: “Building a marketplace is quite challenging. In the Czech Republic, the market is overheating, there are a lot of foreign workers and little capacity. It makes sense for me to take a step aside and throw myself into the real estate branch. “
Investments of 2021: Commodities, stocks, cryptocurrencies and bonds
–—
Investments of 2021: Commodities, stocks, cryptocurrencies and bonds • VIDEO Videohub
—
– .
