Jan Habermann

Jan Habermann is a founding partner of Credo Ventures, an early-stage venture firm headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, with an additional office in Kraków, Poland. By his own account he started his first company before finishing his first year of university, co-founding an event company and then a software house, which he ran and eventually sold. After the software house was acquired, he spent a period as an angel investor and worked at a Warsaw-based VC fund before co-founding Credo Ventures with Ondřej Bartoš in 2009 — at a time when, as the firm puts it, the CEE region had essentially no startup ecosystem. He is reported to hold a degree from the Prague University of Economics and Business, and earlier in his career worked as an M&A advisor.

As a partner, Habermann builds his own deal pipeline, sits on the boards of and supports his portfolio companies, and helps oversee fund operations and LP reporting. Crunchbase lists him with four board/advisor roles. He is a Kauffman Fellow (Class 19), part of the global Kauffman Fellows network for innovation investors, and a frequent speaker at CEE tech events such as Infoshare and Startup Grind.

Habermann describes himself as "a generalist by nature," curious across most verticals — a trait he considers an advantage as the definition of "tech" keeps shifting. Credo has grown from an outsider fund into one of Europe's most successful early-stage firms: across 15 years and five funds it has backed 100+ companies, including two decacorns, UiPath (which IPO'd on the NYSE in 2021 at a ~$35B valuation) and ElevenLabs (recently valued around $11B).

• Invests at pre-seed and seed, frequently as lead investor, and continues to back companies into later rounds; Credo's latest fund (Stage 5) is explicitly focused on pre-seed.
• Targets CEE-rooted founders and the CEE diaspora building globally-oriented, technology-driven businesses — Credo's pitch is "No deck required. No warm intro. If you're from CEE and starting something, we want to hear from you."
• Generalist across verticals: AI, SaaS/B2B software, developer tools, healthtech, fintech and infrastructure.
• On what makes him say yes, in his own words he looks for "authenticity, a real problem they need to solve, and the kind of relationship where we can be honest with each other even when things aren't going well."
• Takes a long-view, relationship-driven approach; on breakout outcomes he has said deals like ElevenLabs and UiPath are "incredibly rare" — over 15 years only those two truly stood out.