
Jan Rezab
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- Full Name
- Jan Řežáb (Jan Rezab)
- Title
- Serial entrepreneur; CEO & Co-founder, Ravineo; angel investor
- Firm
- Ravineo (current company); invests personally as an angel
- Firm Type
- Angel Investor
- Investment Stage
- Seed / early stage (has also participated through to Series A)
- Check Size
- Not publicly disclosed as a formal range; documented individual angel checks include ~$600,000 (Gamee, 2015)
- Target Company Profile
- Early-stage, often founder-led software startups; sectors he knows deeply (social/media analytics, enterprise SaaS) and mission-driven tech
- Sector Focus
- Social media & digital analytics, enterprise/SaaS applications, gaming, environmental/climate tech
- Geographic Focus
- Central & Eastern Europe (Czech Republic/Prague) and broader Europe
- Location
- Prague, Czech Republic
Background
Jan Řežáb (widely written as Jan Rezab) is a Czech serial entrepreneur with roughly two decades in tech. He started his first company, the mobile entertainment and games business Redboss, at age 14 and ran it as CEO for about seven years. He is best known for founding Socialbakers in 2008 (in Plzeň, with co-founders including Lukáš Maixner, Martin Homolka and Jiří Voves), which he built into one of the world's largest social media analytics companies, serving 2,500+ brands such as Microsoft and Nestlé and raising roughly $34M in venture funding. He stepped down as CEO in 2016, remaining chairman. Socialbakers was acquired by Audax Private Equity in late 2020 and subsequently merged with Astute to form Emplifi in 2021.
After Socialbakers, Rezab founded Time is Ltd., an employee-experience and productivity/collaboration analytics SaaS platform, serving as Founder & CEO from around 2017 until late 2024. In January 2024 he co-founded and became CEO of Ravineo, a digital marketing/influencer analytics platform aimed at bringing transparency to social and digital media; the company reached $1M ARR within seven months of launch and exited stealth in late 2024/2025.
Rezab is a recognized voice in digital analytics. He was named to Forbes "30 Under 30" (Europe, marketing/media, 2015–2016) — reportedly the first Czech on the global list in his category — and has lectured in settings including Harvard Business School and NATO. He also blogs and speaks regularly (e.g., WebExpo Prague 2025, Web Summit) on scaling startups, bootstrapping, and AI.
Investment Thesis & Focus
- Invests primarily as an angel at early/seed stage, backing founders in domains he has operated in himself — social/media analytics, enterprise SaaS, gaming, and mission-driven/environmental tech.
- Leverages deep social-media and analytics operating experience; on Ravineo he argues "social media has become less transparent than ever before" and that "everybody stopped innovating analytics around social media about four years ago" — signaling conviction in categories that others consider mature but are ripe for reinvention.
- Tends to take active, hands-on roles (e.g., Chairman at Gamee alongside his investment), suggesting he backs companies where his operating experience and network add value beyond capital.
- Comfortable with long holding periods and durable, bootstrapped-style growth — he has publicly championed the "cockroach startup" model of resilient, capital-efficient scaling with AI.
Notable Investments
- Gamee — mobile/casual gaming platform (later Web3 gaming, part of Animoca Brands). Rezab invested ~$600,000 in 2015 and served as Angel Investor & Chairman from ~2014 to 2020.
- Airly — Polish air-quality monitoring / environmental-tech company; participated in its Series A round (announced March 22, 2021).
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