BudgetBakers
BudgetBakers is a fintech startup that develops tools for personal finance management and budgeting for individuals and small businesses. Founded by Prague-based developer Jan Muller, BudgetBakers' main offering is the personal finance app Wallet, which is available on Android, iOS and as a web app. Founded in 2010, BudgetBakers was funded by angel investors. It was then selected as to attend the StartupYard accelerator in Prague in 2015, where it also garnered its first external investment. Wallet by BudgetBakers grew its user base to more than 1.7 million in the next year, spread its presence in countries like  the USA, Canada, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and most of the European countries. In 2016, it raised seed funding to the tune of €290K. History. BudgetBakers started off as a side project of Jan Muller, who worked as a software developer with leading Czech companies Avast, Ceska Sporitelna and Seznam.cz. Having developed the during his free time, Muller gained confidence as angel investor Martin Jiřička came on board as the startup's first investor. In 2015, BudgetBakers was selected as one among 7 other growing startups to attend the startup accelerator program hosted by StartupYard. In this three month-program , the startup was able to reshape its vision, plan out its strategies and concentrate on scaling up the product. "By entering SY, we had to slow down development of the new version of BudgetBakers and start focusing more on management, finances and defining the strategy that will bring us to next level. At the beginning it was very unusual for me, because i was used to spending my whole day programming. I had to turn towards management, and that was a challenge for me. But now I have to say, it helped me to crystallize my vision in term of  growth and success," said Muller, in an interview. "I’ve come to realize that our priority has to be our customer experience and our market strategy, instead of just building an ever richer feature set. There’s no use in creating the world’s most amazing software, if nobody is ready to use that software to make a positive impact in their lives. So we’ve had to adjust our attitude towards development, and grow up as a company and a team. That’s been an amazing experience for us, and we’re really glad we decided to do it ." It was during this period that the present CEO Michal Kratochvil became an advisor to the startup. "Since then, BudgetBakers has grown to over a million registered users, tripling its paying membership since last year, as it has repositioned itself to focus more broadly on personal finance, and rolled out features that allow customers to manage all of their personal finances in one secure cloud platform," says EU-Startups.com. In June 2016, BudgetBakers "raised seed funding from startup investor Petr Zamecnik and former CEO of HomeCredit and GE Money, Ivan Svitek. Along with the funding round, BudgetBakers revealed that Michal Kratochvil , former Managing Director of Accenture in Central Europe, has joined as the startup’s new CEO." BudgetBakers has been a pioneer in the Czech fintech revolution. It was also selected as one of the 40 growing startups to attend Google's recent CEE All Stars event hosted at its entrepreneur space, Campus Warsaw. Wallet by BudgetBakers was also awarded Google Play's Editor's Choice Badge and was in the list of the 10 best lifestyle apps in the Czech Republic of 2017.