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ONDŘEJ ZBYTEK
Role: CEO & startup founder, innovator, electrical engineer Area: Tech Startups, Fundraising, Smart Indoor Gardening, Smart Cities, Particle Physics, Education Emlpoyer: Plantee, Nuledo What can I help my mentee with?
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Ondra graduated from FEL CTU, but already during high school he started his first big project, the development and production of Czech-made cloud chambers, unique devices for observing radioactivity. At the age of 20, he built his device for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, becoming the youngest business partner of the institution. His startup Nuledo has delivered its equipment to more than 10 institutions across Europe, including the Cosmocaixa science museum in Barcelona and the Institute of Physics of the CAS. The latest order in particle physics was the delivery of the world's largest cloud chamber to Luxembourg in 2020. Then it was time for Ondrej to move on.
Ondřej has been an avid plant grower since childhood and has always been attracted to experimenting with more challenging species. He used his growing experience and knowledge from the development of cloud chambers and started craving a smart home greenhouse. He found no solution on the current market that could meet all his requirements. Therefore he founded Plantee Innovations, a startup that develops and manufactures the unique Plantee indoor greenhouse for growing plants at home. "I knew I wasn't the only one interested in such a product. Since I have a lot of experience in developing a hardware product riddled with sensors and other technologies, I immediately thought I could develop a smart home greenhouse myself and offer it to everyone in the world," he explains how he got from particle physics to growing plants.
The Plantee device combines many disciplines including physics, chemistry, biology and electrical engineering. Ondra Zbytek is thus the archetype of an universal entrepreneur who has to navigate among many fields–not only technical ones. In 2021, he and his company launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, where he raised almost two and a half million Czech crowns for his indoor greenhouse. In addition to his entrepreneurial achievements, in 2018 he was awarded Her Majesty’s Ambassador Nick Archer's Young Person of the Year Award and was granted the associated Eva Jiřičná Award.
Ondra would like to offer his knowledge of bootstrapping a startup and attracting an investor to the students of VŠCHT as part of his mentoring. He says that "the world of innovation and startups is completely different from the university or from employment. Information and contacts are hard to come by and if you have never run a business or sought funding for your project, it is terribly easy to get confused and lose months or years of time."