Diana Rádl Rogerová, the long-standing managing partner at Deloitte, left her managerial position a year ago to venture into investing. She joined the investment group Behind Inventions (BI), which currently has a portfolio of seven companies, including Semantic Visions, a data analytics firm. Recently, BI also acquired a minor stake in Sharry, a smart platform for modern buildings that can integrate several digital systems and allows centralized management of parking, building access, or the use of meeting rooms. However, the group has shifted its original startup focus. It now also aims to invest in sectors like energy or electromobility.
"We have three more mature investments open. We hope to know by the end of the year whether they will come through," says Rádl Rogerová in an interview with E15.
We met at the #FinŽeny project discussion, where the equal representation of women and men in companies was addressed. Why do you think there aren't more women on the boards of banks?
"Women often hesitate to take such positions. Not because they think they aren't capable, but managing the combination of female and professional roles requires upbringing and support. There's been a huge shift, for example, at financial institutions where management provides support, but you need it at home as well. So it's about culture, time, but I believe that time will come."
In the discussion, it was mentioned that a parent on parental leave has an eighty percent lower chance of becoming a CEO. Do you agree with that?
"I disagree. I don't think it's about whether you go on parental leave or not, but whether you get general support. The culture in the Czech Republic is based on the idea that women stay on maternity leave and take care of things. I always say I admire women whose choice is to stay at home; that wasn't mine. If it is, everything is fine. If not, I would do everything to ensure that the husband at home and at work supports the woman in managing it together as a family."
You yourself left the managing position at Deloitte a year ago and became a partner in the investment group Behind Inventions. When investing in various startups and firms, do you feel that more women are appearing in the startup environment?
"Men still dominate startups, in my opinion, due to the risk and the general startup culture. Women want certainty and want to see the result they are going for. Men often look to the future, and potential risk is often a pleasant challenge for them."
This brings us to your new project – investing. Can you elaborate on how much you have personally invested in Behind Inventions?
"The actual number is not important, as investments from my and the whole Behind Inventions project's perspective are primarily about added value. We bring years of experience from working with countless firms and solving their day-to-day problems and more complex challenges to our portfolio of companies. We can help with further product development, sales, or establishing strategic partnerships for successful distribution. There are simply a variety of possibilities, and our team is maximally flexible."
When investing in companies, do you use your own capital?
"Yes."
In the spring, you and Behind Inventions invested in Flowbox, a Czech startup dealing with energy management in buildings and factories, looking for opportunities to save. Is this the latest investment?
"It's not. One transaction I can already disclose with a clear conscience is our investment in Sharry. We also have three other investments open. We hope to know by the end of the year whether they will go through and our portfolio will expand again. From purely startup investments, there is Sharry, and we are considering at least one more startup. The other investments are more mature, less risky."
Your ambition is to hold between thirty and sixty percent in firms. Why?
"Our aim is to bring investments to this share, but not in all cases. There are some where two to five percent is enough for us if they are complementary to what we already have. That's the case with Sharry, for example. Strategies, for instance, with Flowbox, we see that the market entry plan can be interconnected in many respects, so we don't necessarily need a significant percentage. Together with Sharry, we decided to go in together, but a much smaller share is enough for us."
Isn't it a bit of a bet that you don't know which of these two projects will succeed?
"I don't think so. On the contrary, if one succeeds, we believe the other will too."
Why did you decide to also move towards more mature investments?
"At the beginning, I had an idea about the topics that interest me, such as artificial intelligence, data, and technology. At the same time, through Semantic Visions, I saw that I could look for things around energy and energy management, hence the investment in Flowbox. Another possible field is what Europe is very protectionist about today, anything to do with batteries and electromobility. The choice of investments must make sense to us and must have a positive impact on society. Because we care about the future."
Your plan is to complete entry into Semantic Visions, a data analytics company, in which the investment group Pale Fire Capital also has a stake. However, the investment is still not completed because the minority stake of entrepreneur František Vrabel is under execution. What does it look like now?
"Unfortunately, the auction was postponed indefinitely. Today, however, we are talking with Pale Fire Capital about simply completing the investment."
Semantic Visions, instead of uncovering disinformation, started "enriching third-party data." Can you explain what that means?
"It's not true that we're not active in detecting disinformation, it's just more complicated. We leave the interpretation of what is and is not disinformation to the client. We are able to detect all information, true and fabricated. Let me give you an example: You're interested in a specific topic, such as biogas, and we find all the topics associated with biogas. We work with more than 1.3 million articles in twelve languages every day. If you tell me you're looking for companies that could theoretically be for sale in a specific field, we can read all the articles and identify companies based on scenarios. In other words, we can find logic in articles, and thus we can give you relevant information."
People often ask me about ChatGPT, but it just guesses what you want. It finds you the best possible answer to your question, we find facts. We use ChatGPT, but for example, on the front-end, where we use it to create knowledge graphs or summaries."
And haven't you considered, whether there might be cooperation with Open-AI, which launched ChatGPT? If, for example, you provided ChatGPT with your scenarios.
"We are considering what our exit strategy will be. However, I don't think going after ChatGPT is the right path. There are a lot of questions around cybersecurity. We know they already have corporate solutions, where companies will be able to have it on-site on demand and it won't be cloud-based, but on the other hand, I'm not sure how the algorithm will then work. How we will exit from Semantic Visions is not yet on the agenda. Our ambition now is to take the company in a different direction. But I don't think our role should be to enrich ChatGPT's data."
So you use a database of articles, like Newton, for your operations, but it was recently not functioning after a hacker attack. Haven't you thought that could be one of the tools you could also provide?
"We enrich data. We go through articles all over the world. We look at which companies are talked about and what topics are discussed. From that, we create scenarios. For example, when a bank comes and needs to know if their clients will be at risk due to supply chain disruption, we look for warning signals. Newton sells articles, we mine them. So that's what we want to do and offer – not as media monitoring, but for use in hedge funds', banks', and corporations' own systems."
Earlier you mentioned that you use Semantic Visions to analyze some potential investments. Have you found any recently?
"Yes, we've found several options that way. As I mentioned, we chose energy and the environment as one of the topics. Through the environment, we said, what topics are critical for Europe. With Semantic Visions, we look for where the number of key words is growing, and based on that, we try to find other opportunities."
Author: Anna-Marie Horáková
Published in E15, October 5, 2023
Expanding with Czech Know-How: Behind Inventions Helps Its Companies Succeed on the Global Market
