Most video today is still passive. You press play. You watch. That is it. Even with all the progress in AI, content rarely reacts to you in real time. For gaming, esports, and live sports, that limitation feels outdated.
Prague-based startup ValkaAI wants to change that. The generative AI company has raised €12 million in a pre-seed funding round to build lifelike, real-time digital humans that can interact with users at scale.
The round was led by Rockaway Ventures, with participation from J&T Ventures, Tensor Ventures, BD Partners, Fond Naše Česko, and Petr Zámečník.
“ValkaAI is tackling a difficult but fundamental challenge – combining visual quality with speed and true real-time interactivity. This is not just another application. It provides the foundation for a new generation of entertainment,” says Petr Šmíd, General Partner at Rockaway Ventures, a progressive part of the newly established Rockaway Fund within Rockaway Capital.
This marks ValkaAI’s first external capital raise and ranks among the largest pre-seed rounds in Central and Eastern Europe.
€12 million fund deployment
The capital will be used to expand research and product teams across the United States, Europe, and the United Arab Emirates.
ValkaAI plans to strengthen its core platform, scale computational infrastructure, and deliver its first commercial pilot integrations in sports and esports.
In the coming months, the team will focus on building the platform’s backbone and validating early use cases with distribution partners where it already has domain expertise.
Turning video into an interactive interface
So far, most generative video tools struggle with real-time responsiveness. They often suffer from visual flickering, distortion, or high infrastructure costs.
Founded by Vlastimil Venclík, and Miloš Lokajíček, ValkaAI develops technology for fully controllable digital avatars that respond in real time.
ValkaAI operates under Realms Group, a technology group focused on digital entertainment and artificial intelligence. Its first products will be AI commentators for esports and sports that react to gameplay in real time and speak in the viewer’s language.
ValkaAI has created technology that helps businesses use AI avatars for real-time, personalised interactions without typical problems. The long-term vision is to create a platform where every viewer can step into content and shape it according to their preferences.
The company has teams in San Francisco, Prague, and Dubai, employing approximately 45 people, including researchers from Meta and DeepMind.
“The €12 million investment is exceptional for a pre-seed round in Central and Eastern Europe and reflects ValkaAI’s ambition to build a globally relevant technology platform, but more importantly, it reflects our confidence in the team behind ValkaAI,” says David Polach of J&T Ventures. “We believe there will be more stories like this coming out of the Czech Republic,” Polach adds.
“This is groundbreaking deep tech that will have a major impact not just in entertainment, but in many other areas that most people can’t yet imagine,” says Dan Hastík of Tensor Ventures.
“ValkaAI is a long-term project for us. Not a quick hack, but the construction of a technological foundation for a new generation of entertainment. Pre-seed financing allows us to bring top-tier specialists into development, scale infrastructure, and validate the first concrete use cases with strong partners,” adds Miloš Lokajíček.
