ValkaAI Raises €12M for Real-Time AI Avatars

ValkaAI Raises CEE's Largest €12M Pre-Seed to Power Real-Time AI Avatars for Sports and Esports

Video content has remained fundamentally passive for as long as most of us can remember. Whether you are watching a live football match, catching up on an NBA game, or following your favourite esports tournament, the experience rarely extends beyond pressing play and sitting back. Even with the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence tools across entertainment platforms, the vast majority of video content today still fails to engage viewers in any dynamic or real-time manner. You watch, the screen plays, and there is no exchange. That fundamental limitation is the exact problem that a bold Prague-based startup called ValkaAI has set out to fix — and it now has €12 million in AI funding to make that vision a reality.

In what stands as a defining moment for the Central and Eastern European technology ecosystem, ValkaAI has raised what is reportedly the largest pre-seed funding round in the region's history. This latest AI funding news is not just a headline about one startup. It signals a broader transformation in how investors, technologists, and entertainment companies are beginning to think about the role of AI in reshaping the viewer experience. With deep-tech talent, institutional investor support, and a clear-eyed commercial roadmap, ValkaAI is emerging as one of the most compelling artificial intelligence startups to come out of Europe in recent years. The AI World Organisation brings you a comprehensive breakdown of this landmark development and what it means for the future of digital entertainment.

A Landmark AI Funding Round That Rewrites CEE's Record Books

The €12 million pre-seed funding round was led by Rockaway Ventures, a progressive investment arm operating within the newly established Rockaway Fund under Rockaway Capital. The round also saw significant participation from J&T Ventures, Tensor Ventures, BD Partners, Fond Naše Česko, and individual investor Petr Zámečník. The fact that such a diverse and credible group of investors came together for a pre-seed round of this scale speaks volumes about the confidence the investment community has in both the technology and the team behind ValkaAI.

This AI funding news is particularly significant in the context of the CEE region, where pre-seed rounds of this magnitude are exceptionally rare. The standard venture capital model dictates that pre-seed investments carry the highest level of risk and are therefore typically smaller and more cautious. The fact that Rockaway Ventures and its co-investors committed €12 million at this stage suggests an unusually deep conviction — not just in the concept of real-time AI avatars, but in ValkaAI's specific ability to execute. For the broader CEE startup ecosystem, this moment carries symbolic weight. It represents the kind of AI funding news that shifts global perceptions of what European deep-tech startups are capable of building and attracting.

Petr Šmíd, General Partner at Rockaway Ventures, described ValkaAI as tackling a difficult but fundamental challenge — combining visual quality with speed and genuine real-time interactivity. He was careful to point out that ValkaAI is not simply building another AI application. Rather, it has the potential to provide the foundational infrastructure for an entirely new generation of entertainment. That framing is important. It positions ValkaAI not as a feature within an existing product ecosystem, but as a platform layer that could underpin multiple categories of content and interaction for years to come. The AI funding secured through this round gives the company the runway to pursue exactly that kind of ambitious, long-horizon product development.

David Polach of J&T Ventures echoed this enthusiasm, calling the investment exceptional for a pre-seed round in the region and emphasising that the capital reflects investor confidence in the human team behind the product as much as the technology itself. He also expressed strong optimism that the Czech Republic will continue to produce more stories like this, signalling a growing belief that CEE is developing into a genuine hub for world-class AI and deep-tech innovation. This AI funding round is not a one-off anomaly. It is the kind of milestone that sets a precedent and encourages the next generation of founders and investors to think bigger.

Understanding the Technology: Real-Time AI Avatars at Scale

To appreciate why this AI funding round has attracted such attention, it is essential to understand what ValkaAI is actually building — and why solving this particular technological problem is so difficult. At the heart of the company's work is the development of generative AI technology that can produce fully controllable digital avatars capable of reacting in real time. On paper, this might sound like a natural extension of the generative AI revolution that has swept through the technology industry over the past two years. In practice, it involves overcoming a set of technical challenges that have stumped even the most well-resourced organisations.

The vast majority of generative video tools currently available on the market suffer from one or more of the same core limitations. Visual flickering and distortion remain common problems, particularly when avatars are required to respond dynamically to changing inputs rather than simply playing a pre-rendered animation. High computational costs create barriers to scale, making it economically impractical to deploy such technology to large audiences in real time. And perhaps most critically, genuinely responsive, real-time interactivity — the kind where an AI avatar adjusts its behaviour, language, and expression based on what is happening in the world around it at that precise moment — remains largely unsolved at a production-ready quality level.

ValkaAI was co-founded by Vlastimil Venclík and Miloš Lokajíček, two technologists who identified this gap and committed to building a platform that addresses all of these challenges simultaneously. The company operates under Realms Group, a broader technology group with a focused mission around digital entertainment and artificial intelligence. ValkaAI currently employs approximately 45 people across offices in San Francisco, Prague, and Dubai — a genuinely global team for an organisation that has yet to close its first commercial product launch. Among its researchers and engineers are individuals who have previously worked at Meta and DeepMind, two of the most respected AI research institutions anywhere in the world. The presence of this calibre of talent at a pre-seed stage is unusual and underscores the serious technical ambitions driving the company forward.

The platform ValkaAI is building allows businesses to deploy AI avatars for real-time, personalised interactions without the typical trade-offs in visual quality or computational efficiency. The long-term vision is grander still: a world where every viewer can step inside content and actively shape it based on their own preferences, rather than passively absorbing whatever a broadcaster has pre-determined they should see. This is a fundamentally different relationship between audience and content, and it is one that has been made possible by recent advances in generative AI, real-time rendering technology, and scalable cloud infrastructure.

Sports and Esports as the Gateway to a Broader Platform

The commercial strategy behind ValkaAI's initial product deployment is both logical and strategically astute. The company has chosen to focus its first pilot integrations on the sports and esports sectors — two areas where the demand for real-time, personalised content delivery is enormous, where audiences are highly engaged and tech-savvy, and where ValkaAI's team already possesses meaningful domain expertise and existing distribution relationships.

The flagship product emerging from this AI funding deployment will be AI commentators — lifelike digital avatars capable of analysing live gameplay and sports events in real time, generating commentary that reacts dynamically to what is unfolding on screen, and delivering that commentary in the viewer's own language. This last capability — real-time multilingual commentary — deserves particular attention. The global esports industry has long struggled with the challenge of language accessibility. A major esports tournament might be watched by audiences spread across dozens of countries, each expecting commentary in their native tongue. Today, that typically requires hiring and coordinating multiple commentary teams for each language, which is expensive, logistically complex, and often results in uneven quality across different language streams.

ValkaAI's AI commentator technology has the potential to eliminate this problem entirely. By generating commentary in real time and adapting it to any language at scale, the platform could make any sports or esports event accessible to global audiences in their preferred language, simultaneously and without the enormous operational overhead of traditional multilingual broadcasting. This is a compelling commercial value proposition, and it is the kind of practical, revenue-generating use case that investors look for when backing early-stage deep-tech companies. It also creates a clear and accelerating path to revenue, which is critical for a startup preparing to scale its infrastructure and expand its team.

Beyond sports commentary, the applications within the broader sports ecosystem are wide-ranging. AI avatars could power personalised highlight packages, interactive post-match analysis, adaptive fan engagement experiences, and immersive virtual co-watching environments. Each of these represents a potential product extension that builds naturally on the core technology ValkaAI is developing with this AI funding. The company is laying foundations today that could support an entire ecosystem of AI-powered entertainment products tomorrow.

How the €12 Million Will Be Deployed Across Three Continents

Securing significant AI funding is only meaningful if the capital is deployed with discipline and strategic focus. ValkaAI has a clear and well-articulated plan for how the €12 million will be put to work, and it spans three interconnected priorities: expanding the research and product teams, scaling computational infrastructure, and executing the first commercial pilot integrations with strategic partners.

On the talent acquisition front, ValkaAI plans to grow its presence across the United States, Europe, and the United Arab Emirates. Each geography serves a distinct strategic purpose. The United States — and San Francisco specifically — provides access to the world's deepest pool of AI and machine learning talent, as well as proximity to the venture capital community and major technology companies that might become customers or partners. Europe, centred on the Czech Republic, represents the company's founding home and continues to offer exceptional engineering talent alongside a growing startup support infrastructure. The UAE, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the most dynamic hubs for digital innovation and AI adoption in the world, and ValkaAI's Dubai presence positions the company to capture opportunities across the Middle East and broader MENA region.

Scaling computational infrastructure is the second major use of this AI funding round, and it is arguably the most technically critical. Real-time AI avatar generation is among the most computationally demanding tasks in modern software. Producing visually convincing digital humans that respond to inputs in milliseconds requires specialised hardware, optimised model architectures, and highly efficient cloud infrastructure capable of handling surges in demand without introducing latency. As ValkaAI moves from internal development to live commercial deployments, the robustness and efficiency of its infrastructure will directly determine the quality of the experience it can deliver. Investing heavily in this layer now, before the commercial launch, is a smart decision that will compound in value as the product scales.

The third priority — executing commercial pilot integrations — is where the AI funding translates most directly into market validation. By working with sports and esports distribution partners where ValkaAI already has domain credibility, the company can test its technology under real-world conditions, gather meaningful performance and user experience data, and iterate quickly before committing to a full commercial launch. This approach reduces go-to-market risk significantly and ensures that ValkaAI enters the commercial market with a product that has already proven its value in controlled but authentic conditions. Miloš Lokajíček has been clear that this is not a quick-win strategy. The company is building for the long term, and the pre-seed financing is designed to create the technical and organisational foundation that will support that long-term journey.

The Bigger Picture: What This Means for AI Funding in Europe and Beyond

The ValkaAI story is a powerful data point in a broader and rapidly evolving narrative about the maturation of European AI funding and the rise of deep-tech startups outside of traditional Silicon Valley dominance. For years, the received wisdom in the global technology industry was that the most ambitious and well-capitalised AI ventures would always emerge from the United States, with perhaps a few significant players developing out of China. Stories like ValkaAI's are actively challenging that assumption and doing so at a scale that demands attention.

Dan Hastík of Tensor Ventures offered a particularly striking characterisation of ValkaAI's technology, describing it as groundbreaking deep tech that will have a major impact not just in entertainment, but across many other sectors that most people cannot yet fully imagine. This framing is significant because it positions real-time AI avatar technology as a horizontal platform capability rather than a narrowly defined entertainment tool. The same underlying technology that powers an AI sports commentator could, in principle, be adapted for applications in telehealth, remote education, customer service, corporate training, and a wide range of other domains where personalised, real-time human-like interaction adds meaningful value.

This broader perspective is precisely why AI funding news of this nature deserves attention beyond the immediate context of the startup in question. Each major pre-seed or early-stage investment in foundational AI technology is, in effect, a bet on the future direction of human-computer interaction. The more capital that flows into companies like ValkaAI — teams that are genuinely pushing the frontier of what AI can do in real time — the faster the entire ecosystem advances. And as that ecosystem advances, new categories of product, service, and experience become possible that were previously unimaginable.

The AI avatar and digital entertainment market is still in its earliest stages of development. Most of the infrastructure, standards, and user expectations that will define this space a decade from now have yet to be established. Startups that secure significant early-stage AI funding and build foundational technology during this formative period are uniquely positioned to shape that future. ValkaAI, with its exceptional team drawn from the world's leading AI research institutions, its ambitious but grounded commercial strategy, and its landmark €12 million in pre-seed capital, is precisely the kind of company that could define the next chapter of how the world's two billion sports fans and hundreds of millions of esports viewers experience the content they love. The AI World Organisation will continue tracking this story closely, and we encourage you to stay connected for all the latest AI funding news as the generative AI and digital entertainment landscape continues to evolve at remarkable speed.