Startups
After Selling Zásilkovna, Simona Kijonková Is Quietly Buying Up the Next Generation
Prague — When Packeta, the parent company of Czech parcel-delivery giant Zásilkovna, changed hands in 2024, most coverage focused on the price tag and the buyers. Less noticed since then is what its founder has done with the proceeds — a pattern of reinvestment that says something about where Czech e-commerce capital goes once it exits.
By Jan · Contributor · Independent Journalist · Published
Jan is an independent contributor to the Czech Business Review; his views and sourcing are his own.
The sale
Zásilkovna, founded in 2010 by Simona Kijonková and Jaromír Kijonek, grew into the largest parcel-locker network in the Czech Republic and expanded under the Packeta Group banner into Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Romania and Slovenia, eventually operating more than 15,000 pick-up points across four countries and, by some counts, over 186,000 including partner networks worldwide. The company posted consistent operating profit — revenue grew 23 percent to CZK 6.1 billion in 2022, with parcel volume up a quarter to almost 90 million shipments — a rare profile among Czech scale-ups, most of which raise venture capital for years before turning a profit, if they ever do.
In 2023 the Kijonek family, who held 48.6 percent of shares through their investment vehicle JSK Investments, put the company up for sale, drawing bids from private equity group Advent International, Czech financial group PPF, and energy investor Daniel Křetínský, among others, all clearing a reported minimum bid threshold of €300 million. The eventual buyer was a consortium of CVC Capital Partners — the Luxembourg firm that also backed Czech antivirus company Avast before its stock-market listing — and Emma Capital, a vehicle led by former PPF chief executive Jiří Šmejc, with CVC taking 65 percent and Emma Capital the remaining 35. Neither side disclosed the purchase price, though the Kijoneks reportedly received around CZK 4.5 billion personally from the deal.
Where the money went
What happened next is the less-told part of the story. Rather than stepping back from Czech business entirely, Kijonková redirected JSK Investments into a deliberately different set of sectors. In mid-2025, JSK took a majority stake in Volter, a Czech maker of outdoor wheelchairs and mobility equipment for people with disabilities — Kijonková's first move into healthcare devices and manufacturing, a segment she has said she intends to build out further with additional acquisitions of related medical-device makers. Months later, JSK acquired 60 percent of iPrice Recare, a Central European refurbished-electronics group behind the iPrice.cz, BestBerg and Patricca brands, with founder Patrik Jokl staying on as a minority co-owner — a deal Kijonková has framed as continuing the e-commerce, logistics and sustainability thread that ran through Packeta and her earlier investment in online perfumery Alensa. JSK has also backed iSono Health, a US startup developing a wearable 3D breast-ultrasound device, marking Kijonková's first cross-Atlantic bet.
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What this says about Czech exit capital
The pattern is notable less for any single deal than for what it implies about where Czech tech wealth recirculates after a major exit. Packeta's sale is, by most measures, the largest logistics-sector exit the Czech startup ecosystem has produced, and rather than that capital flowing into diaspora funds, foreign real estate, or a single follow-on mega-fund, it has gone into a scattered set of mid-sized domestic and cross-border acquisitions across healthcare devices, circular-economy e-commerce and international health-tech — sectors with only partial overlap with the logistics and consumer e-commerce expertise that built the fortune in the first place.
That diversification pattern is arguably healthier for the ecosystem than a founder simply retiring on the proceeds, but it also means the next generation of companies carrying Kijonková's capital and operational playbook look nothing like Zásilkovna itself — a reminder that the "recycling" of exit capital into new Czech startups doesn't necessarily recreate the kind of company that generated it.