The Studio That Never Took a Kč of Outside Money: How STRV Built Tinder's Apps From Karlín

STRV's Karlín office sits a short walk from the Vltava, but almost none of its revenue comes from anywhere near it. Roughly 90% of the software design and engineering studio's client base is American, a fact its now-sole owner, Luboš "Lubo" Smid, treats less as a curiosity than as the entire point of the company.

From uLikeIt to STRV

The company's origin predates its name. David Semerád and Martin Stava began building mobile apps under the label uLikeIt before Pavel Zeifart and Smid joined and pushed the group toward the US market, at which point the four rebranded to STRV. Smid, an information-management graduate of the University of Hradec Králové who spent an exchange year at Coventry University and a semester at Vermont's Norwich University, joined the founding group in 2011–2012 as a project manager after returning from his studies abroad. He moved quickly into the chief operating officer role and became the person most responsible for building relationships with clients thousands of kilometres away — first through cold persistence, later through referrals, which today account for roughly half of STRV's new business.

STRV's own account of its founding dates the company to 2004, and its growth since has been entirely self-funded. That detail matters more than it might elsewhere: a Prague-based studio competing for Silicon Valley budgets, with no venture backing to cushion a bad quarter, had to be profitable from very early on or fold.

The pivot to America

The US expansion — offices eventually opened in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York — was not incidental to STRV's growth; it was the growth strategy. Smid has described the Czech market of a decade ago as simply not ready for what STRV wanted to build, which pushed the founders toward personal relocation and direct, in-market relationship-building rather than selling through partner networks or intermediaries. The approach produced a client list that now includes Tinder, Microsoft, ClassDojo, Barnes & Noble, The Athletic, Autodesk and the fitness brand Barry's — a company Smid has said the founders pursued partly because they were personally devoted customers of its workouts.

That client roster is also STRV's marketing pitch, and it is self-reported rather than independently audited. The company says on LinkedIn that the products it has built have supported clients that have collectively raised over $12 billion in funding, and it markets itself as a Clutch-verified "Global Leader" within the top 1% of B2B companies on that review platform.

Consolidation, not funding

In December 2024, STRV's ownership structure changed in a way that runs against the usual Czech tech narrative of external investment or acquisition. Smid bought out the remaining stakes held by his three co-founders — Semerád, Stava and Zeifart — becoming the company's sole owner after a process that began in 2018, when he took over as CEO, and continued in 2020, when he acquired a majority stake. That ownership sequence, unlike the client-side claims above, was independently reported in the Czech business press. Smid has described the move as the natural conclusion of thirteen years in which his role and the company's identity became increasingly hard to separate. The other three founders had already stepped back from active management in the preceding years.

The buyout was explicitly framed, in Czech press interviews around the deal, as preparation for STRV's next phase rather than an exit: Smid has spoken publicly about repositioning the studio for an era in which AI tooling reshapes how digital products get built, and about STRV Labs, a newer division focused on the company's own product bets and early-stage investments alongside client work.

Why the story matters for CBR readers

STRV is frequently cited, alongside firms such as Profinit and Altamira, as an example of Czech IT companies that moved beyond staff-augmentation outsourcing toward owning more of the product relationship with Western clients — a shift this publication examined in depth in its earlier reporting on the sector's outsourcing-to-product-ownership pivot. What that earlier reporting treated as a sector-wide trend, STRV's own history shows as a two-decade bet by four specific people, funded entirely out of their own cash flow, that a Czech studio could win — and keep — blue-chip American clients without a headquarters address in San Francisco. The same repricing pressure now reshaping how regional agencies bill for that work is the subject of our separate report on outcome-based contracts.