How I Ended Up Building a Poker Company

My name is Jan Hlavica and I’m 31 years old. Poker has been part of my life for a very long time. I started playing it with friends while traveling to football matches as a kid and I fell in love with it. So much so that when I was 18 and looking for a part-time job, I took a dealer course and went to work in a casino as a dealer. There they told me that I had been scammed by the course and that I basically didn’t know anything. Within a month I learned everything, but the day before I was supposed to sit down at a table for the first time, the casino shut down. Too bad.

Nevertheless, I kept playing poker with enthusiasm on a recreational level. Whether it was at the dorms at Florida Tech university I attended, with friends from the business world, or with teammates during my professional football career. Even though I never played poker professionally, it has always been more than just fun for me.

In the fall of 2025, while considering my next business move, I knew poker was pulling me in. Given that I have experience from the venture capital and have made several angel investments myself, I started thinking about how I could combine these two passions of mine: investing and poker. I put together a concept aimed at finding talented poker players, verifying their skills, and then investing in them. All of this with maximum scalability in mind.

And that’s how Upstakes was born. The world’s first skill-based staking platform. Accessible to anyone who has an internet connection and wants to kickstart their poker career.

I started sharing the idea with people from the poker community in my hometown of Olomouc, Czech Republic. It didn’t take long before I met Jan Nakládal, known in the poker world as “hownorez,” who happened to live there as well. The timing was perfect, because he had already been looking for something where he could use his experience from professional poker and staking. We started working on a proof of concept. I then found a third co-founder, my acquaintance David Simonyi, who joined as CTO.

Together, at the turn of 2024 and 2025, we launched a very primitive PoC that more than 100 players went through. The concept was simple: a 50-question poker quiz, and we split 1,000 dollars among the top five players. The players were excited, they liked the concept, and so I started talking to investors.

In the summer of 2025, we agreed with investor Matěj Turek and his 10X fund that he would provide us with our first angel investment to build an MVP. We built it and officially launched it on the last day of September 2025. And seeing Upstakes featured in the media for the first time after launch was a special moment for all of us. Just look how good hownorez looked in one of the articles :))

Today, Upstakes is a fully functioning platform with more than 12,000 users, and our stable of players is gradually growing. We are now working on becoming more than just a staking platform. Our ambition is to become one of the most technologically advanced companies in poker.

We are working on new data models that will give players deep insights into their performance,  allow us to point out players’ strengths and weaknesses and give us as investors relevant data on predicted profitability. This will help us make better decisions about who to fund and to what extent, in a way that helps players develop as much as possible.

Our mission remains the same: to give players all over the world the opportunity to reach their full potential.

Thank you for being on this journey with us. I’m looking forward to showing you the amazing new things the entire Upstakes team is working so hard on.