Our partners

The Bakala Foundation is the Czech family foundation of Michaela and Zdeněk Bakala. It was established in 2007 with the aim of supporting talented Czech students on their way to excellent education, thus not only fulfilling their dreams, but also making a positive impact to the entire Czech society. Under the flagship Scholarship programme, The Bakala Foundation has enabled nearly 200 students to study at top foreign universities; in other programmes it supports students in specific fields, such as journalism and architecture. The Foundation also supports meaningful third-party projects in education and science.

Charles University (CUNI) is the largest educational institution in the Czech Republic and one of the oldest universities in the world. There are almost 51,000 students (about one-sixth of all students in the Czech Republic) study one of its 870+ accredited study programs. The University has over 8,600 employees, including nearly 4,000 academic and scientific staff. CUNI places great emphasis on international collaboration with prestigious educational and research institutions (it has concluded more than four hundred bilateral agreements and 208 international partnership agreements with foreign universities) and supports foreign internships and stays abroad of its students and employees.

Diana is a young biotechnology company founded in 2018 as a spin-off from IOCB with the vision of finally building a pharmaceutical company in Czechia with its own drug development program. In the pandemic, Diana temporarily changed course and used the know-how in high-throughput screening and qPCR to develop their own diagnostic solution for covid, which gained a significant part of the Czech market and contributed to improving the availability of covid testing. Now Diana is going back to the original plan and investing the profits from the covid diagnostics in the development of its drug discovery programs and expanding their capacity as a contract research organization using, among other things, the DIANA method, which kickstarted the company.

Renáta and Petr Kellner founded the first family foundation dedicated to education in 2002. Later, they merged their philanthropic activities in the education area under the umbrella of The Kellner Family Foundation, which has long supported education in the Czech Republic. During its existence, the Kellner Family Foundation has donated approximately CZK 1.85 billion to socially beneficial projects, primarily located in the Czech Republic.

Contipro was founded in 1990, immediately after the Velvet Revolution, and has over time developed into one of the world’s largest producers of ultrapure hyaluronic acid, as well as cosmetic and medical products based on it. The company has a very active research program, which employs half of all of its staff. As a result, it also clearly offers job positions in R&D attractive for czexpats.

Zentiva is a pan-European platform that develops, manufactures and delivers high-quality and affordable medicines and dietary supplements to more than 100 million people in Europe every year. With over 530 years of history, rooting back to a small pharmacy in the heart of Prague called the Black Eagle, Zentiva continues to grow and innovate off-patent medicines. Its two research and development centers, located in Prague and Ankleshwar, play a crucial role in creating new pharmaceutical formulations. Meanwhile, its four manufacturing plants in Prague, Bucharest (two sites), and Ankleshwar produce more than half of the products in its portfolio.