BigHub wins Readers' Choice Award for the best business story in the EY Entrepreneur of the Year competition

We've always focused on leveraging the latest technologies to deliver top-notch solutions. From the start, one of our most important partnerships has been with a tech leader in cloud and AI – Microsoft. This year has been full of exciting updates, from becoming a Microsoft Managed Partner to achieving the latest Fabric Featured Partner status.

_{What is Microsoft Fabric?}

Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Fabric in public preview – an exciting end-to-end analytics solution that combines Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI. This all-in-one analytics powerhouse features seven core workloads seamlessly integrated into a single architecture, enhancing data governance with Microsoft Purview, simplifying data management with OneLake, and empowering users through Microsoft 365 integration. With advanced AI features like Copilot, Fabric boosts productivity and offers partners opportunities to create innovative, value-driven solutions, making data environments more secure, compliant, and cost-effective.

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Being a Fabric Featured Partner means we’re skilled in using Fabric and ready to guide our clients through its implementation. Our team has undergone extensive training and with many clients where Fabric is already running, we can provide top-notch support and insights.

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_{What this means for our customers}

Microsoft Fabric is a comprehensive data platform designed to streamline your organization's data processes. By unifying various data operations, it significantly reduces the costs associated with operating, integrating, managing, and securing your data.

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• Stay ahead with cutting-edge tech: Partnering with BigHub, you can access advanced features and updates that will keep your solutions state-of-the-art.
• Better support: Our close relationship with Microsoft, and access to their experts and resources, enables us to resolve even the trickiest issues quickly and solve everything correctly.
• Boosted productivity with AI: Using Fabric helps both our customers and our team to enhance productivity, and enjoy significantly faster data access and time-to-delivery.

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Back in 2016, two friends, Karel Šimánek and Tomáš Hubínek, decided to take a different path. They were passionate about artificial intelligence long before it became trendy, and despite everyone advising them against it, they stuck to their vision. The result? BigHub—a company specializing in advanced data solutions born out of their determination to do things their way.

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Clients that trust us

Our unique journey and perseverance were recognized first abroad, with first clients from Germany, and the US, thanks to our cooperation with GoodData. But our domestic market quickly matured and we started to work for enterprise clients in Czechia and Slovakia. The first clients were mainly and quite surprisingly from the energy sector, ČEZ, E.ON, PPAS, and VSE. But we always saw the potential of AI technology for transforming every business. Our goal has always been to make AI accessible for all kinds of businesses, big or small.

While large enterprise clients are still our primary clientele, thanks to the enormous growth of opportunities that came with GPT, we've been opening up to small and medium-sized businesses too. Our GPT-based solutions offer clients better access to data analytics, powerful automation of back-office processes, and upgrade of their services - for a fraction of the price it would cost 8 years ago.

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Wide recognition of our expertise

We’ve had some incredible milestones along the way, which helped BigHub to be recognized as a leader in applied AI. In 2021, BigHub ranked among the top ten fastest-growing tech companies in Central Europe in the prestigious Deloitte Technology Fast 50 CE ranking. Not bad for a company that started with just a few friends and a lot of ambition!

BigHub became widely recognized in 2023 when we won the Readers' Choice Award for the best business story in the EY Entrepreneur of the Year competition. Apart from the successes in awards, we gained recognition in prestigious outlets like Forbes, Hospodářské noviny, CzechCrunch, and EURO.cz.

Both of our founders have shared their expertise on major platforms like CNN Prima NEWS, where they provided valuable tips on spotting and protecting against deepfake and how to spot them, and in a series of interviews for Roklen24, where Karel Šimánek and Tomáš Hubínek discussed their insights on AI and the evolving digital landscape. 

Our story shows how following your vision pays off, even when nobody else on the market sees it through.

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Business growth

We built the BigHub on a strong team, friendly culture, and meaningful work. These foundations have helped us to grow sustainably over the years, growing approximately 20+ percent each year. This year, we’ll reach the big milestone of CZK 100 million in revenue.

We’ve evolved from offering custom-tailored projects to scalable products that still allow for client customization. It’s about finding that sweet spot between prefabricated solutions and personalized service, like automating insurance claim processes to save time for our clients.

Our growth is based on the smart and motivated people we have the privilege to work with daily. Our team now consists of 46 amazing individuals. Whether it’s football matches, cycling trips, or summer parties, we succeeded in building and maintaining a culture that turns colleagues into lifelong friends.

We’ve always believed that education is key to staying ahead in such a fast-moving industry. That's why we not only work hard for our clients but also focus on our development. We regularly host internal workshops and hackathons, where our team can learn new upcoming technologies as well as come up with fresh ideas and innovative applications.

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Acknowledged Partners

None of this would be possible without the support of our great partners. Microsoft has been a key technology vendor for many of our enterprise clients, and our partnership with them continues to thrive as our business grows. With time our partnership deepened and we are proud to gain multiple statuses - Microsoft Managed Partner, Microsoft Solution Partner for Data & AI on Azure, or the latest Fabric Featured Partner, to name but a few.

As our client base has expanded, we’ve become technology agnostic, working seamlessly with all the major platforms and gaining their partnerships as well, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Databricks. These partnerships are just another proof of our team's hard work and their never-ending will to learn. At the same time, proficiency in all the major technologies helps us to pick and deliver the very best solutions to our clients.

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Giving back

Our connection to CTU – our alma mater – remains strong. For the past three years, we’ve been teaching a course on Applied Data Analysis, and this year we’re excited to launch a new follow-up course on Big Data tools and architecture. We sponsor student activities and provide both financial and non-financial support to initiatives like the Hlávka Foundation. We’re proud to say that our commitment to giving back remains unwavering. Whether it’s supporting the Data Talk community as a proud partner of the Data Mesh meetup for all the data enthusiasts out there, teaching, or mentoring students, we’re always looking for ways to inspire and contribute to the next generation of tech talent.

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BigHub beyond the big puddle 

This year we are strengthening our US presence! It represents a significant step forward in expanding our global reach, with a dedicated sales representative starting in October 2023 and multiple US clients already on board. It’s a bold move, and we couldn’t be more proud of the incredible team that made it happen. This is a big step for us in sharing our AI and data expertise with the largest market in the world!

As we look ahead, we’re more excited than ever for what the future holds and the new opportunities to innovate, grow, and give back. Our journey just started, and what a ride it has been so far!

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Pushing Boundaries with Generative AI

Artificial intelligence has always been in our DNA. Long before ChatGPT made headlines, we were using early GPT models for tasks like analyzing customer reviews. But the new wave of generative models has fundamentally changed what's possible. To keep up with — and get ahead of — this rapidly evolving space, we launched an internal initiative: BigHack, a hands-on hackathon focused on generative AI and its real-world applications.

We didn’t want to experiment in a vacuum. Instead, we chose real client challenges, making sure our teams were tackling scenarios that reflect the current business environment. The goal? Accelerate learning, build practical experience, and surface innovative AI-powered solutions for tangible problems.

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Secure and Scalable: Choosing the Right Platform

One key consideration was how to work with these models in a secure and scalable way. While OpenAI’s public services have sparked mainstream adoption, they come with serious concerns around data privacy and usage. Many corporations have responded by banning them entirely.

That’s why we opted for Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service. It allows us to leverage the same powerful models while ensuring enterprise-grade data governance. With Azure, all data remains within the client’s control and is not used for model training. Plus, setting up the infrastructure was faster than ever — minutes instead of days compared to older on-prem solutions.

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From Ideas to Prototypes: Two Real Projects

We selected two project ideas from a larger pool of discussions and got to work. With full team involvement and the power of the cloud, we built two working prototypes that could easily transition into production.

1. “Ask Your Data” App

This application enables business users to query analytical data using natural language, removing the dependency on data analysts for routine questions like:

• “What’s our churn rate?”
• “Where can we cut IT costs?”

By connecting directly to existing data sources, the app delivers answers in seconds, democratizing access to insights.

2. Intelligent Internal Knowledge Access

Our second prototype tackled unstructured internal documentation — especially regulatory and policy content. We built a system that allows employees to ask free-form questions and get accurate responses from dense, often chaotic documentation.

This solution is built on two key pillars:

• Automated Reporting: Eliminates the need for complex dashboard setups by using AI to interpret well-governed data and generate reports based on simple queries.
• Regulatory Q&A: Helps users instantly find information buried in hundreds of pages of internal compliance or legal documents.

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