Fifteen years of self-funding ended this week for CDN77, a Prague operator of internet plumbing that had never taken a cent from outside investors. Private equity group CVC Capital Partners has bought a minority holding, in a transaction a source said values the company near $1.9B, the biggest such deal in Central and Eastern European tech this year.
Founder Zdenek Cendra keeps his majority stake and remains chief executive, with the management team unchanged. CDN77 has been cash-flow positive for 11 consecutive years while building its own edge network rather than reselling others’ hardware.
That network spans more than 230 locations and moves traffic at 330 terabits per second. Customers include Rakuten TV, Udemy and Starz.
The company reports revenues heading toward about $270M this year, up from $218M in 2025, which puts the deal at roughly seven times sales. It is now pushing beyond content delivery into edge computing, storage and dedicated CPU and GPU capacity for AI workloads.
Cendra said he had spent a long time in talks with other potential backers and found CVC’s approach different, framed around respect for what the team had already built rather than a list of changes.
For a region that often watches its founders sell early, a bootstrapped company reaching a near-unicorn-plus valuation on its own terms is a rare datapoint.
