How U+ Became FifthRow: The Journey of Transforming Innovation

The Early Days: A Venture Builder’s Evolution

At 14, I discovered a passion for coding and design—a passion more about learning and potential than any specific business model. Almost to the day, it’s been 15 years since I founded U+. Over this period, we grew from a small office in Prague to ventures spanning Europe, New York, Silicon Valley, Dubai, and beyond.

Our mission was to help companies create and scale new ventures—from initial market research to ideation, and ultimately, building and launching products. We did this around 120 times over the past decade. But despite our success, a thought lingered: Is this the best way? Can we do more?

I wasn’t content being just another agency CEO. I wanted something bigger—something that could genuinely transform how companies innovate.

The Drive for a Platform

Two years ago, I began experimenting with an idea: what if we could automate venture-building? Imagine an algorithm that could identify the best next step for any company and connect it with the right people to execute. We envisioned a marketplace—one side focused on research and concept development across industries, the other on talent. But the real magic was in the algorithm—matching needs with solutions to maximize innovation ROI.

And then, AI exploded. With tools like ChatGPT and GPT-4, the possibilities for automating innovation became tangible. FifthRow was born—not just to automate research and ideation but to create an entire platform that streamlines the innovation journey, offering companies fully-formed, actionable solutions.

Turning Vision into Reality: Launching FifthRow

On May 30, 2023, we officially launched FifthRow, and the response was immediate. In our first month, we had 75 proof-of-concept projects and started generating revenue. By September, we celebrated our first major success: a project with a leading U.S. insurance company. FifthRow analyzed seven problem spaces, generated 200 ideas, built landing pages, and delivered a solution that exceeded industry benchmarks—all in just three weeks.

However, with success came challenges. The consulting model that had once been our foundation was increasingly hard to justify when FifthRow could deliver similar, if not superior, results in a fraction of the time. We poured our 15 years of expertise into building the Innovation App—a platform that combined our knowledge in product development, design, commercialization, and more.

But it wasn’t enough for us.

The Autonomous Revolution

In March 2024, we built the first version of Flows—a no-code autonomous agent platform—initially for our own needs, to automate prompt engineering across multiple datasets. Then, GPT-4o arrived, offering a fast, intelligent, and cost-effective model that made agents a viable alternative to traditional app-building.

We began by analyzing the most common innovation and strategy workflows used by Fortune 500 companies, and systematically automated them. After three months, we launched the “Generate Flow” feature, capable of autonomously creating agent tasks and selecting the right tools—whether for online searches, Crunchbase lookups, or beyond.

From the start, FifthRow leveraged a complex Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) setup. The Innovation App now runs roughly 1,000 prompts across 500 sources (approximately 10,000 pages of content) to produce its market research section. To us, running prompts without grounding in solid data and context is merely wrapping a service in attractive packaging, at best—snake oil at worst. Effective knowledge work demands data, a refined process, and context.

In September, we launched Datasets, enabling Flows to ground its agents in custom datasets (previously based on combinations of app data, online search, and Crunchbase). With this, we had most of the ingredients required to automate knowledge work.

U+ Merges with FifthRow: A New Model for Professional Services

By 2024, every U+ project was rooted in FifthRow. Through Flows, we automated more of U+’s internal processes, with each customer interaction feeding into further autonomous process-building. We realized we had fully become a FifthRow company.

We believe that all knowledge work will be automated.

We believe that 80% of professional services and consulting work will be automated.

We believe that corporations will replace a significant share of external and internal spend with autonomous agents—through Flows, Apps, and Coworkers.

FifthRow is here to create a new paradigm for knowledge work—transforming professional services into scalable SaaS solutions. We’re building a marketplace for automating knowledge work. Whether you’re a consultant aiming to convert service margins into SaaS margins or an enterprise ready to replace consultants and supercharge your teams with reliable AI, FifthRow has the platform for you.