Jan Zizka: Co-founder and CEO of Brightpick

Who Jan Zizka is

Dr. Jan Zizka runs Brightpick and its parent company, Photoneo Brightpick Group, and sets the company's strategy while staying close to new robot development. He has filed more than 20 patents, from 3D sensing methods to mobile robotics.^3,1

Machine vision from high school to MIT

Zizka says he has been interested in machine vision and robotics since high school. He earned a PhD in computer vision from Comenius University, and during it did research on computational cameras and optics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before starting a company he was a research engineer at Micro-Epsilon, a sensor manufacturer.^2,3

While working at MIT, he concluded that most machine vision was still 2D and lacked the accuracy and robustness robots needed.²

I often simplify Brightpick's journey by saying we started with the eyes (machine vision), then added the brains (AI), the legs (mobility), and arms (robotic arm) to eventually create Brightpick Autopicker, our flagship robot.Jan Zizka, interview published by Brightpick

Starting Photoneo in 2013

Zizka, Michal Maly, and Tomas Kovacovsky were PhD students when they started Photoneo in 2013, with Branislav Pulis as the fourth co-founder. Three of them grew up together, and Zizka and Maly competed against each other in regional math and physics competitions in high school.^2,1

Photoneo became a 3D machine vision supplier to customers such as General Motors, Volkswagen, and KUKA, and Zebra Technologies acquired it in early 2025.^3,1

Building Brightpick

Photoneo's logistics customers kept running into labor shortages, rising costs, picking errors, and seasonal peaks, and the founders set up Brightpick to address all of them with one system. The Autopicker was unveiled in February 2023.²

Brightpick raised $12 million in November 2024 to expand installations in the US. The founders sold Photoneo to Zebra for EUR 60 million and reinvested most of the proceeds in Brightpick.^4,5