"Should win that category"

work in progress

• Not Bored. Tomas is turning Bored Panda towards animation, starting with his own scenarios – forget baby shark and try Fire Spike, they got 14m views last month! In games, Nordcurrent expands its portfolio with the acquisition of the legendary Cinemaware catalog.

• Mobility is changing – new firms are being built
  • Regional charging markets are up for grabs. Inbalance Grid is investing EUR 12m in LT and PL, and wants to roll out aggressively elsewhere in CEE. Eleport closed another financing round from the current investors Gren and Ambient Sound Investments, will invest EUR 20M in 2024 alone to install hundreds of new charging points in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Lectrium joined URBAN-X accelerator.
  • Cars. Estonian Planet42 (rent-to-buy subscription in South Africa) raised $16M locally from Standard Bank, mostly debt. Charge Cars (Matas is CTO there) added "vortex" mode to their electric Mustangs (are they surviving as Arrival closed the shop?). Elinta Motors juices Subaru BRZ - "we'll do manual vortex". Get to know OBDeleven, they have 3m customers already.
    Why did Apple cancel the car program after many years?
  • MaaS. The pioneers in the field - Finnish MaaS Global, files for bankruptcy. Choosing a different revenue model, Trafi achieved profitability recently.
• Award-winning. Mantas, AISPECO founder and CEO, is among 50 Geospatial World Rising Stars. Torus won the “startup innovation of the year” at Merchant Payments Ecosystem 2024. Integrated Optics won a pitch contest at the prestigious 'Quantum Technologies in Defence Applications conference.
• People move . Vilius Semenas is returning to CoingGate as a new CEO. Mantas Staliunas is now CEO of VIALET. Erik Bhullar assumes the General Partner role at Baltic Sandbox Ventures. Aleksej is now technical lead at Axiology. Vilius Adomauskas follows the trend of experienced executives going fractional, here is a list of all these fractional fellows in the Baltics.
• Outpost SEA. Back to Singapore, where organizers paid Taylor Swift $20m or more so that she could perform all six shows in the city-state, and Singapore to benefit from approx 200k fans flying in from the region and spending locally. Last week we listed some Baltic entrepreneurs, but our amazing readers got back with important additions:

• Ventures. Estonians are building Finfra in Indonesia. Jeff App is growing in the region, and Tom Niparts is doubling down on this opportunity. Reverse Resources has a broad presence across Asia
• People. Karolis Rosickas is a biotech entrepreneur, now CEO of Regeneus in SG. Laura helped scale HappyFresh, now involved with scale-ups in the region. Audra is a partner at First Move, a consumer early-stage VC.
• Baltic Dynamism. Baltics is where both global profitable unicorns get built, but economies still maintain some cost advantage. A case in point - GoCardless, which acquired Nordigen in Latvia earlier, is reducing the staff but has already transferred functions to Riga and plans hiring +60 people during the year.
• Bio for the planet. BravelyCultured, developers of ocean-based biosurfactants and proteins for a sustainable world, joins the University of Cambridge accelerator. Inobiostar is working to secure EUR 3M from EIC to start producing sustainable sorbent for aquatic oil spills clean-up. Also early yet ambitious –  Biohifas and Freya Cultivation Systems, in Baltic Sandbox portfolio. To watch closely: HeavyFinance team is spending more time in the fields and just started EUR 50m private credit fund to help farmers choose sustainable practices.
• Getting on a flight? Three pods for you
  • Tomas Kemtys, GP at Contrarian Ventures – how to compete in venture, globally
  • Tomas Moska, Turing College (in LT), setting the founder mindset
  • Aurimas Bakas & Andrius Minkevicius, CyberUpgrade, on the opportunity in the space and serial founder learnings