AI takes off (traffic)

work in progress

• Edtech and education. Your consumer traffic... I am sorry (and get ready for more). Chegg Sues Alphabet, Says Google AI Led to Strategic Review – their organic traffic dropped 34%. As Tomasz writes there – "AI agents crawl and digest the internet, we witness the birth of a new economic hierarchy". Positive AI education spin from Estonia – the first country in the world to bring AI to schools with OpenAI and Anthropic – well done. Meantime in Lithuania, Vedliai teams with Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind and launches Experience AI program – it will reach 40,000 pupils. On the policy side, tech leaders keep calling for simple primary education reform – here Rytis from Omnisend.
  • What ventures? Kristina (EditAI) is heading to Nordic Edtech Forum. Solfeg was awarded – their music education solution being used at 25,000 schools (Iron Wolf portco). Baltic EdTech week is March 19-20. Steam Academy founders are pushing Exoclass internationally – it's been a backbone for their own after-school programs. Indie projects: ScreenTreat is an iOS app to turn ScreenTime into a positive motivation for kids.
• Health and wellness. Persikas has sold more than 15,000 weight loss memberships in LT – is that deja vu Kilo Health, almost 10 years ago?
• AI. FIRSTPICK launching AI accelerator in May 2025. New under the sun: Emmi AI – AI-Powered physics architecture and models for industries – co-founded by Miks Mikelsons and the team. Silver Keskküla bringing AI to fight AI-driven scam with ScamGuardian.ai. Tomas Okmanas had fun-to-listen chat with Sifted – mostly on nexos.ai, but also puzzling Amy with unconventional ways they run things. How does he run several huge companies in parallel? What kind of "family office" is Tesonet? So which basketball clubs do you own now?
• Fintech. Set to further grow 800+ team in Vilnius? – Shift4 is acquiring Global Blue, a payments and technology provider to luxury brands, for $2.5 billion. At $11.2B run rate Shopify is growing at a stunning 31% – "it is effectively an ecommerce fintech that is powered by a SaaS solution". An inspiration for Omnisend to acquire? Momentha (gifts via phone) founder showing that SharkTank is worthwhile for customer acquisition, too. TransferGo expands into B2B. VIALET is partnering with AMLYZE for all things AML.
• Sport. Vinted people tackling new sports ventures. Edas, Nerius and Ignas introduced Motifind for the Sharks, they launched something like Treatwell but for sports coaches? Another project is a simple Euroleague mini-game that Vytautas (Vinted) built in the evenings.

rounds and capital

• Pulsetto secures EUR 2M for defence applications for its vagus nerve stimulation tech. Scalewolf is leading this round on its own. The company secured a EUR 20 million valuation after raising EUR 400k in investment on Lithuanian Shark Tank and has been featured in a Netflix documentary this year. 
• BADideas.fund had its first exit – their community-backed RoomPriceGenie with a EUR 170k. Now they secured a $75M investment.
• For Europeans, YC can't be copied or replicated. But early-stage funds and accelerators can learn something about branding from these guys in Finland: 54-room hacker hotel.

sponsors

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Oxylabs [Step into the world of web data gathering]
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Wargaming [award-winning game developer, careers]

Tech Philomaths' community

• Lithuanian founders in US building something new. We found 15 names.
• Lean and Mean - small profitable Baltic tech firms
• Baltic Founders with YC experience
• Startup lists for the Baltics - Drone startups, Marketplaces, Sportstech
• Repeat Lithuanian founders - 40+ serial founders building now