work in progress
Spacers. Who to follow ICEYE, now EUR 10B company, which 10 years ago looked "too capital-intensive for our small Fund II” at Lifeline (luckily, they changed their minds). Space is hot, including multiples now. Blackswan Space lands EUR 2.5M round building autonomy for spacecraft: a Mission Design Simulator for autonomous space missions and the RPO Kit. Delta Biosciences went into space, now new frontier: military medicine. Matas + co.founder want to build Spaceprint (3D printers in microgravity). Julius is building SCM Solutions for Space and Wearables. There is also a bunch of crazy engineers in Kaunas — Thunderclap Labs — but they have too much free time and also a youtube channel.
Apparently, there is a space connection with Sentante — yet to figure this out, but we are following closely. And while not to confuse — Trace.space from Latvia is not space startup, but they launched Trinity - the AI harness that makes scaling physical AI possible.
Angels for complex domains. As Linas Sargautis, NanoAvionics co-founder joined Blackswan round - we started to think about angels that that combine two qualities: deep expertise in complex vertical (ex-operator) + actively directly backing startup founders. Who else should be on this list?
Mantas Mikuckas - marketplaces (pitchbook, not a complete list)
Linas Sargautis - space (Melius Futurum)
Paulius Vilemas - life sciences (Sofigama Investments)
Lukas Petrikas - finance (but investing more broadly - Mokafund)
Estonia's most valuable tech firms. Baltics are tech-first economies, and here is why: total Baltic Nasdaq equity market cap is about €12.05bn across 68 companies. Top 5 Estonian tech = €22.4bn already. Blackwall seem to have entered unicorn territory. New 2026 estimates from Prudentia + Siena Secondary.
Controversial? That's Zobi in Estonia. Updates suggest 0 to 30M in 90 days, which is rather insane growth. What we heard from different investors: some have seen Stripe, thinks it's legit. Founders seem to be super smart. But there many funds remain skeptical: there are too few other signs (traffic, reviews, etc), this is run rate (so could be just aggressive projection), also churn is unclear. Hopefully this is another massive success in the making.
Real, estate. Cityshift event coming Oct 15. We heard there is also a Whatsapp / casual brunch group Big Data + prop-tech, organized by Tomas. Laurynas Bilotas going into RE via technology / Lost Astronaut angle. With another loan realized in Poland, we are looking InRento dashboard - Poland to overtake LT by investments (already at EUR 46M) soon; true European platform.
HRmaxxing. Vinted Go (correct, only the shipping business) is now 400 people big. (Julius, ex-Vinted engineer, is on a mission with OrderKrab now). But Vinted is not slowing down either — hiring 100 people a month, o net 631 new colleagues since March this year.
This also means "just jump into director role at Vinted” is nostalgia from 2021, now you are at competition across London and Amsterdam and rest of Europe. Super lucrative alternatives where "still early, but going big” — scale-ups listed below in roleplay section, they are growing crazy and want to build strong local teams first.
rounds and capital
Blackswan Space raised EUR 2.5M round, led by Iron Wolf Capital, with participation from Lemonade Stand and former NanoAvionics co-founder Linas Sargautis, as well as new investors NGL Ventures and Tomas Žalandauskas.
DIG Ventures raised fund III - at 120M, with Rytis being partner. Their portcos already include Ace Waves, Balsio, CUBE AI. nexos.ai.
DoD Solution in Estonia raised $2.1M pre-seed, to build autonomy layer for unmanned systems.
bilt.me, Tallinn-based AI-native mobile app builder, has raised €615k pre-seed, led by Superhero Capital, with Bolt founder Markus Villig and Lightyear founder Martin Sokk joining.
roleplay
Ovoko - Head of Customer Operations
Hostinger - Head of Product (agentic ecommerce)
Eneba - Heads of: Finance, Influencer+Affiliate, Engineering
Oxylabs - AI Senior Roles
Eldorado - CFO and Brand Lead
Surfshark - Brand Strategist, Head of Partnerships
VIALET -Chief Accountant
Unicorns Lithuania - Ecosystem Growth Lead
Mediatech - Director of Content and Audience Growth
Rods - Head of Growth
Military Intelligence and Counterintelligence - Developers, analysts
Valkyrie Dynamics - six founding roles
brand + design
Baltic brands. Winners of Baltic Global Brands Index 2026 - the first research ranking the global reach, distinctiveness and consistency of Baltic Brands have been announced. The B2C category was dominated by Lithuanian scale-ups, including Vinted, Surfshark, Ovoko, and Hostinger. Meanwhile, Pipedrive (Estonia) took home the B2B brand award. See the full list here
Shaqverse. Flew in on a private jet, sat courtside at Žalgiris, gave a NordVPN talk. A packed week for Shaquille O'Neal. Put Lithuania on the map.
The World is Changing: AI For Creativity.
"Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes... Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence.
Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found... Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out.
*AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul.
By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new."*
A great read on AI & creativity by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the man behind Disney's '90s animation (The Lion King, Shrek, and others), now investing in AI through WndrCo.
ecosystem
Teams 2. We love European ambition, there is so much energy coming from the Baltics and yet.. somehow we have most embarassing projects in Brussels and absurd politics at national parliaments…
Let regulations expire. We also love well-function cities, and balanced view regarding public policies. Let's agree that regulations tend to.. accumulate over time.
Interesting from the US - Idaho has achieved one of the most dramatic state-level reductions in regulation ever. Instead of assuming old regulations should remain on the books, it made agencies justify the ones they wanted to keep. Since 2019, the state has eliminated roughly half of its regulatory code.
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