work in progress

Launches. Backed by Tesonet, trendos is live: will help marketers to understand how their brands appear at LLMs. Elvinas building Rikta: AI that plugs into agency's workflow, captures work automatically, and bills clients. Justas built Nosinė: Lithuanian keyboard for iphone. Vilius accumulated a ton of ecommerce knowledge throughout the years - built 110 point Shopify CRO audit for others. Giedrius in SF re-introducing Exante via video. Priidu, former Head of Design at Skype, is also vibecoding well. Gintaras, 17yr old builder, made Time to Talk.

Radio + AI. Radiodays Europe receiving builders from the Baltics. Galago FM, radio intelligence product, was launched by Tomas and the team right in time. 15min team, pushing new horizons with M1, was there. Latvian Spotwise was there, too. Not radio, voice, real-time AI interpretation - Eriks building Everspeak.

FDE is the new FTE? As forward deployed engineer demand skyrockets, Ace Waves explain why this the method need (for agents to replace labour); April 2nd AI meetup in Kaunas and here is Antanas Baksys selling power banks already when he is 14.

"Has all the cards". Justas turning around Whatagraph - from 120 to 40 FTEs, but positive EBITDA and all other fun. Lauri got accepted to YC after 4 attempts, and - turned it down:

by the time they said yes, we'd already figured most of it out ourselves, we had real revenue and a strong understanding of our market. four rejections will do that to you.

we found something that fit us better. 10 companies instead of 200.

Deeply vertical. Always fascinated by founders who embed themselves deep, all the way to culture and style, into their domain. Goramp warehouse staff having fun, and revenue follows.

Highly sustainable. Why Key Carbon chose to back InSoil? What Favonius Energy will do with our buses in Vilnius?

People. As Julius steps into the Board role, Oxylabs group welcomes new CEO — Vytautas Savickas. Vaidotas Juknys will be leading Decodo (Oxylabs is seriously accelerating). After 10 yrs in London, Ieva is back in Vilnius. Paulius is now Director of Product at Vinted Pay. Indre joins Kiloverse as Chief People Officer.

Calendar. Startup meetup next Tue. Entrepreneur First in Vilnius - Mar 31st.

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rounds and capital

Giraffe360 raises $10M Series B, led by Cipio Partners - impressive Latvian company marching ahead.

Unmanned Defense Systems and ILTE Lietuva have signed a loan agreement to finance working capital – EUR 4.67M worth.

Tesonet Foundation invests €100K in Vedliai to co-develop AI literacy for teachers

Talking M&A, not so much in tech: TopSport gets acquired with EUR 65M EBITDA, rumored very high multiples.

Did Boomio raise from NGL?

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brand + design

”The premature sheen” is killing quality. Rem Koolhaas (One of the most influential living architects) coined the phrase "the premature sheen.” The premise: You can make anything look really good really quickly. Things that look like great work. But it doesn’t make them good, because it misses the underlying thinking. This is the sharpest articulation of what is happening to design and brand right now.

Taste-first decision-making isn't free. It's funded by margins. Financial and psychological. The most important decisions are taste decisions that data later confirms or fails to measure. DHH (37signals co-founder, Ruby on Rails creator) kept a data scientist on staff for over a decade. The honest admission: they never once followed the numbers when the numbers disagreed with their instinct.

Everything you need to know about taste and how to cultivate it is in this conversation. The word "taste" never comes up once. It's a conversation about attention, feelings, craft, and why the premature sheen kills good work.

founder's guide

Follow the pull.

further insights

Vilnius photography. Big fans of how Andrej Vasilenko captures Vilnius, now he is available to teach others.

LLMs started as huge bundles, horizontal tools - and now unbundling, going vertical to win B2B sectors.

FT VS a16z = 1:0

ecosystem

IT market. Antanas suggesting IT sector has peaked in LT, but inside it is more complex: talent moves from large corps and IT centers into startups and scale-ups (almost 20k of staff), part of tech / startups is not under "programming category” but e-commerce, deeptech, etc.

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