Went to bed thinking about Oxylabs - just like you. Same thought in the morning.

Wanted to call today's memo something with "printed playbooks”. Or "Baltic playbooks”. But basketball can offer better.

Main idea is very simple. Oxylabs is another hit at "PMF meets ambition”. Because the founders here will not let an opportunity go. If it works, they will run it to the maximum. So zero to 3.6B EV in less than 10 years (and triple revenue in the last two years). Importantly, this is different playbook. Heavy on B2B, pursuing top enterprise accounts. You cannot funnel your way with Meta to this outcome - talented people built a B2B sales muscle to meet the opportunity.
Huge congrats. Onto the next one.

work in progress

Oxylabs. It was September 2024 and someone responded to the weekly memo with one sentence: oxylabs virs 100 siemet. That was the sign. Now suddenly at 350M ARR Oxylabs takes $130M Warburg Pincus' check commanding $3.6B valuation – the business shows no signs of slowing down.

Everything at once. The Baltic unicorn recipe, it seems: find PMF + have hunger to win globally. Can't easily plan yourself into product-market-fit, but once there, the playbooks are there to win (if you really want it).

On scaling - there is not one playbook. Multiple playbooks drove to billion valuations. So next time someone asks you - what Baltics are good at? - don't just jump to "marketplaces” or "cybersecurity”. Appreciate the diversity, as per EU slogan. Case in point - Orbio confirmed growing 73% last year, hit EUR 264M and improved profits.

Consumer / prosumer scale-ups are leveraging marketing-driven customer acquisition, but use different channels and monetization (can't really put Nord/Surfshark, Wise, Hostinger, Flo, Kilo, Orbio, TransferGo into one basket). Marketplaces also need consumer acquisition, but it comes with supply liquidity (can be marketing, or sales), and increasingly infra to make it work (payments, logistics) - so Vinted, Bolt, Ovoko, Eneba, Eldorado are different beasts. And yet another group - B2B giants - Oxylabs, Pipedrive, Veriff, Cast AI, Omnisend - vary from PLG motion, to heavy enterprise sales.

There you go - that next unicorn may be a fintech, a robotics company, or a defence startup. Perhaps someone in life sciences or health? Only PMF+Ambition is required.

Energize. PVcase has been named one of TIME’s World’s Top GreenTech Companies of 2026 - they closed 2025 at 33M revenue, and profitable - impressive. Another one to watch - impressive robotics player in Latvia - Aerones (rumors at $40M revenue, can't confirm!). Not in venture, Lina talking to Ieva from Climate Action Data Trust.

In terms or larger energy picture, German Proxima has raised €411 million - Europe's largest ever private funding round for fusion; Plural has now backed the company four times: pre-seed to today, and is the largest investor. Plural is well positioned to take big bets in Europe - Estonian media surfaced that investment firm Skaala (also Taavet and Sten) has a stake in Anthropic - the same Series A financing round, in which the lead investor was Jaan Tallinn.

Also, we learned great tech founders from the Baltics love basketball - Skaala also invested into Portland Trial Blazers.

Products. Albinas built Tvaras.ai - AI data analyst that lives in your stack. Robertas built BoardQ to gamify team performance tracking.

Shipping within a ship. Here is what scale-ups are going through: how to bring AI inside the business without killing it? Recall how Intercom became Fin for that transformation? Recently Hostinger's Giedrius talked how they are building AI-native platform (and thus hiring many product heads). Very interesting to see what Omnisend came up with (quoting Tomas’ post):

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At the end of April, we announced Project Compass company-wide. Here's how we described it:

• €2M Omnisend-funded project, running as a fully separate unit for six months
• The team works from a dedicated office and operates outside Omnisend's normal processes
• Product must be AI-first, use Omnisend's API, and focus on marketing automation
• The target market: smaller businesses that current Omnisend is too advanced for – early adopters who tolerate rough edges
• Three possible outcomes at the end of 2026: continue as a separate product, integrate into Omnisend, or discontinue

People. Linda leaves Karma Ventures. Gediminas Peksys, Co-founder of Oxipit, left the company post acquisition. Tadas decided to leave GitHub. Laurynas finds himself as venture builder at Lost Astronaut. Eglė is now VPN Engineering Team Lead at Surfshark. Žemyna joins Pando Moto. Abdulsalam joins Sonna.

rounds and capital

Oxylabs raises $130M from Warburg Pincus at a $3.6bn valuation

15min Group invests in perks.lt, a discount platform with 100,000 users. Interesting move, a platform play - more to come?

Muun Health has secured a €700k grant from EIS Enterprise Estonia to develop its Smart Patch Platform.

Blackswan Space has been selected as a partner in the European Defence Fund (EDF) funded ASIMOV project - project worth approx EUR 700k

founder's guide

A lot of horizontal plays got crushed with AI — strong signal to go vertical through workflows.

Get to that event to meet customers - Startup Lithuania compensates up to EUR 3500.

roleplay

Career advice in the age of AI

Surfshark - Mid/Senior Partnerships Manager (Incogni)
‍VIALET - AI & Automations Engineer + other engineering roles
Eldorado - SEO Specialist, Google Ads Manager + other
Hostinger - Head of Product, Head of FP&A
‍Cloudvisor - AWS Solutions Architect (Principal Engineer)
Oxylabs - Product Manager (Native AI Products & New Ventures)
‍Saily - Multiple hires - Engineering and Marketing, Designers
‍Google - Territory Manager Startups, Baltics

‍Roleo - Founding Engineer
‍Tingit - France Operations Lead
‍Kaching Appz - Organic Growth Lead

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