work in progress

• Fintech self-imposed troubles. Much has been told already about changing regulatory approach, an consequences are starting to surface.
  • Lithuanian Supreme Administrative Court has ruled that the Bank of Lithuania acted unlawfully in refusing to grant a banking license to Baltic Financial Company.
  • Reminder how Paysera was fined for moving ahead with Contis, but worth understanding they were trying to protect the customer base, which is also important.
• Post-hackathon.
  • WhyTheDuck wins the hackathon and launches Lovable for Design
  • Ugnius and the team built Elyria - a grand fantasy dimension in your phone

• The magnificient 15, which is the latest Plug and Play last batch: Celine Biotechnologies, Axiology, airvolve-aero, Buck4Bug, Fivrec, Footy Labs, Lindra.ai, Misslaboratory, Monopulse, NaionX, STARFLIGHT DYNAMICS, Luna Robotics, UAB ItaroBlu, OrderKrab, Commody.
• Cute, useful or both. Paulius: find where the closest parcel locker is. How Simas finds and comments on Reddit for Callsy AI. Kris buildins Ordinary.page and they are fun+simple to build.
• Second first. Ebay is not giving up to Vinted (yet) – they just acquired Norwegian C2C secondhand marketplace Tise, for undisclosed amount. We've got some powder ready with Vinted Ventures, Tingit (Partnering with Printemps Haussmann, the legendary Parisian department store), Yaga, watch them all.
• Data. Everyone and anyone, who has better data, will be rewarded extra with AI. How good is your country with medical records? Because "AI can forecast your future health – just like the weather". Vilius launches new Milda.ai for everyone to tap into company data and find prospects. Whitebridge.ai understands it's not only data, but also packaging / use cases, that matter (they seem to have 120k monthly visitors, revenue traction must be there, too)
• Health-tech. Inspiration for Pulsetto and Samphire? "Oura is on track to generate more than $1 billion in revenue in 2025, doubling the $500 million it posted in 2024" (valued 11B now). Pulsetto brings Jonas Valanciunas, as ambassador. FPRO is learning the playbook quickly – Marcelo Vieira, Real Madrid C.F. legend and 5x Champions League winner, has become their Ambassador.
• "Never heard, how come growing so fast?" – Latvia edition
  • Matrixify - EUR 14m (33%) - riding Shopify wave
  • Prime Prometics - EUR 44m (101%) - pro-age makeup
  • Flirtu - EUR 1.5m (55%) - Tinder inside Telegram
• People. Rugile returns to LT for Strategic Partnerships Manager role at nexos.ai. Raphael also joins GTM team at nexos.ai. Giovanni is exploring next gig. Tadas is officially co-founder of WhyTheDuck.
• Calendar. The Founder’s Story Vilnius Oct 2, Startup Fair Oct 9.

rounds and capital

• Estonian-Ukrainian defence-tech startup C2GRID (near real-time 3D geospatial situational-awareness platform) has secured the first close of its pre-seed round from Sunfish Partners.
• Codigi acquired Aicore, IT and AI vendor focused on industrial customers.
• Bagfactory founders (LT) started an investment vehicle to support small but growing manufacturing businesses.

founder's guide

• Personal Branding for Founders
• Game of Inches – why we think about marketing wrong
• LinkedIn newsletters are no good
• Life is a Poker, not Chess
• Vytenis (Vinted) wrote a little guide – Finding Team Strengths from Different Personality Types.

further insights

• Britain Then, America Now. Nations rise on industry but fall when they rely solely on finance (sometimes title tells it all? by Nicolas Colin)

ecosystem

• Among very few alergies that our editorial team has, there is one for unprotected bike lanes (this is when someone draws a line on a street and calls it "bike path"). Generally, Baltics need to do much better job in traffic safety – Nordic cities Oslo, Helsinki achieve zero deaths already (ridiculously low fines don't help – would be easy to collect another 10M per year and buy some drones).

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