work in progress

AI employees. Superpal launches with the backing of FIRSTPICK and Outlast - and a fun video, too. You might have heard about Polish Viktor, and now Claude has launched a competitor; but as founder Fryd writes, the market is massive and there are likely to be space for multiple players (USV developed a thesis called The Rebel Alliance - betting that the best products at each layer will be built by teams who are obsessed with that layer).

New AI natives. Luvy has joined Saul Adomaitis as Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at OrbitronAI (based in the UAE, Saul spent 22 yrs with EY, latest as Global Oil and Gas Leader; this rhymes with YC talk featuring Webflow co-founder, who is back to building Ploy - it is time when domain experts can build incredible products). Ott is going all in on display.dev - will be building full-time together with Carl. Dainius started Sofidus.tech to orchestrate construction planning with AI. Stagecaptions.io is a real-time subtitling tool for conferences and events.

Second wave. Two strong signals from Vinted: now became most-downloaded shopping app in the US and launched Australia, with shipping from the UK. But besides Bolt, Vinted, also Printify/Printful, there is a new strong wave of marketplace scale-ups, that are emerging strong.

Ovoko | Eneba | Eldorado | IPXO | Contra | Saltz | Yaga | Eany.io | CGtrader (turned around - growing profitably)

Giving back. Recognition for Hostinger (MO Museum), BCG and sixteen.media (Blue/Yellow), and Pijus sharing Furniture1 philanthropic initiatives.

Edtech. Robotikos Akademija is raising private debt to accelerate growth, including Ireland / US. ALPA Kids google ads conversion: install to paying conversion is around 5%, MAU to paying is 22% and the cost of a new paying customer around €7.5. After building FastTrack, Kristijonas is open for smth new.

Social / consumer. Marijus and the team launched noProbs - faceless social platform for real connections. Joiner founder went all the way to meet the competitor - Timeleft. Joiner has already connected people leading to weddings!

rounds and capital

Wise just acquired Expatica, a leading resource for people living abroad.

Wise have been buying and building media/content assets for years through a unit called Owned Sites (portfolio of 50 assets). It's also move up the funnel: the older properties (Exiap, Geldtransfer) are comparison/affiliate sites, Expatica is editorial - housing, healthcare, immigration - catching people months earlier.

Timely reminder of Mediatech machine - they broke EUR 100M revenue mark in 2025. Similar playbook, but Tesonet company productized it into a standalone company: media as a business, not media as marketing - and the proof is showing software-like economics on a publishing org.

Superpal receives EUR 500k funding from FIRSTPICK and Outlast Fund.

XTX Markets covered as they seem to have deployed north $500M since 2024. Gabriele recently added Kopa.ai in LT, and shares that they move with conviction -

“If we like the company and we’re really excited, more often than not we will go after it and we will invest. We do try to not have a lot of groupthink. We have conviction. In the wider market there’s a lot of ‘Oh, who else is investing?’”

Talents for Tech (known as Women Go Tech in Lithuania) received the largest support from Google.org - 2.3M - to provide AI training to everyone in CEE (7 markets) at no cost

Vilnius University Foundation receives another 1.2M - donation by Irena and Algirdas Juozapavičius. Other existing donors also added almost a million.

Vibe.co to be acquired by Walmart- Tesonet portfolio company (note Teso have new website, too)

Tesonet received a construction permit for a new multi-purpose development in Kaunas.

brand+design

The A.I.-Design Aesthetic. Anthropic’s own branding appears inside Claude’s outputs, and just like AI writing has it’s hints, AI design now has it’s own and that style is now spreading through the defaults of a tool becoming an extension of Anthropic’s brand in the wild.

Brand is proof of effort. The point of design, particularly in branding, is to appear unique and signal effort and intention. AI makes pretty-good design available to everyone, which means pretty-good stops being differentiating, and if a product looks like every other AI-native company, it signals low effort before anyone uses it.

further insights

AI reasoning - new research paper from Linas at Stanford

Stripe data - “The Age of Solopreneur”

Second, as we have shown previously, the story of spiking business applications is not confined to the United States. New business registrations have risen roughly 40% in Australia, 70% in Finland, and 80% in France since 2017, with meaningful acceleration in 2025 alone. Multicountry acceleration across different regulatory environments argues for a more fundamental driver than fraud activity. And in France, where more granular data is available, the surge in business formation is driven primarily by solo founders or microentrepreneurs rather than by traditional employer businesses—similar to the US.

Nathan Benaich - Europe cannot rent its way to AI sovereignty

ecosystem

Lithuanian founders. Building in the US.

Repeat Founders - 70 Lithuanian entrepreneurs on second, third, fourth gig

Weird takes = strong moats. 20 unusual Baltic bootstrapped firms, with strong defensibility.