Atrandi Great Companies

work in progress

• Logistics. Estonian Parcelsea was acquired by JetBeep. Latvian Mapon acquires Swedish company. GoRamp has pretty impressive ROI data points. Cargo Stream is bringing AI into logistics companies. Swotzy is way beyond their first 500 customers.
• Defence. With these geopolitics, European defence startups have lots of tailwind now, arming set to grow. Estonian KrattWorks starting to raise series A. Ragnar saying that "Munich & Tallinn are now the fastest growing HUBs for European defense Tech startups" makes us think we need to events in Lithuania? No competition, the more the better. Mistral is seeking defence contracts. Airvolve Aero filed a patent application in the US. SensusQ at the front page of The Times.
• AI, starting with Hostinger. We've heard they reduced headcount while doubling in revenue (interview with founder Arnas, in LT). Now, Hostinger is launching an all-in-one AI app builder (and a16z keeping a close eye there). How AI agents will transform professional services? NfX suggests building a marketplace there is always a good idea. List of AI applications that allow selling work/service/product, instead of just workflow. Some examples could be Sort A Brick, Inveniam AI visual analysis, or Oxipit medical imaging (signed distribution). basedspace_ is running AI Hackathon mid March.
• Exceptional talent. Search for breakthrough firms is going further downstream – not only backing repeat founders, but also incentivizing other ways. Ryan from Weekend Fund wants to potentially double equity for early hires, by investing and sharing carry. Konstantine (Sequoia) has offered to try to match “founding GTM people” with fast-growing early-stage companies in the Sequoia portfolio.
  • Diversity – Baltics looking better. Baltic Female/Male Funding Ratio for 2024 is at 20%, a bit higher than European averages.
• People. Eimantas ended his run disrupting tech in the government - and we are grateful for that. Martynas is now CTO at Pulsetto. Elvis joins Tingit as Head of Product (no boring gigs in Lithuania so far). Osvaldas, Head of Engineering at Neurotechnology, leaving for something next. Ilona, who led people at Kilo Health, is leaving and heading to Australia. Andrius Katinas leaves Orbio World. Marta, Head of HR is leaving Tesonet. Tadas joins FIRSTPICK as Accelerator program manager. Ruta joins Vedliai as Growth Project Manager. Marili Merendi is joining SmartCap as an Investment Advisor for fund-of-funds mandate. Domantas joins Kilo Health as Head of Technology Operations. Vytenis Buzas was honoured with the Medal of the Order for Merits to Lithuania for contributions to UAV and space technology development.

sponsors

Cloudvisor [AWS partner dedicated to startups]
Hostinger [making online presence accessible to everyone worldwide, hiring]
PayPal [Global integrated payments solution]

Oxylabs [Step into the world of web data gathering]
Vinted [Largest C2C European marketplace, hiring]
Presto Ventures [investing in startups – security, defense, aerospace]
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]
Wargaming [award-winning game developer, careers]

rounds and capital

• Atrandi Biosciences secured $25 million Series A funding round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Vsquared Ventures, Practica Capital, Metaplanet and GRIDS Capital. Startuo will accelerate expansion into the U.S. market, support the growth of its semi-permeable capsule (SPC) technology, and advance new product development to enable breakthrough scientific discoveries.
• INVL raised the largest private equity fund in the Baltic region – EUR 305m, hardcap is 400m.
• Estonian Parcelsea has been acquired by JetBeep.
• Latvian Mapon has acquired Interkom AB, a Swedish fleet management company based in Lund operating under transit.se brand.

three questions

Juozas Nainys, CEO and Co-founder of Atrandi Biosciences

Atrandi was launched 2016 - what have been the most pivotal moments or decisions that have shaped the company's direction?

When I look back, I realize that during our journey so far we’ve internalized a couple of simple core principles that we follow when we think about our technology and product roadmap. There wasn’t a single eureka moment that led any of these principles. It was a journey of trying different things and testing different ideas until we saw a pattern that works for us. One of the main decisions that led us to where we are was a conscious effort to solve difficult problems that others don’t want to. The way we see it: if we succeed, we have a competitive advantage globally. Easy problems are likely already solved, and we just don’t know about it. Another pivotal moment was realizing that we need to build for biggest impact (i.e. if we try to solve difficult problems - those might as well be impactful). While this seems obvious the devil is in the details and understanding the impact at the end of the day means understanding the market and the potential evolution of it over time. And this timing piece is really critical when it comes investing into long development cycles that are inherent to our industry. Finally, we wouldn’t be where we are if we haven’t decided to build open systems from day one. This principle can be seen as a weakness from certain angles. Yet we believe scientific progress is not something that happens in an isolated lab or startup. It is a global effort, and our customers and collaborators are as much part of the journey and eventual solution as we are.

Atrandi semi-permeable capsule technology has been described as a breakthrough, enabling multi-step molecular analysis without loss of single-cell compartmentalization. How do you envision this technology transforming single-cell analysis - what new applications or industries do you anticipate it impacting?

Our technology is innovation at one of the fundamental layers of life sciences – sample preparation. Simply put this means that we enable different ways to prepare cells for readout (i.e. turning biological signal into 1s and 0s). As any innovation in fundamental technology, capsules have broad applicability in diverse areas from research to drug development and diagnostics. Yet we have to choose an initial focus and our product roadmap for the next couple of year is designed around our core scientific expertise – analyzing single cells. Broadly, we aim to enable better ways to generate more comprehensive dataset from complex biological systems by profiling single cells. More specifically we are building single cell DNA and multiomic (meaning DNA and/or RNA and/or proteins) analysis solutions. These tools will be crucial to unravelling some of the many unanswered questions in biology. Practical examples from our ongoing collaborations include better understanding of oncological diseases, efforts towards regenerative medicine as well as uncovering mechanism of rare diseases.

Zooming out to a global technology landscape we are very excited about the recent advantages in data analytics field (i.e. AI) and realize there are clear applications in life sciences as well. Yet the fundamental limitation to any model is the underlying dataset that was used to generate it. To this extent we are super enthusiastic to enable better (both in a qualitative and quantitative way) data generation. We feel this is the missing piece to truly enable the Century of Biology.

How do you approach financing of this company and what are your expectations after closing this new growth round?

We are a VC backed company and aim to work with partners that are experts in deep tech and life sciences industries. So far, we have been fortunate to be backed by exceptional funds that are true leaders in their geographies. We hope to maintain this trajectory in the future as well.

The recently closed Series A funding round enables us to broaden and accelerate our product roadmap as well as increase our commercial presence globally. Among our plans for the next few years are multiple product launches across different categories (hardware platforms, reagent kits and software) as well as opening of the US office. We are on a mission to enable researchers to uncover the unknown and we are just getting started!

founder's guide

• Good take: build an edge by collecting insights before you need capital.
• The founder’s playbook for scaling to $1 million ARR
• If not triple double, it's fine to grow 50% – for a long time, like Odoo.
• Internet has been surfacing the last Bezos' shareholder letter, this part – take it as encouragement.

• Finn Murphy on narratives and selling up

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