Competitive summer

Lithuania Tech Weekly #183
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Job board - early-stage Baltic startups - here
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Follow on X
and LinkedIn
Job board - early-stage Baltic startups - here
Join our community via Contribee here
Subscribe by invitation only - ask our supporters for one, or join a waiting list.
work in progress
- Unicorns. Tesonet Global (Nord Security + others) in 2023: EUR 547m revenues with EUR 62m gross profits – hugely impressive machine it is. There is more than that, when looking at broader investment portfolio (below). Wargaming in LT showing EUR 76m result, however, other sources speculate around an estimated $1.1B in revenue globally – and cumulative $7B for the World of Tanks franchise (350+ million registered players). A true soonicorn is CAST AI – their exec team met the Minister of Economy just recently (one investor in the meeting is not yet on a cap table – there surely is some work in motion)

- Fresh start. A while ago, we listed 20 profiles in between – possibly launching something new, time for a follow up. Giedrius Daubaris launched Exante, AI-powered contract repository. Vytautas Mikalainis started Unbound Autonomy. Martynas Narijauskas kickstarted Livity app. Mantas Aleksiejevas (WePower, Breezit) founded Cor, an AI-native platform for B2B businesses scale their customer success teams.
- Mobility. Latvian Blue Shock Race is just getting started – their electric karts getting deployed across the globe, from US to Maldives. Parkis spent years defending their patent. AKO, which started as a three-wheeler startup, is working with Italians to license tilting technology. Interesting talks with Bolt CEO Markus Villig - this video on Serbian taxi mafia is entertaining, this 15min interview goes in depth. Also in Balkans, no more underdog - after going from zero to hero, Rimac has raised EUR 280m funds for Verne, a robotaxis company (yes, named under Jules Verne).
- Overseas. What can be more exciting for the "largest country in Europe in 15th century" than homegrown companies expanding abroad? The likes of Vinted and Nord Security are in a league of their own, but we are also here to support Paystrax entering UK, Walk15 expanding into Germany, and many more.
- People moves. Unicorns Lithuania appointed a new CEO - Gintare Verbickaite-Baciuliene, moving from Invest Lithuania. Ignas Brazdauskas assumes CEO role at Spark. Lectrium adds Daniel as new Account Executive in the US.

rounds and capital
- Co-founded by Nikolaj Martyniuk, Renewabl secures closed a multi-million seed round led by Helen Ventures
- Truly entrepreneurial executive team from WePower Network – while that venture did not work out, besides Nikolaj, Arturas is building Breezit (co-founded with Mantas), Andrius founded ALGORI, Gytis launched Greatness unit within Kilo Health, and Mantas just launched Cor - AI agents for customer success).
- EU funding will be helping a few: TrustGuru is to receive 100k, and one can actually see quite a list adding "igyvendina projekta" to LinkedIn search
- Estonian back-office operations management solution for SMEs enty has raised €700K in a seed round from UK-based TMT Investments Plc and others
- Lead Ventures (Budapest) launches €100M fund for CEE startups.
- Meet Impellent Ventures, tomorrow (Tuesday) evening in Vilnius.
sponsors
Privileged to receive support from a group of core sponsors, who decided to get onboard. They have some newsletter invites, too!

Cloudvisor [AWS partner dedicated to startups]
PayPal [Global integrated payments solution]
Vinted [largest C2C European marketplace, always hiring]
Tech Zity [tech hubs and campuses across Lithuania]
Presto Ventures [investing in startups at the forefront of security, defense, aerospace]
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]
Wargaming [award-winning game developer, careers]
founder's guide
- New founders - good pod on how to get going with marketing
- The Playbook on Rapid International Expansion With Dan Westgarth, COO at Deel (ex Revolut) – good takes on building a machine.
- Closing the very first sales in B2B / enterprise scene – get smart about LinkedIn and your network.
To identify leads, they used the list of recipients to whom they were writing their monthly updates—about 30 investors and 70 supporters.
By exploring each person’s Linkedin network of around 3,000 connections, they identified VPs of operations and supply chain of companies they were targeting. By leveraging mutual connections, they sent personalized emails asking for introductions, making it easy for recipients to share information about Factored Quality with potential buyers.
- For those moving around - how to make friends as an adult?
- Should every founder create content? The answer is more nuanced, but Tibo is good in building with public.
Tech Philomaths'community
- Startup lists for the Baltics - Drone startups, Marketplaces, Sportstech
- Repeat Lithuanian founders - now added ex-founders of Applaudience, Lemon Labs, Nanoavioncs, Robolabs – all building new ventures (40 serial entrepreneurs)
further insights
- Lambda School has been one of the shining edtech stars of ZIRP era.. Things went wrong, and looks like we have another founder that wanted success too badly.
- Does it take extraordinary talent to build home runs in venture capital? Looks like founders tend to be not exactly average, Episode 1 tried to quantify a bit, while Harry always has some anecdotal evidence to offer, too.
We created 5 binary factors to assess how iconoclastic a founder is. These span early childhood signals, quirky hobbies, unique career trajectories and obscure skills. These factors were combined, giving each founder a score from 0 to 5. This iconoclast score was the single most predictive variable in our AI model. Founders with a top score were almost 6x more likely to raise a future Series-A/Series-B round! This score also showed no correlation with conventional metrics such as whether a founder previously worked at a top company or attended an elite university.

ecosystem
- New Thai DTV visa is competitive
- Repeat with me – and vote accordingly (new paper)
1% decline in public R&D spillovers causes a 0.17% decline in productivity growth. Public R&D spillovers are three times as impactful as private R&D spillovers for firm productivity and their impact persists at the sector level.
roleplay
Early-stage startup jobs, Baltics
Join the leadership team before Series A
Vinted - Vice President of People, Group People
Vinted Go - Senior Program Manager
Spark - B2B Sales Manager
IPXO - Account Management Team Lead
Billo - Motion Design Team Lead
Bored Panda - Head of Business Unit (boredpanda.com)
Atrandi Biosciences - Head of Computational Biology (HCB)
Nord Security - Head of Treasury
SME Bank - Chief Legal Officer
Join before they hit another round and valuation skyrockets
Ovoko - 40+ positions
CAST AI - 60+ positions
Join the leadership team before Series A
Vinted - Vice President of People, Group People
Vinted Go - Senior Program Manager
Spark - B2B Sales Manager
IPXO - Account Management Team Lead
Billo - Motion Design Team Lead
Bored Panda - Head of Business Unit (boredpanda.com)
Atrandi Biosciences - Head of Computational Biology (HCB)
Nord Security - Head of Treasury
SME Bank - Chief Legal Officer
Join before they hit another round and valuation skyrockets
Ovoko - 40+ positions
CAST AI - 60+ positions
Member discussion