Drive safe

work in progress

• Awards. Vilnius TechFusion Startup Awards - congrats all! As Mantas thank you speech says - let's not get spoiled. So 2023 FTW. Plus - socialhack talking to Omnisend, PVCase, and Practica Capital.
• Edtech. Last week we added year-old news on Teachers Lead Tech Funding - thanks for flagging this mistake. Instead, TLT is taking awards - among TOP5 winners in Education at the World Summit Awards 2022 - and starting US journey. Turing College launches Data Engineering course in partnership with Oxylabs. Smart Brands Lab started Growgo - DTC brand inspired by Montessori.
• People. End of Gorillas as they are taken over by Getir, and Aiste moved to L Catterton (earlier POS podcast with Aiste). Vainius, Data Scientist at Meta, will take a break. Vytis is the new CMO for BlockGames. Ignas moves from AdeoWeb to Orbio CMO role and Veta to Slite to lead brand marketing.
• Growing easy. Pickvibe reached 1m visits, but we are still puzzled to see fairly simple product landing more than EUR 1m in EU R&D funding.
• AI. ChatGPT is shaking the technology scene worldwide, and VCs are scouting to find promising AI founders, dead or alive. Not much action in Baltics yet, Siim notes, and shares a great read on how to build when the whole world goes "curiosity stage". Estonians in California, Pactum AI, closed $20m round. Lithuanian Workofo optimizes employee schedules, predicting business demand. Also - AI awards nominees, and AI observer newsletter started by Deividas Mataciunas.

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rounds & capital

• Norwegian-Lithuanian commercial warehouse directory Speiz secured EUR 1.3m round, led by F-LOG Ventures, a VC specialised in logistics, also joined by Iron Wolf Capital and Lithuanian VC Angel Fund.
• Fusebox (Contrarian Ventures) has raised EUR 2.5m seed+ funding round led by Eneco Ventures and joined by PKO TFI.
• Invega confirms signing EUR 18m contracts (total) that split between Firstpick and Baltic Sandbox Ventures. Now no reason they cannot take your pitch!
• SMOK from Poland would be happy to do some Lithuanian tickets.
• Dobra is a venture studio that seem to have landed in Vilnius. Tell us more?

roleplay

Drop a link to your job posting here, and select to show one or two weeks. Free for early-stage teams.

founder guide

• Scaling GTM from $25 to $50 million ARR, or -
• Startup restructuring, 101
• Paradox of content marketing - begginers VS experts
• What does Chief of Staff role entail? (Northzone)
• DTC brands have a challenge - as supply chain and marketing got sorted through platforms, how good are they creating culture? Cult framework lens:

founder guide to set 2023 - choose your tool

• Steve Schlafman - Ultimate Review
• Anthony Gustin’s Annual Review
• James Clear - Annual Review
• Sahil Bloom - Goal Setting Guide (based on Atomic Habits)
• Tim Ferris - Conduct Past Year Review instead
• Sam Altman - just do monthly!

insights

• State of European Tech 2022 is a solid report, lots of important signals. A timely reminder that we are very small still, hardly noticeable in the European context. One interesting lens is how founders and VCs see differently coming to a partnership.
• AI is pattern matching, naturally - sometimes wrong (Stratechery)
• While technology is deflationary, we should not have too much hope of middle-class creation at scale

• How long will your marriage last? Somehow linked to how much did you spend on wedding and how many people showed up.

ecosystem

• Accell and Dealroom did some decent LinkedIn screening to uncover Europe's unicorn factories - which are unicorns themselves. The likes of Spotify, Delivery Hero, Revolut, Skype has led to 20+ new startups each, effectively compounding entrepreneurship.
• Do these newly founded startups stay in HQ city? Not always. Net-net comparison by Sifted shows that UK has been the largest beneficiary, Sweden loosing some, and several startups chose Lithuania.

+ask for policymakers & associations

• Form is collecting info on how EU countries support tech. This does not reflect yet LT changes regarding stock options, lower capital requirement, tax incentive for R&D products built locally, startup procurement policies (govtech?). Let's make that table shine.

three questions, previously

• Povilas Poderskis, Development Director, Darnu Group, ex-COO Nord Security
• Gytenis Galkis, Venture Partner, Superhero Capital
• Daniel Kratkovski and Dominykas Milašius, co-founders, Delta Biosciences
• Kasparas Aleknavicius - Co-Founder and CPO, Loctax
• Andrius Milinavičius, General Partner, Baltic Sandbox Ventures
• Laura Korsakova, Founder and CEO, Psylink
• Paulius Uziela, Investment Manager, Coinvest Capital