Garage no more

work in progress

• Shopify pathways. First, it is home to massive e-commerce businesses, such as Burga. Amazing to watch how they started with literally nothing, in Skuodas, 2016 – and generated EUR 200m in sales since then, now building a new fancy factory. Considering that Shopify itself has grown 6.6x times in the last 5 years, there is a vast ecosystem to service. We follow Kaching Appz – they are at six-figure MRR and have grown rapidly. Essential Apps were started by former Oberlo guys, now also building Shopify Apps. Donatas, former CTO at Kilo, is now building ProfitKoala – is it just me or that's too much Kaching inspiration?
• AI. Vytis from Sonomagic wins Zinemaldia Startup Awards – Sonic Alchemist is an AI-powered sound design tool. 19 teams worked hard at Tesonet hackathon, winners are three – Nida AGI House (instant demos to convert visitors), Whitebridge.ai (ID and social profile verification) and Allianse.ai (voice journal to connect with epileptologist). More AI: AskToSell pivots to Cust, an autonomous customer success platform. Vocal Image is going places. Workofo solves another headache – AI helps optimize staff levels with 15min precision (growing beyond Baltics). Evergrowth is betting that unstructured sales-related data can be helpful, again. Juras is building marketing automation for SMBs - Keika.ai.

• Healthtech. Graduating Entrepreneur First, Gediminas Pazera and the team are moving to SF to kickstart their startup (transforming cancer treatment). Garrden is on a mission to visualize, track, and grow your most important relationships. Kilo Health grew "only" 7% last year (EUR 233m rev), going with a few changes to set it up for 1B journey (Sifted reports). Venture builder idea by Kilo:

The math is simple: the target is to have 24 new ideas every year, kill half of them in the first three months, kill half of the rest in the first year and then kill another half at later stages. “The goal is to launch three [or] four new successful companies per year"- T.Burgaila

• Startup Fair must have been fun! You can see all the pitches and some talks here and here. Congrats BrachyDOSE, now set to raise funds from LitBAN, Coinvest Capital and Baltic Sandbox Ventures. More – funds decided to also consider investing in Psylink, KaiSense, Freya, CBRX and Ligence. And even more, Stuart Energy received $5,000 in AWS credits from Cloudvisor, AQ22 got EUR 3,000 in legal help by Sorainen.
• People. Martynas Gudonavicius, co-founder and former CEO of Trafi, joins Flanco – office and property management platform (Tesonet portfolio; will be exciting to watch). Martynas, Head of Supply Chain at Deeper, left the company. CyberUpgrade hires Dainius Aleksonis as CISO. Milda, AE ad Deel, is up for the next adventure. Zygimantas Sabalius takes CEO role at Robolabs. Laurynas Spangevicius leaves Revolut to join Robinhood as GM Robinhood Europe.
• States, United. With the news of Roko this week, we looked at other prominent tech founders with Lithuania connection.
  • Einaras von Gravrock – Founder and CEO of CUBE3.AI, co-founder CAST.AI, founder and CEO CUJO.AI
  • Gajus Kuizinas, Co-founder and CTO, Contra
  • Justas Dauparas, Co-founder, Xaira Therapeutics
  • Povilas Gudzius, Co-founder and CEO, Spike Technologies
  • Tumas Rackaitis, Co-founder and CTO, Rogo
  • Marty Kausas, Co-founder and CEO, Pylon
• Games. The last platform to fall for Human Fall Flat popularity – VR is Meta Quest, PSVR2 and PC. Airplane Chefs (Nordcurrent) teams up Pringles. Smart way to break into the industry - Wargaming runs a free Quality Assurance course, apply Oct 7th the latest (yes on Monday).

our amazing sponsors

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]
Wargaming [award-winning game developer, careers]
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]