Robotikos akademija went from one classroom to 700-plus locations. What was the actual unlock — content, teacher supply, or funding rails?

Teacher supply, but not the way people think. The unlock wasn't finding robotics teachers, because they don't exist. It was standardising the curriculum to the point where a motivated student could deliver a great class. Content didn't scale the business; content made teachers scalable.

The other two came in sequence. Schools gave us rooms — you don't build 700 classrooms, you partner with schools that already have the space and the parents' trust. Funding rails came last, and deepened demand: when Lithuania introduced the NVŠ basket in late 2015, more than 58,000 children joined state-funded activities within months, and the state budget for it has since grown from €3m to €25m a year. That turned after-school from a middle-class purchase into a mass product.

But the thing that nearly broke us at every stage was none of the three. It was back-office: schedules, payments, attendance, contracts, municipality paperwork. Nobody romanticises that part and everybody underestimates it. It is also why we are building Exoclass.

Is there a Treatwell or Booksy for after-school — and if not, why hasn't it been built?

It has been built several times. It just keeps dying. Hoop in the UK reached 1.5m families and collapsed in 2020; the brand was later relaunched by new owners as a simple listings app. KidPass in the US was acquired and quietly absorbed. Pebble raised £5m as a consumer marketplace and now sells B2B activity-management software. The survivors — Sawyer in the US, ClassForKids in the UK — are all SaaS companies, not marketplaces.

The reason is structural. Booksy works because a haircut repeats monthly and the barber already runs a calendar. After-school is the opposite: families decide once or twice a year, demand is brutally seasonal and — the killer — there is no bookable inventory. Providers run on spreadsheets and Messenger, so a marketplace has nothing to plug into.

So we reversed the sequence: first give providers the operating system — scheduling, payments, contracts, state-funding paperwork — then open the marketplace on top of supply you already control. Like Ovoko did. That is Exoclass plus bureliai.lt, launching in the first schools this September. Every dead marketplace lacked a revenue floor and locked supply. We start with both.

What is the traction so far? Are you considering funding, and which markets are on the radar?

Today: 50-plus providers, more than €10m of GMV through the platform, and 6% churn so far. Our favourite metric is that 80% of new clients pay their first invoice within a week — in this category, that is product-market fit. Robotikos akademija is migrating all 700-plus locations onto Exoclass this summer, our flagship case. Stovyklos.lt, our camps marketplace, has signed 71 organisers with 25 paying since its March launch. Bureliai.lt goes live in September, starting with Vilnius schools.

On funding, we plan to raise a venture round in about a year. We want to arrive at that conversation with bureliai.lt proven nationally and the first international market opened, not with promises. Until then we grow on revenue.

On markets, Lithuania first, because we can roll out and generate revenue quickly. Beyond that we are researching both Europe and Asia — we will make that call by the end of the year.

You've built impactful businesses rather than unicorn-shaped ones. What are you actually optimising for?

In Lithuania — a country that funds after-school from the state budget — a third of children still end up in nothing. Europe does not have an operating system for after-school; it runs on spreadsheets. That is what we are optimising against.

We don't believe "impact versus unicorn" is a real trade-off. It is about matching the vehicle to the opportunity. Robotikos akademija is a profitable operator and should be run like one. Exoclass is infrastructure with network effects and a closing window, so it gets venture behaviour. A unicorn is an outcome, not a strategy.

Children don't remember valuations — they remember the coach who got them into robotics or basketball. We are optimising for how many of those moments happen per euro. If we build the operating system for after-school in Europe, the label sorts itself out. If it doesn't, a few hundred thousand children are still in activities they weren't in before. We can live with either ending.

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