Live fully now

work in progress

• Recognition. NordVPN - The Best Inventions of 2022, Time. Omnisend - Gold Medal in The Lovie Awards for the best website. Ernestas Kalabuckas, Kongsberg NanoAvionics, awarded as Lithuanian CTO of the year!
• Regtech. Amlyze team showing confidence, joins Firstpick batch and hires Jekaterina Govina, ex-Bank Lithuania. Their competitor in Estonia, Salv, is hiring client manager in Vilnius. Dutch Hyarchis keeps expanding in LT, too.
• Wellbeing. Kilo Health landing first B2B customers locally. There is few more working on prevention, like Wow Health (story in LT). Full-body scanning is also a somewhat secret Daniel Ek (Spotify) investment in Sweden.
• It's official. SWG Lithuanian team forms its own venture, FIRSTPICK. €20m fund, with €15m  committed (anchored by €9m from INVEGA). Planning to back 45 startups in 3 years. Launches with a party that we missed, but here's video reporting from Socialhack, the location is identified, and we are processing leaked afterparty pictures for your benefit.

rounds and capital

• Taiwania Capital made its first venture investment, signing a EUR 3.5 m round with Litilit, an innovative femtosecond laser startup (Iron Wolf portfolio). Two more investments will be announced soon, to bring the total to 10 million euros.
• LitCapital led the investment round in an electric powertrains designer and manufacturer Elinta Motors, which plans to triple revenue in 2022 (was EUR 5m last year). And if the LitCapital landing page is a bit more revealing, they seem to have invested around EUR 4m.
• Speiz is now listed as Iron Wolf Capital portfolio firm - looking forward to learning more details. In the meantime, the team is in building mode.
• Isomer Capital joins as its first institutional investor in Siena Secondary Fund
• New angel syndicate looking to invest EUR 200-700k in an early-stage LT startup - doesn't sound too hard, does it?

roleplay

Hiring? Now you can drop a link to your job posting here, and select to show one or two weeks. As you know, this will be in front of the very top talent LT has.

founder guide

• To restore performance, drink coffee before you nap
• Lenny's podcast is getting seriously good, and beyond product. This with Matt Mochery (exec coach) talks about firing people well, fear and anger, and much more. Plus - here are all of Matt's frameworks, how come this is still free?
• 110 funds that lead seed rounds. Also, our previous summary on how to fundraise this year and worth listening to the new EF pod episode on the topic.
• Go-To-Market Fit Toolkit
• Here's why gross margins can kill a business - Opendoor, Twilio, Bird

insights

• Ruta talking to Titas from Vinted to educate on stock options (in LT).  New employees in LT still rank them terribly low as a criteria. But these interviews will get much spicier after IPO or acquisition!..
• Why Cleantech 1.0 died - and why it is different now? Illustrative: Lebanese went on a solar power binge, importing $800m of solar kit in just 1 year.
• "Biologization of industry would look and feel very different from the industrialization of biotech" - Atoms are local.
• It's common tracking Layoffs.fyi and panicking, but maybe no need? The pace of hiring in SV was out of control - "to get back to 2019 employee levels, Meta would have to layoff almost half the company".

three questions

Gytenis Galkis, Venture Partner, Superhero Capital

Superhero Capital is a regional player. What are you after in terms of startup stage, verticals, or business models?

As with most of the other regional VC’s we look at early-stage (pre-seed/seed) companies with strong founding teams and scalable businesses :)

Being a regional VC firm, we are generalists, so we look at various verticals and business models, but they need a software element. Then we pick the ones that, in our view, have the most compelling investment opportunity. We offer capital in exchange for equity. Our fund’s average initial ticket is ~EUR 500k and can go up to EUR 1m. Entrepreneurs are Superheroes like Batman. We at Superhero Capital are Alfreds to Batmans’.

What would you like to achieve in Lithuania and the Baltics in the next 12-24 months?

There is no specific strategy towards Lithuania, but towards the whole region (Finland + Baltics). We are here to provide capital to local entrepreneurs with global aspirations. That should give us and our LPs solid investment outcomes (exits). For those who seek to invest in Venture Capital, we plan to provide such an opportunity within the next 12-18 months. We are always available for a chat.

Founders in Lithuania. What comes across for you as particular strengths, or advantages - something you recommend to leverage more?

According to Dealroom data about all the New Nordics, Lithuania stands 3^rd when counting the company value per funded euro. The leader is Denmark, followed by Sweden. However, I’m doubtful about the reliability of this data but based on it and my overall judgment, the best guess is that most of our startups are capital efficient. This thesis has also been validated by McKinsey 2019 study on B2B SaaS startups where Lithuania was placed second in Europe. I believe this ability to achieve more with less will be crucial in the next couple of years.

Previously with three questions

• Daniel Kratkovski and Dominykas Milašius, co-founders, Delta Biosciences (also there is a new video interview with the team)
• 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

Raise your voice
For our weekly newsletters: