Resilience

work in progress

• Unicorns Lithuania reporting H1 2025: 282 M taxes paid, 19,500 talents employed, EUR 4600 average salary. No signs of slowing down!
• +50M annual revenue scale-up club. How many Baltic tech scale-ups reached this level? We found 17 in Lithuania, 4 in Estonia, and 1 in Latvia. Some might be missing - let us know if you know.
• Research-driven. KELI Therapeutics has been awarded EUR2.5 million grant from the EIC Accelerator program. Urtė Neniškytė secures €2M ERC grant to decode the brain's 'sugar code'. Litilit secures EUR 1.87M EU funding to develop femtosecond laser. CovaGreen is developing charging technology that uses... thin air. Vilnius Tech university signs 114k contract with Blackswan Space. Another mission is taking Astrolight technology to space.
• Cars. Production-Ready Rhino RR01 Supercar Unveiled. OBDeleven launches OBDeleven 3. Mbito is on a sprint (10x).

• Ex-Vinted is the working title, what do we have from this great brand? Listing who is building, especially in tech / startups, LinkedIn post here
  
  Donatas Stundys, Co-founder, Kaching Appz
  Simona Vasytė, Co-founder and CEO, Perfection42
  Aurimas Slapšys, Co-Founder at Sort A Brick
  Alius Petraška, VP of Engineering and Co-Founder at isLucid
  Deividas Celencevičius, Co-Founder and CEO at Boop
  Tomas Peciukaitis, Co-Founder at Gearro
  Donatas Tamošauskas, Co-founder and CTO, Leya AI
  Lukas Grigaravičius, Co-founder, AgroSync
  Edas Lakavicius, Nerius Žarnauskas, Co-founders at Motifind
  Kasparas Siudika, Co-founder and CPO at laki laki
  Saulius Krygeris, Co-founder and CEO, Procurli
  Martynas Narijauskas, Founder, Livity
  Armandas Vaičikauskas, chef de cuisine at Sobeck Futures
  Paulius Sadauskas, Co-founder, Blizy
  Mangirdas Adomaitis, Co-founder, Mentum (acq by Eany)
  Povilas Skrebutenas, Co-founder, Mentum (acq by Eany)
  Martha Eierdanz, Co-founder, konsens
  Vytautas Butkus, Co-founder, Kubi Design
  Juozas Zobernis, Product Designer | Co-founder at Nannow.app
  Nikita Svesnikov, Founder, Kumite Technology
  Deividas Graužinis, Co-founder, Wozber
  
• Talking about unicorn mafias, Palantir has global recognition, with FDE becoming the hottest job in town (town being SV). Gintautas leads the ex-FDE founder pack as Co-founder and CEO of Mavenoid. Somehow, all Palantir people for the Baltics are LT-based.
• Financing spinoffs. LT Research Council will deploy EUR 5M (120-150k subsidies at 100% intensity) for spinoffs to commercialise their products. Funding is critical – it is great investment for the future economy. However, we are concerned about fragmentation / misalignment in innovative businesses funding/support. For example, A) your startup is doing innovative products but you have never heard about this B) yet another institution running financial support program C) applications acccepted in Lithuanian only D) Experts will assess the commercial potential – not sure who are they, but only accomplished technology entrepreneurs and professional venture investors can qualify for this) E) Guessing hardly anyone applies without hiring consultants just for this admin job (hope I am wrong).
• Calendar. IKI X REWE Digital Startup Night Sept 24 (our recent interview with impressively growing Pickitoo here, Traxlo recent funding here). You can still get funding for taking part at fairs/events.

sponsors

Cloudvisor [AWS partner dedicated to startups]
Hostinger [making online presence accessible to everyone worldwide, hiring]
Google For Startups [cloud credits up to $350K, expert support & faster growth]
Oxylabs [Step into the world of web data gathering]
VIALET [Business accounts for growth, hiring]
Surfshark [Top 50 among fastest growing in EU, hiring]
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]
Superangel [Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A for tech companies]

rounds and capital

• Handwave lands $4.2M seed round, led by Practica Capital, alongside FIRSTPICK, Outlast Fund, Inovo.vc. Team is launching a privacy-first biometric payments + ID platform across Europe and the US.
• Bisly has raised €4.3M in funding — led by 2C Ventures with participation from SmartCap, Aconterra, Pinorena, and Foxway founders. AI-powered building automation.
• Psylink raised EUR 500k pre-seed led by Coinvest Capital, with participation from FIRSTPICK, BSV Ventures, Erin Gainer and other angels. Working on plant- and fungi-derived compounds for therapies.
• KELI Therapeutics has been awarded EUR2.5 million grant from the EIC Accelerator program
• *Real Estate, premium luxury. Supported by Oxylabs, Synthesis launched a cool campaign "Senamiskio Rezidencijos" – surprisingly low square meter pricing.

three questions

Rokas Bendikas, Co-founder and CTO, Laelaps AI

What led you to start Laelaps AI – what is the founding story?

The three of us actually met during our undergrad at King’s College London. Maria and I were doing Engineering, and Sophia was studying Physics. We’d see each other around all the time: joint lectures, events (and parties). After undergrad, Maria and I went to Imperial for our Master’s in Computer Science and Robotics, and Sophia went to Cambridge to study Biotechnology. We stayed really close, especially during COVID when it was hard to meet new people; we kind of became a support bubble. Eventually, Sophia stayed in Cambridge for her PhD in Applied Quantum Physics, and Maria and I started ours in Robotics and AI at UCL.

Around that time, the war in Ukraine had just started, and there were all these attacks on infrastructure, like the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea, and we started having really serious conversations about the future of Europe. We felt like many were looking at defence, like battlefield innovation in both hardware and software, but not so many were thinking about resilience of “everyday infrastructure" like our warehouses, rail lines, electricity substations. That’s where the idea for Laelaps really took shape.

Tell us more about the product and problem that you are solving?

We’re still in stealth, so we can’t say too much yet, but the core problem we’re tackling is pretty clear: internal security across Europe is being overlooked. The three of us are from different parts of the region (Lithuania, Germany, and Greece), and we all started noticing the same thing. While there’s been a lot of focus on defending borders, the stuff that keeps society running, like military warehouses, substations, rail lines, is wide open to attacks. And we’ve already seen this play out.

That’s the gap we’re addressing with Laelaps AI. We’re building autonomous robotic systems that can help protect critical infrastructure from emerging threats, things that are fast, unpredictable, and often hard to detect with purely static security solutions. We think internal resilience is just as important as frontline defence, and it needs smarter tools.

What's next for you in terms of fundraising, hiring, anything else?

We’ve just closed our pre-seed round and are proudly backed by Google Cloud, AWS, and the European Space Agency alongside our investors. In August, we’re opening our office and lab in Zürich (woohoo!) and are now looking for exceptional individuals to join us as our first founding team members on-site.

If our mission resonates with you and you’re the kind of person looking for the ride of a lifetime, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a message at talent@laelaps.ai or reach out directly on LinkedIn!

founder's guide

• How did a couple generational companies got built? Amazing story of Figma (Dylan Field, remember the name) and learnings from Ramp (how to 22B valuation in less then 10 yrs)
• GenAI as a mirror for the human psyche, by Lina Zakarauskaite.
• Mindaugas writes about Mortality.
• Simple but actionable framework for product ideas:
  
  1. Go to Reddit
  2. Search on “alternatives”
  3. Find pain points of existing products
  4. Build a better alternative

further insights

• Camcorders are back, why?

• Will data centers crash the economy? Great read by Noah Smith, where he notes that "Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending".

• Phones and kids: "This is crazy and kind of heartbreaking. In a huge survey of young kids about phones and technology, they all say they want to be out playing in the real world. But parents don't let them out unsupervised. So they're stuck on their phones."
• "Eyes on the street" – how many people with public policy background travel and explore.

ecosystem

• Always fun to see driven civil servants, or in this case, diplomats, pushing hard behind the curtains (diversifying energy supply with US lobby).

roleplay

• How to navigate job market if you want to join a startup. Also, the guide to getting a job with cold email.