Scale at work
work in progress
- The promised land. Bolt posted 2023 revenue at EUR 1.7B (jumped 37.4%), EBIT loss of €94.2m (only). 87% of revenue is from Europe, and 81% is driving service (the rest being rentals and deliveries). What else to know? EUR 535m marketing spend. The largest shareholder – Markus Villig – owns 16.88% of the company.
On a similar scale, but little more profit: Revolut 2023. That is £1.8b of revenue (+95% YoY), £438m of pre-tax profit (vs £25m loss in 2022), 45m accounts (+36% YoY). Curious to see how Nik Storonsky's side hustle, AI-led and ‘truly systematic’ $200 million VC firm QuantumLight, will perform (in New Nordics, they have backed Danish Monta already).
Also, in the promised land, regulators are after you: Vinted will appeal the €2,3 m privacy fine it received from the Lithuanian data protection authority, making a case that they have been protecting users and has not violated GDPR. If the fine is refuted – it will be a sad case study of a regulator who shows no understanding of strategy, as Eimantas argues) - More on mobility, beyond Bolt. Woop Drive is getting launched, starting with petrol discount card and moving into car-sharing very soon. Now talking about gas, the tide has shifted, as you know – it will be almost all electric, because of these fundamental technology improvements. Inbalance grid is set to become major player in Poland – just made a deal with Stokrotka, to launch 270 charging spots across the market. Dancer, an electric bus maker, has made its way with public funding and private investment, but now struggling to survive.
- AI x BIO. Simona (Perfection42) changed industries, but she has Molecular Biology background, and mentions these teams to follow: Caszyme, Klinio (part of Kilo), Biomatter, AI Dermatologist: Skin Scanner. There are certainly more, for example, Justas Dauparas is a co-founder and Xaira Therapeutics, which recently came out of stealth with... $1B funding (ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs, along with F-Prime, NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures and SV Angel).
- People moves. Povilas Zinys joins Plug and Play Accelerator as Director for Lithuania. Laurynas Bogusevicius, the founder of Deals on Wheels, is leaving the business and selling his equity, to focus on Deals on Home, 15min reports. (Interestingly the largest shareholder for DoW is Pijus Makarevicius (Furniture1), with 49% stake). Tautvydas joins #walk15 as their new CTO. Martynas leaves Oxylabs / Nord Security to lead talent acquisition at Light Conversion.
- Breakfast with Iron Wolf - they have Karolis, product designer and OpenAI, as a guest (July 11th)