Seasoned founders

work in progress

• Techchill on high voltage, as always. Forget these scrappy founder pizza meetups. Only four LT startups - Greet, Liledu, Pickvibe, Salesforge made to the top50 of the Pitch Battle. The winners are:

• Salesforge – 150k EUR syndicate funding from BADideas.fund and an additional 100k EUR from DEPO Ventures (hiring senior AE) .
• SUBmerge Baltic (LV), taking home the 10,000 EUR TechChill Community Cash Prize
• FleetFox – 75k EUR in funding from BADideas.fund + Snap 10k credit
• Silo Team (SE) – 250k EUR investment offer from Look AI Ventures

• Phones are taking a punch. While some are trying to make them smarter – kevin. did the first-ever account-to-account NFC transaction on an iPhone – the "dumb" phone movement is real, too. Schools are embracing lockable pouches, and impact on children / teenageers is being understood better. AI does not seem to be an immediate solution on its own – at least not in the form of Humane AI pin. A phone, a friend is taking the gradual route, assumes LLMs will keep improving and tech will evolve.
• Manufacturing. Asked couple weeks ago – which hardware startups might lead to new factories, and somehow completed missed Burga, which is already in progress. Solitek opens new building and launches energy storage products, while all Europen solar businesses are squeezed with extreme competition from China. Keep an eye of laser firms – Altechna reminds that they will grow following demand explosion for compute power.

• Edtech. Let's start with controlled experiment in Ghana which found that an AI tutor improved K12 math performance significantly at low cost. So did Alfa Klase - launched AI-driven tool for Lithuanian 12th graders to speed up their Maths exam prep. Latvian Edurio platform is used in more than 1,500 schools in the UK. Mindaugas launched Coho as a spin-off from onDeck in Portugal, and this key learning is that "true professional growth stems from a blend of challenge and support found in diverse, thoughtfully curated peer groups".
• Majority of M&A events and awards in the Baltics: it's about getting a bunch of scale-ups and VCs on the stage, since this is where most exciting deals happen.

• Defence tech. "Founders say they can feel the heat of the war when in the Baltics, while in Western Europe it feels so distant". This pod with Edvinas Kerza from Scalewolf made me think – there is probably more opportunity in the Baltics, besides inspiring and backing local tech entrepreneurs (although it looks quite promising Estonians are pulling events ahead, 200 people there). But if we are little more creative, with dedicated funding (Scalewolf, CoInvest, Baltic Sandbox, Lemonade Stand), close networks with Ukrainians, ability to run experiments quickly in the war scene, we should be inviting many more European/NATO miltech founders to spend time here. That might lead to new team formations, local scaling/production – or simply successful investment cases. It's worth considering to double-down on this thesis and ease geo-focus. But someone has to take the initiative, call all these European VCs to build decent dealflow (strange not to see Scalewolf on that table yet).
  • (Think about it - as a LP, Ignitis made a return with Contrarian ventures exactly because their scope was not limited to LT or Baltics, but investing wherever best energytech founders are. What if Invega/MOD learns from this and rinse-repeat?).

• Calendar
  • AI in software engineering event, virtual, April 25
  • Tech Events in LT by Fiestos

• People moves. Kilo Health has a new CEO - Zygimantas Surintas! Tadas Burgaila will now be able to get more done :) Here is the press release for you, too. Cedric joins NGL, as they just launched board member + advisor community for startups. Wave ventures gets Tiffany onboard, based in Tallinn. Karina leaves SWG to focus on sustainability. Rasa moved between countries, but with Talent Garden – celebrating 10 years relentlessly building.
• Vinted is having celebrity moment across the continent, and that coverage will gradually lead to something:

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rounds and capital

There is now a certain rhythm in announcements as main early-stage investors are deploying capital and running acceleration batches. Interestingly, all three rounds are with second-time founders, so this list is handy if you want to be around for series A.

• Saltz.app, a fresh products marketplace launched by Andrius and Tomas, co-founders of Oberlo, has raised a EUR 3M seed round. It was led by Lifeline Ventures, with Illusian Family Office (Miki Kuusi, founder of Wolt), Change Ventures, Mantas Mikuckas, Rytis Vitkauskas and former Shopify executives also joining.
• Softloans secured EUR 1M pre-seed round, led by FIRSTPICK and with undisclosed angels (one of those being Moose Ventures?). They do embedded revenue-based lending solution to SMEs.
• CTO2B, SaaS platform for automated DevOps on cloud infrastructure, closed also EUR 1M pre-seed. Practica Capital led the funding with participation from FIRSTPICK and several business angels.
• In Latvia, inGain raises EUR 650k to offer no-code SaaS loan management system for fintechs, a round led by Trind VC and Fiedler Capital, with angels participating.

sponsors

Privileged to have them onboard. They have some newsletter invites, too!

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 early-stage B2B startups and marketplaces],
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]
Wargaming [award-winning game developer, careers]

• Working in a list of Baltic tech companies which are growing fast, that are either profitable (or can be profitable). Noticed some amazing tech stories get forgotten simply because they don't announce rounds every couple years. Do you know any, especially in Estonia and Latvia? Good examples in LT could be Orbio World, CarVertical, RSI Europe, and many smaller. Hit reply, please.

resources

• Startup lists for the Baltics - Drone startups, Marketplaces, Sportstech
• Repeat Lithuanian founders

founder's guide

• Latest YC request for startups and I can see some Baltic teams performing on building new ERPs (like Katana), new Defence Tech, better "Enterprise Glue" and many other categories.
• 10 Ways to Avoid Burnout as a Founder by J.Lemkin
• Sinkus Studio is offering free services and support for non-profits and underprivileged founders.
• What behaviours signal high-velocity team for VCs
• Popular SV advice recovering from collapse – optimize (or assume) that you will be raising one round only (don't run for tens of millions raised unless you believe in exiting in billions).
• Brand agency / creative resource directory in Notion
• Market size becomes important in later stages, but don't stress on in the first rounds - see Shopify case and also good Lenny's pod (this topic and others - like pivoting) with Dalton Caldwell, YC MD. Like the reminder that once getting started don't think A/B testing and other growth hacks series A companies do – it has to be customer-obsessed path, very hands-on:

further insights

• Cars. In case we were thinking that plug-in hybrids a step right direction – in turns out, emissions are 3.5 times higher than official tests claim.
• Founders. A study looked at 2000 US+UK unicorns in the past 10 years.
  • 70% of unicorns have “underdog founders” (immigrants, women, people of color).
• 53% have degrees from the top 10 global universities
• 49% of unicorn CEOs had STEM degrees, 70% of founder teams have STEM degrees.
• Only 34% of unicorn founders had worked at an elite employer prior to founding a unicorn
• Writers. How Much Do Writers Actually Earn?
• Service, not software, because AI can do some thinking for you. A lot of good ideas on thus, and expecting execution to follow: set of examples from foundation capital, how AI-enabled services can tear down the Big 4 market, and more.

roleplay