Second home
Follow on X and LinkedIn
Job board - early-stage Baltic startups - here
Want to subscribe?
Sponsors and Contribees - add many of your friends here
Subscribers - welcome to add one (1) reader in 2024, here
Got this forwarded? Join the waitlist here.
work in progress
- Landed. The first femtech unicorn – Flo Health – secured $200m round to break through $1B valuation. No big surprise, Flo has 60m monthly active users, $112m of annual revenue in 2023 and $192m ARR (source). Scale-up has moved their Belarus operations to Vilnius several years ago, and has been growing since.
Flo brings us to a list of unicorns/post-IPO tech companies/ impressive scale-ups who have teams in Lithuania. The hired/trained have top calibre senior talent, which makes the ecosystem much deeper than seen from the outside.
Revolut 🦄 - team of 250+
Wargaming 🦄 - team of 880+
Flo Health Inc. 🦄 - team of 235
Unity (post-IPO) 🦄 - team of 135
Mambu 🦄 - team of 109
Chronosphere 🦄- team of 19
- Full list
- Hospitals will not be the same. The fully-robotic tele-operated system, Sentante, has successfully completed its first human clinical cases in the recently initiated first-in-human clinical trial at Paula Stradiņa Klīniskā universitātes slimnīca in Riga. Estonian startup Menken Trials gets EUR 1,3M to spare doctors of paperwork. Oxipit partners AI partners, deepc, has secured EUR 12m to expand radiology AI solutions worldwide.
- Emerging markets. So fun to see Baltic founders going places to find opportunities or solve problems. Starting in Latvia, Eleving group has grown across Europe and into Africa (consumer credit and vehicle finance), on track to EUR 200m revenue this year and eyeing IPO. Emerging markets expose to more macro risks and political volatility – for example Estonia Planet42 in South Africa just had t0 suspend loan repayments to its investors. New ones to watch – Jeff App, which just reached $1m MRR, and Finfra (hiring staff in Jakarta).
- Difficulties. Kevin. troubles continue, being chased by Serbian creditor and Bank of Lithuania is blocking from serving new clients as fintech failed to comply with reporting requirements.
- Exporting sporting. In a surprise move, Tesonet acquires a UK basketball club – London Lions. This should allow Zalgiris to share their accumulated experience, as well as broaden opportunities to source and develop talent. New in sportstech - ScheduledAthlete – is in search of technical co-founder. List of Baltic teams addressing sports is growing, just a snapshot here:
- Vertical. Who is following the footsteps of Robert Kupstas' Pure Harvest in Abu Dhabi? They raised over $300m. Leafood has grown from zero to 45 people, in 18 months, and revenue shall follow. Kipras, co-founder of Synternet, also seem to be exploring agriculture with data/software. Freya (Baltic Sandbox portfolio) is "obsessed with greenhouse aeroponics" which is the right attitude to get going.
- Dual. Brolis is showing they are a world-class company, now putting signatures on multiple contracts - LT military (EUR 18m), Spain, and more in the pipeline. ScaleWolf started the third cohort, featuring 13 teams from 7 countries (great to see geo expanding). Unmanned Defence Systems are testing algorithms for SwarmC2 development program—an advanced swarm command and control system tailored for loitering munition vehicles.
- People moves. Alessandro Bertino joins Contrarian Ventures as Principal; based in London, he was with Energy Impact Partners before. After 11 years with Deeper (CTO, CEO roles), Donatas joins Fellow as CTO of Fellow European Innovation Studio (hiring hardware engineers). The heartbeat of FIRSTPICK accelerator, Jurgita, is leaving – and considering edtech for the next adventure. Linas left SUN365. Giovanni has launched Polipo – to enable using any Figma design as the UI of a real application (with live data, and live synchronization).
rounds and capital
- Biomatter raised EUR 6.5m seed round led by Inventure and UVC Partners, with Practica Capital, Metaplanet and others participating. Very promising – Biomatter's Intelligent Architecture™ platform allows building new enzymes bottom-u”, without the traditional constraints of natural enzymes, greatly expanding the potential scope of their applications.
- Vilnius-based Bourgeois Boheme (BoBo), a fintech company tailored for the new generation of successful entrepreneurs, announced that it has closed a €6.5M seed round led by Graphit Lifestyle, an Austria-based VC firm. Possibly another one brought to LT with EMI licence?
- Swedbank AB completed the 100% acquisition of Estonian fintech company Paywerk (value of the transaction will not be disclosed)
sponsors
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 startups at the forefront of security, defense, aerospace] - check their newsletter and startups raising
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know] and also now owns M-1 radio
Wargaming [award-winning game developer, careers]