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Job board - early-stage Baltic startups - here
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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]

founder's guide
- 25 bite-size early-stage sales lessons, including #1
0-1 sales talent does not exist. Founders, this is you.
- Data Room Template for raising seed from Creandum.
- Current SDR/BDR salary benchmarks for German
- Don't read this Carta data if you are a new founder – unless you are ready to go through walls.
Tracking 3,067 US startups incorporated in 2018 – what did they achieve by the end of 2023? About half are no longer in business, 5% got acquired, 0.2% IPO - and the rest scattered across the VC fundraising stages.
- Manage your emotional state – this is such a simple summary, that one can actually remember.
Tech Philomaths'community
- Startup lists for the Baltics - Drone startups, Marketplaces, Sportstech
- Repeat Lithuanian founders - the likes of ex-founders of Applaudience, Lemon Labs, Nanoavioncs, Robolabs – all building new ventures (40 serial entrepreneurs)
further insights
- I like this term – "accountability sinks". That's why B2B (enterprise) like massive brands, incentive is to play sit safe.

- Great reporting from Bloomberg on how middlemen are gaming H-1B visa application process in the US.
- How to invest federal funds as a VC. Interview with The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), whcih helped bring Moderna’s mRNA vaccine through clinical trials to market.
Events
- Baltic VCA Summit in September (grab a discount code below)

- For those negotiating contracts and wanting to get better – Negotiation Conference (#Derybos2024) October 3rd, 2o24.
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roleplay
Join the leadership team before Series A
(Submit your opening for free)
Vinted - Product Designer, VGo OpsTech
Orbio World - Head of Growth
BitDegree - Senior Product Designer
Eskimi - Engineering Manager
Eneba - SEO, PR, Growth roles
Finbee - Head of Sales
Billo - Head of Acquisition
Teamhood - Head of Marketing
Go Vilnius - COO
One thought reading this Jurgita's post about job search – try to avoid using "open to work" badge. It's rather clear by now it does more harm than benefit for the candidate. (While many people think hiring is based on merit, it's very often not, it is a lot about signalling – some external validation that a person is smart/capable) For companies wanting to hire "best" (= running a competitive process), a green badge sends a wrong signal, because generally, the best candidates are never available – companies need to convince them to change jobs. Open to work made sense when there were massive layoffs in covid and businesses wanted to help those suddenly fired without any reason. Now the job market is back to usual, so you'd be better off just "taking a break" and explore opportunities privately.
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