Taste and culture

work in progress

• Something new. Paulius joins Lovable shipped and playing with AI-powered health advisor. Liina is putting together a round to back Muun Health –startup that wants to revolutionise fertility tracking. Juras getting Keika.ai off the ground with demo calls. Callsy and Subsribed.fyi join FIRSTPICK accelerator. Gooliver team launches new venture – Vocali – to help medical personel with documentation. New Edtech – Aha Stories – have one famous co-founder onboard, Milda Mitkute (though registered as non-profit). I am also very curious about Annifer – machine learning with expert insight to bring instant, transparent, and data-driven art appraisals (TBDC accelerator program in Toronto this June).
• Founder genius. Very few things are as exciting as founder-led products that create new categories and solve actual problems. Some strike with simplicity, some are hugely complex+high stakes.
  • Sentante just pulled off a fully robotic remote endovascular stroke thrombectomy in an animal model using the their robot - with 1600+ km between the operator in Kaunas, Lithuania and the procedure in Paris, France.
  • InSoil (former HeavyFinance) is an example when founders don't need a playbook – they start solving a problem and gravitate towards larger issues and markets – from machinery financing to $100m carbon farming partnership.
  • Loved Darius' share on how he got started with FPRO during covid, such a simple yet powerful idea! From scratch to 140,000 users in 84 countries, profitable, and Tesonet EUR 2m investment. Wondering how many of you have ideas + problems to solve, but holding back? Text them to me.

• More human, more culture, more taste. AI is abstracting away the code and gives startups new flavours, encourages creativity (that plays along distribution: you'd better do some meaningful stuff that people want to hear/see). Examples? Cluely's $15M raise by a16z video (cheat on everything?). Sam (Altman) and Jony introduces oi (video). Sintra.ai gave AI engines artsy touch with these little fellows.
• With great power comes great responsibility? Both Vinted and Tesonet going for the moon:

Steal this phrase as a new founder. It might sound too audacious, but actually it's ok (depending on which VCs you're talking to). Thomas talks on a new pod why and how they are building a whole ecosystem for reuse (marketplace + shipping + payments + venture). Explains that Vinted is a company that might buy your startup, but ain't "going to sell".

Before you're into billions of value (but in hundreds of millions valuation), founders and CEOs are responsible for growth, which often needs to go beyond organic. Oxylabs closed their second acquisition, acquiring a well-established brand ScrapingBee, with a reported "8-figure all-cash deal" – just a little more than the ScrapingBee founders initially planned for:

• Btw the target was TinySeed portfolio firm, as well as marllm, founded by Jolanta. Here she tells story of transitioning into this venture via Antler, and reaching 380k revenue in the first year.
• People. Jurgita joins Vedliai. Aiste takes an analyst role at Practica Capital. Greta joins Svietimas#1. Nikodemas joins FIRSTPICK.

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]
Presto Ventures [investing in startups – security, defense, aerospace]
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]
Superangel [Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A for tech companies]

rounds and capital

• Sintra.ai raises seed funding which is would be sound series A – $17m round, led by Earlybird VC, along with Inovo.vc and Practica Capital. You get there if you can grow from zero to $12m ARR in just 12 months, with 40k+ customers. Special team and culture – keen to follow this journey.
• Pactum AI closes $54m series C, led by Insight Partners.
• InSoil announced Europe’s largest climate‑resilient farming financing initiative: €100 million to support regenerative transitions across 1 million hectares – a partnership agreement with Key Carbon.
• Estonian autonomous vehicle developer Clevon has been acquired by U.S. tech company indiGO Technologies (terms not disclosed).
• Traxlo closed EUR 1.6m seed round. Fast-growing platform transforming physical labor into verifiable tasks, has raised from Coinvest Capital, BADideas.fund, Plug and Play Tech Center, NGL Ventures, DEPO Ventures and participation of existing investors.
• YOLO in Estonia closed 100m fund – looking for series A-ish, mil+ revenues in the spaces of crypto, fintech and igaming (deploying globally)

three questions

Chris Sidlauskas, founder, sintra.ai

What early experience shaped your growth mindset and made you so relentlessly focused on scaling?

Just before turning 21, I sold all of my shares of my marketing agency to my co-founders, bought a bright yellow VW van 🐝 and then packed all of my bags to go down south to Portugal in search for meaning and for my next adventure.

While there, I spent a couple of months living in parking lots like a bum and surfing on coasts of Ericeira, Peniche, Arrifana. There was a lot of ocean time and I had some quality time learning to read waves.

The idea for Sintra came while coming back from this trip, in a small pitstop apartment in Berlin. We became one of the first ones to sell ChatGPT prompts – and eventually bootstrapped from there.

It felt like our growth was driven by the market and knowing how to surf the waves at the right time. With waves, as with markets, you can't stop them and you can't control them. The bigger the wave, the higher the skill required – and if there are no waves, you have no surf.

Surfing in startups means that you can spot where the market is headed and what customers truly want – and then knowing how to capture that demand into a product that they'd use and love.

It's a skill which we're still learning – to catch even bigger waves.

With Sintra.ai growing so quickly, how do you and your team stay grounded amid constant change?

Gut feeling.

Usually, the glitz and glamour of startups are the shiny headlines, the big revenue numbers, huge investment rounds and record growth. People look at that and think, wow, that's impressive.

However, what we usually don’t see are the internal battles behind the scenes and the struggles within the heads of the founders. How the people feel at the company. How much do the founders trust each other. How the company holds true to its values and integrity. How our gut feels.

In reality, the outcomes of startups, the metrics, the vanity, none of that matters if people doing the work don't feel like doing the work. It's the journey and the feeling that comes from this journey that makes us go back every single time.

Sintra was born because of this feeling.

The real risk for Sintra will never be a lack of capital. It will always be about people losing this gut feeling. Because then you can work for free, even during the weekends, out of abandoned garages, eating buckwheat just to get by. It's what drives everything.

Your gut knows.

You launched your first marketing business at just 16—what would you tell today’s teenagers who want to build something after school?

First of all, I'm honestly a bad role model to follow. There are so many beautiful paths you can take in life.

What really helped me was the realization that It's all in your hands. Time is ticking and nobody is coming to save you. Nobody is going to hand you anything on a silver platter. You have the ability to plant beautiful flowers in the world while you're still here. Why waste a second of this precious gift?

founder's guide

• 11 things founders (first-time founders) should know about VCs
• Six useful prompts including "turn this into first-principles thinking"
• How to do reference calls
• Why AI Labs Are Starting to Look Like Sports Teams