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5 min read

The last one (this year)

The last one (this year)
mixed my photo and one by Vadim Sadovski on Unsplash
Lithuania Tech Weekly #205
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work in progress

  • Growth capital. Eagerly waiting for what next year brings! We should begin with a bang. There is one very exciting round Practica has in their portfolio. Waiting for another one to arrive from Tesonet, early stage but very meaningful. Walk15 opens series A, watch them marching forward. Divaks will need growth capital, too. One wish for all those needing to fundraise in 2025 – do it with confidence, text like Musk.
  • AI art in progress under #AIArtCompetition2024 hashtag. This might be our favourite.
  • What to expect in 2025?
    • Hype is not distributed equally. We tend to notice those who raise capital, but there are so many more that don't need to – and they grow just as fast. Is it Oxylabs, Hostinger, Surfshark, Orbio World, RSI Europe, Eldorado, or others (we need your help to notice them all)
    • In terms of venture-backed scale-ups, keep an eye on CAST AI, Ovoko, PVcase, and biotech / life sciences teams.
    • Market momentum will lift defence, cyber, and certainly AI products. Climate and sustainability will not run out of fashion, although it seems to be reinventing a bit.
    • Marketplaces have become a speciality in LT, and recently a number of exciting ventures got started. Can't list them all but some really interesting angles came from HeavyFinance, Sort A Brick, Saltz, Tingit, eany.io, Traxlo, boop and others.
    • We keep crawling closer to liquidity events, which will further unlock senior talent to pursue something they are tinkering with over the weekends.
  • Transport, water this time. Vilnius is getting four electric ferries, you wish it was Candela P-12 (starting price EUR 1.8m so could only afford one) – instead Latvian BIC will build something, could only find this one render (chatGPT is that you the designer?).
  • There is no hardware. Once perceived as simply "atoms harder than bits", more expensive, and more risky, it has become way more nuanced. Top companies globally now are hardware-driven – Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, TSMC, SpaceX and we expect this trend to continue.
    • No surprise that in defence, the likes of Anduril and Helsing embrace full-stack engineering (soft and hard). In the Baltics, plenty of variety in dual-tech – from aggressive revenue growth (Brolis, RSI Europe, NT Service), to sound rounds (UDS, SensusQ), to a mix (Origin Robotics).
    • Hardware to service playbook is working well for the likes of Aerones, Giraffe360 (both Latvian), or Aispeco and Industrial Robotics (LT).
    • It is exciting to see many hardware plays growing, quite a few profitable even with small size (Astrolight, Industrial Robotics, Aktyvus Photonics, LABA7 almost there), others seriously accelerating (Elinta Motors, Elinta Charge, 8Devices), not to mention Starship Technologies or Aerones.

rounds and capital

founder's guide

Venture capital (including angel investors) is a funding mechanism for moonshots. If you have an exponential business that will grow to $100M in 5 years and be acquired (or go IPO) for billions, venture capital is a good fit to get the rocketship off the ground.

But 99% of startups are not rocketships. They're good, solid business ideas for niche opportunities.
  • The Yope Foundation, formerly Founder.org, unveils its new mission and opens applications for its 2025 program at www.yope.org/apply (includes 100k funding)

further insights

DAC7 requires marketplaces report seller revenue if the seller exceeded 30 transactions or 2000 EUR annual revenue. Designed to collect tax, it totally disregards the profit element on which the tax is levied. It results in companies sharing giga-mega-size-irrelevant data about people selling 30 pairs of jeans at loss.

3. "AI-free" becomes the new organic. Products start advertising themselves as "made by humans" or "AI-free" as a premium feature. Not because they're better, but because humans start craving the imperfection and authenticity of human-made things.

4. We move away from text to prompt interfaces. It starts to get cumbersome and new, interesting ways to prompt with AI get built. Our grandchildren will laugh we did text to prompt.

ecosystem

sponsors

Welcome Oxylabs, our new sponsor and impressive tech scale-up. You are in a great company – Tech Philomaths is made possible by an amazing set of supporters. We will have a couple slots opening – get in touch if your amazing brand would see a fit.

Cloudvisor [AWS partner dedicated to startups]
PayPal [Global integrated payments solution]
Oxylabs [Step into the world of web data gathering]
Vinted [Largest C2C European marketplace, hiring]
Tech Zity [tech hubs and campuses across Lithuania]
Presto Ventures [investing in startups – security, defense, aerospace]
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]
Wargaming [award-winning game developer, careers]

Wargaming just announced New Mech Shooter: Steel Hunters

roleplay

Early-stage startup jobs (50+) Baltics, don't miss opportunities like:

Coinvest Capital - Independent Member for Investment Committee

humaning - Technical Co-founder
[Stealth] - Technical Co-founder
Smartproxy - Content Manager
isLucid - Sales Manager B2B
SalesForge - Account Executive
TaxTactic - CTO

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