There is no moat

work in progress

• Building a school in Cambodia - Andrius from Hostinger inspires all.
• Kickstart. Millo is the winner of TechBBQ 2021 Hardware Startups Pitch and coming back next week with millo air: New Generation Motorless Magnetic Blender. Get one and support here.
• 3D. Desktop Metal is at $1B cap, turns $100m+ revenue and it's still early days. Founders to talk to: Linas from Vital3D (bio printing), Odeta from Vukaza (global maker network), and Einius from Cyber POD (print-on-demand electronics).
• Right thing. Laurynas (DOW, which surged revenues last year) smashes gov't plans for charging stations at public buildings (for big moneys). Seems like one of these policy initiatives guided by "easy thing to do" instead of "doing the right thing". While infra is indeed an enabler, we actually find EV purchase subsidies shortsighted: if one actually cared about climate, your goal would be getting people out of cars- turning them electric is a very expensive way to tackle emissions (it's still 2000 kg of steel carrying 80 kg) and also regressive (incentive covered by those riding the bus). This funding would have more impact upgrading public transport and incentivizing micromobility (already e-bikes outsell e-cars).
• Where to look for a new set of unicorns.

• No moat. When an early-stage investor asks about your startup moat - there is none, correct, you can only build one over time. Media is fun and partly because there is never a moat, it's a pure execution game (even Delfi knows it).
  Shoutout to all indie media relentlessly covering the Baltic tech scene - is it Pursuit of Scrappiness, Superproduktas, Katalista pod, others, including anyone thinking to launch a podcast, newsletter (welcome Cloudvisor), or just a twitter handle. We've been putting a few resources for TP Member Circle - media on how to do media, some recent fun shots are Harry Stebbings on how to do 100m downloads, and Indie Hackers with 100k newsletter readers.

rounds & capital

• Boomio landed EUR 550k to level up the customer loyalty market. Led by Lighthouse Ventures and a syndicate of 4 European angel investors. Prior Boomio received funding from 2 LitBAN investors, together with 70V and Startup Wise Guys.
• Sweden's Mavenoid has secured $30 million in a Series B round led by Smedvig Capital. Mavenoid builds a leading hardware support platform, with Gintautas Miliauskas as Co-founder and CTO.
• Justina joins Geniess (Norway) pre-seed round, they do software for battery storage system developers.
• Invega (and Lithuania) is joining NATO Innovation Fund and will contribute up to EUR 28m.
• Peoples. Gabriele (Change Ventures) is moving back to Amsterdam to join APX as an Investment Manager; Dominykas (prev Launchpad Capital) moves to Taiwania Capital, as Global Investment Manager (200mln USD fund is focused on CEE).

Learnoverse is the first-ever Learning Metaverse with Learn & Earn token economy and NFTs. The ambition is to create a decentralized education ecosystem with the metaverse as a social space and a new medium of learning.

Learnoverse is built on top of BitDegree and will inherit its 1.2 million users and Web3 education focus to start with. BitDegree & Learnoverse has a team of 40+ people in Vilnius & Kaunas offices and is looking for Senior Executives (COO & CMO) to power its growth.

founder guide

• Find The Fast Moving Water - wonderful read from NfX
• Ways to improve hiring quality, especially within scaleups
• Top 5 mistakes in US expansion (by Balderton, first one - delay)
• Doing a lot with less capital - Loom story
• Updated J12 seed deck template
• Good picks for young founders/operators by Lukas Yla (Citybee, Bolt) (in LT)
• Open Source Software and getting contracts right (by Andrius from NOOR). As the tech ecosystem booms, startups require more specialized advice.

roleplay

ecosystem

• Vilnius Coding School acquires BTA, which seems to double their revenue and hopefully nurture many new talents.
• Q2 figures for Lithuanian startups - almost 800 of them, 16,3k people employed, and almost EUR 70m per quarter in taxes.
• Who will become CTO of the year? Highly likely one of the startups.

what if it went right?

Glosendas provides custom solutions for worldwide data collection, transfer, storage and processing using proprietary state-of-the-art solar-powered GPS/GSM devices (trackers) with record-breaking weights - as low as 10 grams and beyond.

While sounding like a niche, we are entering a rapidly expanding market as vast new funding is getting assigned for all things climate monitoring and adaptation, including research on changing environmental patterns. Consider Saildrone — uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) - which raised $100m series C just to explore world's oceans. Glosendas might be positioned for impressive growth.