Tuscany can wait

work in progress

• Sporty. Walk15 grows all the way to 1,000,000 app users. Marek is shutting down scorestars, and bringing insights and experience to something next. It is a pivotal moment for the coach-in-your-pocket type of products, with LLM processing: a simple example with basketball tutor. This makes me think about opportunties for the likes of Latvian HackMotion (grew 160% to EUR 7.3M in 2024, profitable), KaiSense, FittyAI, Motion Trials, and certainly FPRO.
• Nominate. We've got so many incredible female entrepreneurs and investors, got to have the Baltics topping this list: please nominate your favourite to Sifted 100 Women in Tech in Europe. Inspirational lists here and here, and don't forget female investors.
• E-commerce. Genus AI launches big new product – Sage, an AI Agent that's designed to help e-commerce brands grow via digital channels. The shift in advertising, PPC teams and what marllm is doing. Supliful (Latvia) went from 200k in 2021, to 9m 2024.
• Fintech. Being ahead as a jurisdiction requires continuous effort – impressed to see a broad regulatory package going through, it solidifies LT's advantages – well done by all involved. BeMyBond has entered into a strategic partnership with fund management company Aggressive Capital. FIRSTPICK picked Chaseit – a team that brings AI into debt recovery space. CoinGate reports on H1 market, with USDT wiped out, USDC usage surging 4x, while TRX volumes pumped 8x. Vialet partners with Yaspa.
• Lasers and space. BBC covers space tech startups. Integrated Optics is also breaking into space tech scene. BMI Awards Rokas Slekys, Akoneer CEO, as Entrepreneur of the Year – another high growth laser company is emerging (revenue almost 4x 2o24). Sensmetry (impressive team) took part at Cassini accelerator, and excited to learn they are are productizing with SysIDE tool.

• Health. Flying off the shelves: Pulsetto closed H1 with €11M in revenue - already surpassing their 2024 performance. To address data fragmentation, Spike Technologies created a unified sleep score – standardized metrics that work across all devices.
• Creators. Different than all influencers, Billo is betting on real humans for creatives (grew revenue to EUR 7.4m last year). Modash jumps to EUR 6.7m revenue, quarterly. Paulius built CreatorHunter, but keeps on shipping new stuff. Learn how to do AI cartoons from Framer (Paulius). iPhone Photography School did 14m revenue in 2023.
• Builders. After leading growth at Kilo and Moerie, Mangirdas launches lakilaki: personalized beauty learning app to replace these endless tiktoks for learning. Liina (ex-Deel) is thinking about how to help startups go from day 1 to performing sales engine. For those inpatient ones, _basedspace is the curated community to get into. (if not there, this is fun read how to go build in Japan)
• Estonian CRM/ERP for your Business. Is Pipedrive accelerating? EUR 121M in Q1 2025. Katana ERP displaying predictable growth. MRPeasy is almost bootstrapped (seedstrapped), growing and profitable.
• Defence. News on Ragnar Sass' new venture firm: fifteen-month-old Darkstar just completed a first close of €15 million backed by European entrepreneurs, family offices, and Estonian state-backed LP SmartCap. Does Deeper want to do boat drones, fishing only or perhaps dual-use? Talking about sea vessels, Superangel in Estonia backed Kraken Technology Group, joining an a coalition that includes NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) and UK's NSSIF. Airvolve and signed a LoI in Finland for 10 units of Airlift-U500. Monopulse was selected to receive support through the APUS program (Odense Robotics)

• People. Saulius Tvarijonas, ex VP at CUJO, joins GREÏ as co-founder and CTO. Auguste (ex-Spike Technologies) joined n8n GTM team. Egle (ex-PVcase) joined GrowTech as Head of Business Development. Liliana joins Trace.Space as the first marketing hire (and Janis from Trace.Space is relocating to San Fran). Ausrine, former minister of Economy, joins inRento. After nearly a decade Startup Wise Guys CEO, Cristobal Alonso, is passing the baton back to the founder, Herty Tammo. Did we miss your hire? Share pls.

rounds and capital

• ex-Sequoia partner Matt Miller closes in on $400mn European tech fund (as solo partner) – and we wonder when we will hear this name again?
• Skarbe team raised EUR 600k to help founders who hate CRMs finally sell on their own terms. Investment coming from FIRSTPICK, Somersault Ventures, Andreas Mihalovits and Jeroen Van Ermen.
• BrachyDOSE has secured EUR 554k round to test its radiation measurement technology in a clinical environment. Funding led by Coinvest Capital, with participation from BSV Ventures and LitBAN + EstBAN.
• Calmio secures EUR 200k EU-financing support to build AI-based grief assistant.
• Sygnity S.A., part of Total Specific Solutions group, has acquired DocLogix.

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]
PayPal [Global integrated payments solution]
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]
Superangel [Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A for tech companies]

three questions - most recent

• Tadas Norušaitis, CEO and Co-Founder, Pickitoo
• Chris Sidlauskas, Founder, sintra.ai
• Kasparas Jurgelionis, Founding Partner, Iron Wolf Capital
• Mikk-Plakk, Co-founder and CEO, Paul-Tech
• Gajus Kuizinas, Co-founder and CTO, Contra
• Miks Mikelsons, Co-founder and COO, Emmi AI