Digital roots

work in progress

Growing together. Tesonet + INVL first major into education - just acquired Siaures Licejus, which is two schools and three kindergartens. Robotikos Akademija founders are now locked in with ExoClass - see the interview. Edtech is hard to get right, but won’t stop builders trying - list of Estonian products.

Vibes shipped. Martynas at 70k MRR with Livity + building Buma in public. Adas (ex-Vinted) built personal finance app - in two months - give it a try (Mihkel has built Bilance, tried it, very handy). Elina Pika left 15 yr corporate career for anna app — day-ahead guidance for perimenopause. Tomas gets some builders in a house in Spain for a week - Vibe House (video). Brigita built Hurive for men - “wellbeing app built like a car dashboard, for the most important machine you own” Tomas and Vilune launched Maxwriter - LinkedIn content engine for busy founders. Rokas built Overvisual for social media content.

For all builders out there — you can get noticed via Sharks - third season is here.

Ventures. Two Romanians and Sarunas started Elephant.Broker - the memory and control layer for AI agents. Duncan Titmarsh, a legend of professional LEGO building, finds himself at Sort A Brick office.

Dual use. Krattworks making real revenues - over EUR 20M in the last four quarters. Mainline shows what EFDI infra can do at NATO integration sprint. RSI Europe keeps ramping up the team, including corporate finance function (M&A considered). Business Insider covers Astrolight, as alternative for Starlink in Europe. New team to track - 3P Defence. NATO DIANA hiring in Estonia.

Brazil. Baltics should do anything and everything to get founders like Gabriel starting their business here. Danius - building Footy Labs - surely had to visit Rio given the market they are in - and had adventures. Brazil is also huge market for Hostinger, as well as Eneba (massive traffic from Mexico and Brazil to their platform).

VCs that turned founders themselves:
JB Daguené - ex 70V - Evergrowth
Alexey Morgunov - ex Metaplanet - AI x Bio (stealth)
Tomas Martunas - ex Iron Wolf - WhiteBridge
Lauri Lehtmaa - ex Creandum - Fundra
Lukas Kairevicius - ex Contrarian Ventures - Chaceit
David Clark - ex Tera Ventures - Logman Defence
Jonas Kavaliauskas - ex Contrarian Ventures - Unive AI
Jokubas Vaiciulis - ex FIRSTPICK - OpenMail
Martynas Pocius - ex Iron Wolf - founding engineer at Drafted.AI
Kristi Kurvits - ex Tera Ventures - founders associate at TerraSpark
Peteris Ozolins - also started Weby.vc and other projects - VamosPRO

Poland / CEE. Many Lithuanian entrepreneurs breaking into Polish / CEE markets for growth. InRento adds EUR 11M (!) to portfolio in July only. ROIX has also launched private credit in Poland. Poland is important market for Ovoko - ex Uber GM runs it.

People moves. Aivaras lands Director of Growth role at Burga, and Goda is the new CHRO. Valeriia becomes a Partner at Darkstar. Aurimas leaves Vinted, joining Hostinger as Head of Cyber Security. Anuka joins Eneba to find more talent, Verica joins as Affiliate Manager. Darius joined Pulsetto as Head of Manufacturing & Supply Chain. Justinas moved back to Kaunas after 15 years in the UK and joined Hostinger. Also Hostinger for Mantas, ex-Spike. Akvile is Head of Comms at Ondato. Benita joins Pulsetto as Community and Brand Activations Manager. Benoit, ex-Earthbanc, looking at new roles in business development (in LT). Migle (ex Mailerlite) is ready for new product role.

sponsors

Cloudvisor [now offering stress-free migration from any cloud to AWS]
Hostinger [online presence accessible to everyone worldwide, hiring]
Google For Startups [cloud credits up to $350K, faster growth]
Ovoko [join to transform Europe’s €30B+ used car parts market]
Oxylabs [Step into the world of web data gathering]
VIALET [Business accounts for growth, hiring]
Surfshark [Top 50 among fastest growing in EU, hiring]
Eldorado.gg [world’s largest in-game trading marketplace, hiring]
Eneba [join the marketplace 20M gamers love]
InRento [Investments in real estate projects with income, growth, and impact]

three questions

Serial founders in Edtech now solving what slowed them down before.

Robotikos akademija went from one classroom to 700-plus locations. What was the actual unlock — content, teacher supply, or funding rails?

Teacher supply, but not the way people think. The unlock wasn't finding robotics teachers, because they don't exist. It was standardising the curriculum to the point where a motivated student could deliver a great class. Content didn't scale the business; content made teachers scalable.

The other two came in sequence. Schools gave us rooms — you don't build 700 classrooms, you partner with schools that already have the space and the parents' trust. Funding rails came last, and deepened demand: when Lithuania introduced the NVŠ basket in late 2015, more than 58,000 children joined state-funded activities within months, and the state budget for it has since grown from €3m to €25m a year. That turned after-school from a middle-class purchase into a mass product.

But the thing that nearly broke us at every stage was none of the three. It was back-office: schedules, payments, attendance, contracts, municipality paperwork. Nobody romanticises that part and everybody underestimates it. It is also why we are building Exoclass.

Is there a Treatwell or Booksy for after-school — and if not, why hasn't it been built?

It has been built several times. It just keeps dying. Hoop in the UK reached 1.5m families and collapsed in 2020; the brand was later relaunched by new owners as a simple listings app. KidPass in the US was acquired and quietly absorbed. Pebble raised £5m as a consumer marketplace and now sells B2B activity-management software. The survivors — Sawyer in the US, ClassForKids in the UK — are all SaaS companies, not marketplaces.

The reason is structural. Booksy works because a haircut repeats monthly and the barber already runs a calendar. After-school is the opposite: families decide once or twice a year, demand is brutally seasonal and — the killer — there is no bookable inventory. Providers run on spreadsheets and Messenger, so a marketplace has nothing to plug into.

So we reversed the sequence: first give providers the operating system — scheduling, payments, contracts, state-funding paperwork — then open the marketplace on top of supply you already control. Like Ovoko did. That is Exoclass plus bureliai.lt, launching in the first schools this September. Every dead marketplace lacked a revenue floor and locked supply. We start with both.

Interview continued here.

roleplay

brand + design

Not every company can become culturally ingrained, nor does every company need to. But for brands with that potential, it can become one of the strongest forms of long-term equity.

True brand-building relies on cultural resonance and integrating a company into society.

By announcing this latest investment in a foundational cultural institution, alongside existing investment in Žalgiris which is arguably the strongest Lithuanian brand with the highest cultural equity, Tesonet seems to be doing just that.

founder's guide

• “You’re not depressed. You just need to find your creative quest”
• How to be The Post-Agentic Founder

listed

• Lithuanian VCs Abroad
• ex-Vinted Founders
• Lithuanian Founders in the US
• ex-Oxylabs Founders