Full-court press

Went to bed thinking about Oxylabs - just like you. Same thought in the morning.

Wanted to call today's memo something with "printed playbooks”. Or "Baltic playbooks”. But basketball can offer better.

Main idea is very simple. Oxylabs is another hit at "PMF meets ambition”. Because the founders here will not let an opportunity go. If it works, they will run it to the maximum. So zero to 3.6B EV in less than 10 years (and triple revenue in the last two years). Importantly, this is different playbook. Heavy on B2B, pursuing top enterprise accounts. You cannot funnel your way with Meta to this outcome - talented people built a B2B sales muscle to meet the opportunity.
Huge congrats. Onto the next one.

work in progress

Oxylabs. It was September 2024 and someone responded to the weekly memo with one sentence: oxylabs virs 100 siemet. That was the sign. Now suddenly at 350M ARR Oxylabs takes $130M Warburg Pincus' check commanding $3.6B valuation – the business shows no signs of slowing down.

Everything at once. The Baltic unicorn recipe, it seems: find PMF + have hunger to win globally. Can't easily plan yourself into product-market-fit, but once there, the playbooks are there to win (if you really want it).

On scaling - there is not one playbook. Multiple playbooks drove to billion valuations. So next time someone asks you - what Baltics are good at? - don't just jump to "marketplaces” or "cybersecurity”. Appreciate the diversity, as per EU slogan. Case in point - Orbio confirmed growing 73% last year, hit EUR 264M and improved profits.

Consumer / prosumer scale-ups are leveraging marketing-driven customer acquisition, but use different channels and monetization (can't really put Nord/Surfshark, Wise, Hostinger, Flo, Kilo, Orbio, TransferGo into one basket). Marketplaces also need consumer acquisition, but it comes with supply liquidity (can be marketing, or sales), and increasingly infra to make it work (payments, logistics) - so Vinted, Bolt, Ovoko, Eneba, Eldorado are different beasts. And yet another group - B2B giants - Oxylabs, Pipedrive, Veriff, Cast AI, Omnisend - vary from PLG motion, to heavy enterprise sales.

There you go - that next unicorn may be a fintech, a robotics company, or a defence startup. Perhaps someone in life sciences or health? Only PMF+Ambition is required.

Energize. PVcase has been named one of TIME’s World’s Top GreenTech Companies of 2026 - they closed 2025 at 33M revenue, and profitable - impressive. Another one to watch - impressive robotics player in Latvia - Aerones (rumors at $40M revenue, can't confirm!). Not in venture, Lina talking to Ieva from Climate Action Data Trust.

In terms or larger energy picture, German Proxima has raised €411 million - Europe's largest ever private funding round for fusion; Plural has now backed the company four times: pre-seed to today, and is the largest investor. Plural is well positioned to take big bets in Europe - Estonian media surfaced that investment firm Skaala (also Taavet and Sten) has a stake in Anthropic - the same Series A financing round, in which the lead investor was Jaan Tallinn.

Also, we learned great tech founders from the Baltics love basketball - Skaala also invested into Portland Trial Blazers.

Products. Albinas built Tvaras.ai - AI data analyst that lives in your stack. Robertas built BoardQ to gamify team performance tracking.

Shipping within a ship. Here is what scale-ups are going through: how to bring AI inside the business without killing it? Recall how Intercom became Fin for that transformation? Recently Hostinger's Giedrius talked how they are building AI-native platform (and thus hiring many product heads). Very interesting to see what Omnisend came up with (quoting Tomas’ post):

At the end of April, we announced Project Compass company-wide. Here's how we described it:

• €2M Omnisend-funded project, running as a fully separate unit for six months
• The team works from a dedicated office and operates outside Omnisend's normal processes
• Product must be AI-first, use Omnisend's API, and focus on marketing automation
• The target market: smaller businesses that current Omnisend is too advanced for – early adopters who tolerate rough edges
• Three possible outcomes at the end of 2026: continue as a separate product, integrate into Omnisend, or discontinue

People. Linda leaves Karma Ventures. Gediminas Peksys, Co-founder of Oxipit, left the company post acquisition. Tadas decided to leave GitHub. Laurynas finds himself as venture builder at Lost Astronaut. Eglė is now VPN Engineering Team Lead at Surfshark. Žemyna joins Pando Moto. Abdulsalam joins Sonna.

rounds and capital

Oxylabs raises $130M from Warburg Pincus at a $3.6bn valuation

15min Group invests in perks.lt, a discount platform with 100,000 users. Interesting move, a platform play - more to come?

Muun Health has secured a €700k grant from EIS Enterprise Estonia to develop its Smart Patch Platform.

Blackswan Space has been selected as a partner in the European Defence Fund (EDF) funded ASIMOV project - project worth approx EUR 700k

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]
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]
Saily [eSIM data for international travel, hiring]
InRento [Investments in real estate projects with income, growth, and impact]

three questions

What a founder: Vladas Jurkevičius has bootstrapped both Eldorado.gg and Humbility to serious scale - and they are just getting started.

Is there a thread connecting a mechanical engineering degree from Cambridge, a rapidly growing gaming marketplace, and an algorithmic crypto trading firm?

The common thread is the people.

Many of the key people at both Eldorado and Humbility are friends I’ve known since high school at Vilnius Lyceum or from university.

The story actually started back in high school. In 2011, I began buying and reselling in-game assets on various online forums. By 2014, I had launched my first e-commerce stores focused on gaming assets. The business was doing well, and when I graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, I decided to pursue entrepreneurship rather than an engineering career.

In 2017, I invited my high school friend Lukas Deksnys to join me as co-founder, and we set out to build more ambitious companies together. Over the following years, we experimented with a wide range of ideas. Besides Eldorado and Humbility, we built a Twitch extension for streamers, a game price comparison website, a digital identity management platform, a Fortnite esports team, and several other ventures.

When Eldorado and Humbility began gaining real traction in 2021 and 2022, we made a conscious decision to focus exclusively on those two businesses. Since then, we’ve stopped chasing new ventures and instead channel all of our experimentation into growing and improving these two companies.

Where is Eldorado today, and what do you think is actually possible with this business? It looks like it’s accelerating impressively — what’s the ceiling?

Today, Eldorado processes a few hundred million dollars in GMV every year, and we’re continuing to grow rapidly.

When we started building Eldorado in 2018, we believed the ceiling for this type of marketplace was around $20–30 million in annual GMV, because that was roughly the size of the largest competitors at the time. As we’ve grown, we’ve realized the market is significantly bigger than we originally thought.

A big part of our mission is to help change how people think about in-game assets. More and more players see their digital items as something they own and should be able to trade freely, and we’re helping push that transition forward.

I believe that within the next few years, Eldorado will process more than $1 billion in annual GMV. The gaming industry continues to grow, digital ownership is becoming more accepted, and we’re still only scratching the surface of what can be traded safely and efficiently. <...>

Read full interview – here.

founder's guide

A lot of horizontal plays got crushed with AI — strong signal to go vertical through workflows.

Get to that event to meet customers - Startup Lithuania compensates up to EUR 3500.

roleplay

Career advice in the age of AI