Lifting status

work in progress

The token + agent economy. Condense.chat last weekend opened the service to every basedcollective hack participant. And the winners are:

condense.chat award - Ignas Gustainis
best demo vibes - Oscar Pickerill and Cameron Webby
most ambitious build - Edas Lakavicius, Daumantas Banys, Povilas Dumcius
runner ups - Artem Murzin, Anastasiia Ivanchenko
winner - Jonas Lekevičius!

Consumer. Sifted listed 100 European consumer startups - with Flo taking #1. It only considers startups launched after 2014, and before series C, otherwise Baltics would crush it –

Next Fintech. Rizon hits 400k installs, and welcome Laurynas, serial entrepreneur, who co-founded it. Axiology theme: Lithuania just put DLT-based listings on equal footing with traditional exchanges.

Scaling commerce. Prime Prometics grows 108% to hit 100M in revenue 2025 - impressive team in Latvia. Orbio knows the playbook - just added EUR 100M and EUR 13M net profit last year.

Vinted founders. Ex-Vinted, building what? We found 25 builders (excluding former interns). But important take away is that this list is dynamic - people try building products / startups, fail, learn and return with another attempt. Just few sample names here, full list here

Donatas Stundys, Co-founder, Kaching Appz
Tautvydas Gylys, CEO, Self.co
Jonas Matuliauskas, Co-founder, Essential Apps
Aurimas Slapšys, Co-Founder at Sort A Brick
Martynas Narijauskas, Founder, Livity
Evaldas Bieliūnas, Co-founder, Guideless
Julius Valma, Co-Founder at OrderKrab
Arbo von Monkiewitsch, Co-founder and CEO fluado

Problem solving. At Tingit, it's different.

LT founders elsewhere. After Entangl (YC graduate), Antanas is back to Stealth. Two founding engineers: Martynas is at Drafted: they just raised a $16M seed led by Buckley Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Samsung NEXT; Zygimantas is founding engineer at Develop Health and they raised $14.3M Series A, led by Wing Venture Capital. Augustinas with INK building essential layer for deployment infra. Lukas is launching Agentic Customer Discovery in SourceWizard.

Dual use and defence. Harpia Nautical is in the water - hybrid USV/UUV for dual-purpose applications. Aktyvus Photonics closed 3.8M in revenue last year, growing well, RSI Europe at 15M and getting US footprint with partners.

EVs. Evoroute founders built a solution for a public transportation company, and it becomes a B2B product - Electric Vehicle Optimization Routing Engine. Lectrium welcomes Lukas as new CTO, hiring full stack engineer.

People moves. Dovydas Matuliauskas, Co-founder of Ligence, is looking for the next gig. Kuldar joins Creem as a founding design engineer. Vaidotas joins Backoffice as CTO. Karolis Dambrava joins IPRoyal as Sr Director of Revenue Ops. Alisa is now VP of Growth at TransferGo. Outcraft AI quickly ramps up the team, added four new members. Mantas joins isLucid as Founding Head of Sales. Ingrida is now Head of Comms, CEE at Revolut.

More builders - Google for Startups launches Startup School. Agentic AI, an immersive training program on building live, multimodal products, apply.

rounds and capital

Vinted Ventures are backing ex-Revolut duo: Abhi Thanendran & Neil Shah on their mission to grow live-commerce in Europe. Startup is called Tilt, and landed $26M round.

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

Meeting Gustas Germanavicius - founder of InRento with an impressive track record and much higher ambition.

Where is InRento today, and where is it going? What are your top priorities for the next 12-18 months?

I've always believed that for fintech companies to build sustainable and profitable businesses, they need to be exceptionally focused on solving one specific problem for one specific market. That's exactly what we've done. Rather than constantly expanding into new verticals, we focused on perfecting our model and scaling it across different geographies. Today, we serve thousands of clients globally, ranging from retail investors to publicly listed companies. Recently, the total amount financed through our platform exceeded €100 million across eight markets. At the same time, I believe we're still only scratching the surface of the opportunity ahead. We're not reinventing the wheel. We're applying technology to one of the world's oldest industries: lending. The addressable market remains enormous, and there is still significant room for innovation, efficiency, and better access to capital.

One of my core business beliefs is that success comes from understanding which activities truly drive growth, eliminating distractions, and improving the key drivers by just 1% every day. This philosophy has shaped InRento from the beginning. It has enabled us to grow at least 2x annually since founding the company, without raising external capital since 2022. Last year alone, we tripled our business. Over the next 12 to 18 months, our priorities are simple: be 1% better than yesterday, continue (at least) doubling the business year after year, maintain conservative underwriting standards, and increase profitability for both our clients and ourselves.

Full interview in our website.

brand + design

Scenius over Genius. Most design people know the Braun-to-Apple lineage. Fewer know the institutions that made it possible. This is a fascinating read on the Deutsche Werkbund, the German alliance of artists, designers, educators, and industrialists that helped shape the visual language of modern life.

Today’s global aesthetic did not assemble itself. It was built by people who believed industrial progress needed cultural direction. The Werkbund understood that “people are molded by the objects that surround them.” Still true. The environments we build also build us: factories, tools, interfaces, buildings, brands, products.

Same reason places like basedcollective_ matter. It’s not just rooms for people to code in. They are taste-forming environments. All of it quietly trains what builders think is normal, ambitious, and worth making.

roleplay

founder's guide

While Ampler bikes closes, fellow founders want to nominate Kristjan Maruste for award - for resilience and persistence.

Marty from Pylon shares his calendar

Not sure about ROI, but it's pretty cool to introduce new startup with longer form video and founding story

Who in the Baltics runs their tech startups in similar async way as 37signals, Linear, PostHog, Buffer, Ghost, Raycast?.. we thought Kaching Appz, Toggl, MailerLite, Plausible Analytics could be closest examples.

A small thing that quietly costs startups a lot: the AWS reseller they pick determines which AI models they can actually use. Cloudvisor is now an authorised Anthropic reseller.

further insights

UK never gave up. While we were reporting about Sweden, this year almost half of all venture capital in Europe is going into the UK.

Edward Lucas introduces his great initiative - Baltic International Security Center

Why the Estonian startup ecosystem needs fresh blood

ecosystem

Choose a group of people you want to lift up. Then listen, understand, highlight - that's one way to build a media. It was a big part of why we started Tech Philomaths: curated coverage of the founders building technology here in the Baltics.

Now I think this is one of the most powerful things we can do: make starting a firm, building a product, iterating on ideas and solving bigger problems the default path. The cool and ambitious path.

It's easy to forget how far we've already come. In plenty of countries, being a founder is still not a high-status path - entrepreneurs go toe-to-toe with celebrities, executives, influencers, politicians and public figures over what counts as "impressive". But we want builders to be profession #1.

Why does this matter so much?

• People show what taking action and taking risk actually looks like.
• We've seen how big this gets. Tech gives you leverage. Products scale. Businesses go global. Those little weekend projects are almost always more powerful than they look.
• Because the good companies are built through iteration - trying a dozen things until one fits the market. Fail but don't stop; that's what's truly hard in entrepreneurship.
• And because if you're a newly built economy (hello Baltics), tech is your shortcut to an innovative one: R&D-intensive companies, exports, and well-paid, interesting jobs.

Thanks for supporting us in our mission!