Moats and boats

work in progress

• Launches. With a cool video, event, brand, open positions – Antanas, Ringaudas, and Lukas (exited SearchNode co-founders) introduce Ace Waves with a splash; they even have a manifesto and true customer stories. Commody platform goes live, and you can become a fractional owner of the first water-cooled Turbo in Porsche history – 911 Turbo X50 (996).
• What is growth these days? FT reported Hostinger being the #2nd fastest growing European company of the past decade – an insane achievement, and that team is not slowing down. For new teams, distribution has become critical, and there is no lack of talent locally (according to Creandum). Short-term momentum is more of boat, than a moat – it can only get you somewhere, where real moats, and retention get built. Here is what is working in GTM, 2025 – by Kyle Poyar.

• Games+marketplace. Eneba founders just shifted gears (into "sport"), securing EUR 10M loan from ILTE to double down on AI capabilities and to challenge Apple / Google duopoly (closed FY24 at 44M revenue, profitable past 3 years). With 120 people on the team, still hiring, Eldorado is accelerating, too – clearly beyond 16M revenue in 2024. In 2025, over 13,000 new games have already landed on Steam – an event tonight at Wargaming on how to navigate this landscape for game devs.
• Health. Loved this storytelling from Mishkay. Spike Technologies worked hard to launch Health Ops: Therapy specific Voice AI Agents that automate payor calls, benefit checks, and the patient intake process. Spike also welcomes Gabriele as Chief Growth Officer. Muun Health raises pre-seed from Greiner Innoventures GmbH and The Better Fund Angels for female hormone monitoring solution. Martynas, Guste, Gabija – get to know Livity team, they are great in making steady progress. Vital3D Technologies making connections in the Bay Area.
• Fresh, AI-native. Liutauras with SoReachMe – who'd love to reduce their influencer marketing campaign setup from 30 hours to just 3.5 hours? gilia gets EUR 60k grant to improve our emotional intelligence with AI. OpenAI recognized Skarbe for passing 10 billion tokens processed through their API. Simona is introducing Perfection42 platform for top furniture brands in Europe. UI bakery introduced App Agent, which ships complete apps for businesses.
• New Builders, how? Heard Arvydas from Practica sharing this before – Slush is a founder machine, and we should bring this model to the Baltics

Slush is one of Europe's leading founder factories as a WHOPPING 15% of alumni become founders! (Mikki Kuusi from Wolt you already know, but also founders of Clair, Inven, Paebbl).

• Security. Months past interesting interview with Rokas Bendikas, co-founder and CTO at Laelaps AI, building in Zurich. Now we can reveal more: team got backing from leading investors, including Speedinvest, Expeditions Fund, Florent Venture Partners, Fund F, and the European Space Agency, and is rapidly developing autonomous security stack to revolutionize how facilities protect their perimeters. Aleksey built lightest multi-charge cassette weapon for an interceptor drone, might access that 1M prize for "balloon landing solutions". Broswarm wins 1st place at the Deep Tech CEE Summit & Challenge. 100 early-stage Baltic startups in Defence and Space, by Iron Wolf Capital.

rounds and capital

• Muun Health raises EUR 545k pre-seed with strategic partner Greiner Innoventures GmbH and The Better Fund Community Business Angels.
• Vodafone acquires Skylink for EUR 200M+, a chunk of their business was in Lithuania (approx 13M revenue it seems).
• Tallinn-based cleantech firm LynxPower, which optimizes building energy use with AI-powered monitoring and control, has raised €550,000 from Giga AS to expand into international markets.
• Altrove (AI+material science, Contrarian Ventures portco) raised 10M seed from Alven and Bpifrance Digital Venture as well as previous backers.

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]
Surfshark [Top 50 among fastest growing in EU, hiring]
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]
Superangel [Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A for tech companies]

three questions

• Gabriel Ferraz, Creem
• Jonas Kavaliauskas, Unive AI
• Rokas Nemeikštis, Achoo.studio
• Mykolas Katkus, Repsense

founder's guide

• Venture landscape, LP notes (Justinas from Willgrow).
• The blessing and a curse – your brain rewires what you repeat.

further insights

• Beyond TechCrunch – note where tech coverage happens now.
• Yes, we are in AI bubble, but it some ways it is attacking much larger and lasting – "human labor bubble": the systemic overvaluation of routine, low-impact tasks that consume massive payrolls without generating proportional economic value, writes Gil Dibner.
  
  There is no better place to deploy an AI-powered solution than where a local human labor bubble exists. One way to diagnose where this “labor bubble” exists by looking for the following indicators:
• Basic data entry and classification work.
• Text or content generation problems.
• Humans acting as human APIs (performing simple, repetitive information lookups).
• Other simple cognitive tasks where complex human judgment, holistic reasoning, trust, or relationships are not required
  
• Airbus is an example of successful industrial policy and the rare European company that is better than its American rival. Could its success be copied elsewhere? (probably not so much)
  
• Video and song this week – Satisfy feat Vaida, TV on the Radio, NYC
  
• How to Run New York City? With Maria Torres-Springer, COO.
  
  What kinds of benchmarks did you set for yourselves?
  
  A major one in housing, for instance, was a moonshot goal of 500,000 units of new homes over the next decade, backed up with very detailed plans about how we were going to get there. For economic development, it was not just regaining the one million jobs we lost during the pandemic, but also topping the total employment and private-sector employment records the city held before the pandemic. On workforce development, we had a goal of 30,000 apprenticeships, which was a new model for workforce training in New York.

roleplay

ecosystem

• Why Western world keeps suffering from the rise of right-wing extremists and populists, and how moderate political leaders need to reinvent themselves.