Needle in the haystack

work in progress

Researchers now hottest founders. Incredible round this week: co-founded by Vitalis Vosylius and Edward Johns, Machenta raised a $40m seed (!!!) co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures. They are bringing Instant Robot Learning to life. Similarly, co-founded by Estonians Kristjan and Andi, MuRay has raised €7.1M to see inside the components X-rays cannot penetrate. We keep an eye on Laelaps AI and several other deeptech startups, including several in Lithuania for news. Contrarian also adding robotics company - Bleu Robotics in France - as newest investment.

344x return — the power of power law. Anthropic listing is not an everyday event, and anticipated outcomes for investors are out of this world. The $124m Series A in May-21 was led by Jaan Tallinn, with Dustin Moskovitz and Eric Schmidt, and other investors - including Skaala in Estonia, participating. This round could be converting to $43B at IPO.

Pipedrive. Massive layoffs across the company, which seem to performing pretty well, around 400M revenue. 270 out of 380 Estonian emplyees made redundant, and also closing Prague and Lisbon offices. Looks like 500 out of 800 total jobs might be affected.

Lithuanian scale-ups are hiring rapidly, many are open for remote jobs - try Eneba, Nord Security, Hostinger, Ovoko, Surfshark, Source AI, Vinted.. roleplay section below.

Shipped projects. European Property Investment Map (rental yields). Augustas with nepagavau.win: a site where AI agents explain films and the plays staged at Lithuanian theatres. Edvardas launched Branvio. Eimantas building Strivie. Adomas building Steer. Adas built Tenenda.

Launched. OpenMail, mail for agents, launched with a bang on X - ask the founders who did they orchestrate that?

People moves. Angelina (ex-Nord) joins Dex Advisory. Unicorns Lithuania: Emilija joins as Project and Operations Manager, Ekaterina is new Data Tech Lead at Mediatech. Marius joins mrSoda. Deivydas joins CoinGate.

Anniversary. Tesonet turns 18!

sponsors

Cloudvisor [now an official AWS Managed Services Provider]
Hostinger [online presence accessible to everyone worldwide, hiring]
Nord Security [join us and create what's next in cybersecurity]
Ovoko [join to transform Europe’s €30B+ used car parts market]
Source.ai [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]

rounds and capital

Machenta out of stealth, startup out of Imperial, raised a $40m seed co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures, with IQ Capital and Hoxton Ventures.

MuRay has raised €7.1M - the €3.5M round is led by First Momentum Ventures and co-led by Caelora, and Superangel, Nordic Science Investments, Mätch VC, Arcas Ventures and Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company join as followers. A further €3.6M comes from EU’s Programme Horizon Europe.

Stargate Hydrogen is taking over HyStat alkaline electrolyser business from Cummins Inc.

Favro: The team behind the Favro platform recently joined up in a new company and acquired the Favro business and its assets.

KineDB (DK) has raised €850,000 in pre-seed funding, led by Superhero Capital, with participation from NGL Ventures and angel investors

TP Recommends

What technology do tech people consume? We asked to list three apps they love to use.

Justas Galaburda, Essential Apps
Instinct Agent runs my life. Claude runs my business. Hevy keeps me in shape.

Edvinas Sersniovas, HeyPolo
HeyPolo, ChatGPT, Apple Podcasts, RadioApp

Gabrielė Poteliūnaitė, Balnord
Spotify has the highest screen time for me – I consume podcasts like there’s no tomorrow. I used to be a die-hard fan of Claude, but lately I’ve transitioned to using ChatGPT way more (it fluctuates with every new model release). And Granola – honestly, it’s been the biggest game changer for me, both for calls and for in-person events and conferences.

Deividas Kovger, Holo
My new personal favorite is cursor. I’m not technical at all, but I use it for all funnel related stuff - landing pages, quizes and etc - replaced all the website builders for me. + Holo for creatives but I might be biased

Audrius Janulis, MailerLite
Revolut, Airbnb, FocusFlight. The amount of craftsmanship that goes into their products makes failing on them feel better than succeeding on other apps.

three questions

Rando Rannus built and sold SmartAd to MTG, did operating stints at Bolt and Viveo Health, and now runs the Baltics’ only dedicated VC secondaries fund, Siena. We were keen to get his pan-Baltic perspective.

Estonia went slower for a while, and now has two new unicorns at once: Blackwall and Skeleton. Is this a new wave?

I wouldn´t call it a new wave. It is the result of work that has taken some time. Like one of my friend likes to say about basketball - "Keep your eyes on the ball and the scoreboard takes care of itself". It seems we in Estonia have been good at that. But I am sure that Lithuania will follow soon. You have so many great companies that are under the radar. Eventually some of them will join the famous unicorn club :-)

What really separates the Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian tech ecosystems - based on your observations and talking to founders?

Estonia got a head start with Skype, Wise etc and now enjoys the fruits of this development. Lithuania well known for its bootstrapped scaleups, is now catching up - actually having a higher velocity maybe even than Estonia. Latvia is like a "black hole" in between us (sorry my Latvian friends for my being blunt) - no decent angel community, not so many scaleups. Hopefully they will have their 1st great liquidity event sometime soon (looking at you Fyul) so that they can kickstart their flywheel as well.

Full interview

roleplay

brand + design

Revolut’s designers are now 3–4x faster? Revolut has always had a strong design culture. That’s a big part of why this speedup is possible: they’re building on a system that took years of deep product thinking to create.

So what accelerated here is the assembly. Not design.

AI cuts the time needed for production. What makes design challenging isn’t just putting a UI or poster together. It’s deciding what the pieces are, how they work together, and what story and message they carry.

Treating output speed as the measure of design is the McNamara fallacy in action.

further insights

How to network like a diplomat (even if you’re not an extrovert). Helpful if you need this.

More action but for what? Dror writes that "Empowering more people to perform “creative” work won’t save the middle class. It will turn white-collar work into show business.”

VC returns, how would that look in Europe? Smaller startup hubs have delivered higher MOICs this year than New York or the Bay Area.

ecosystem

Lithuania and Estonia protects notaries in EU? Shocking to see leaked EU Inc files, what makes the change difficult. Embarrasing to see LT and EST are defending the need to use notaries… send this to relevant ministers, let's pick up — we are ourselves blocking EU inc, initiative for new legal regime to easily start and run European countries. Terrible for Baltic reputation, too

Klaipeda - Lighthouse is starting new incubation / acceleration project with 2M EUR backing from the government.