Pipeline PhDs

work in progress

Defence tech sprinting revenue - and exits. Insightful interview with Augustinas Vizbaras, Brolis co-founder after they sold 60% equity to ETNA Capital: about to reach 100M this year, very significant deal, some happy investors. RSI Europe to enter US market with WGS Systems agreement (and plans 3-4x revenue this year). Vytenis Buzas is ramping up Unmanned Defence Systems — planning EUR 15M revenue this year, getting ready for series A raise (will UDS pass Nanoavionics?). Quantum Systems acquires Estonia’s SensusQ. Marcin is scaling Valkyrie (miniature radar seekers for interceptors) - needs engineers to relocate to Kyiv. KrattWorks wants democracies to scale defence impact without scaling people.

Defence momentum is also huge opportunity for the Baltics in terms of R&D and manufacturing. Three related ideas on industrial capacity -

• Pipeline of deep tech startups is needed, or at least researchers with deep domain knowledge. You can’t predict where opportunities can arise in the next 5-10 years, but deeptech founders is a key bottleneck. We have less than 100 PhDs per year in LT in natural sciences.
  • (luckily, many bright researchers are launching startups in universities abroad)
• Market waves / themes become huge lift for new tech companies. Obvious in defence, strong in healthcare and energy, but also adjecent industries, like lasers (think Aktyvus Photonics and Astrolight as dual-use players).
• Industrial capabilities can be further advance with capital and M&A. Ideally exits fuel new entrepreneurs and their ventures, as we talked previously. So seeing industrialists taking this path is exciting to watch: Light Conversion just acquired a German player, Teltonika hiring M&A lead.

Health. Potentially huge - Sentante receives CE approval unlocking commercialisation of its Endovascular Robotic platform. Pulsetto in one number: +261% sales growth year over year. Martins with Supliful - fifth straight month with sales above 1M. Misslaboratory receives EIC Seal of Excellence. Goda and Aleksas built hardware that changes what happens while you’re still asleep.

Agents and voices. Accel lead Viktor’s $75 million Series A - Poland has a new set of AI-native startups, and Michal from Inovo needs new friends in consumer + social investing. in Tomas is building Cogvel solo. How much Martynas needs to raise for Altis, as they want to compete with Victor - 0.7, 7M or 750M? (hiring founding engineer). Jevgeni is building Clew, the agent ships features (you keep the map). Blizy is now Voice agents, focused on healthcare and dental. NordVPN rolling out a new browser extension that will help flag suspected AI-generated voices.

Surfshark’s transformation to watch, now under the leadership of Dovydas Godelis: “product range includes Antivirus, Incogni data removal service, personal data alerts, safe search, scam checkers, and Alternative ID & Number. Its latest release is ID theft insurance coverage worth up to $1 million.”

Startup Nations - Karma Ventures Founder Margus Uudam on Quest Means Business.

People moves. Monika Paule was appointed a new Managing Director at Innovation Agency. Atrandi Biosciences hiring for a new phase: Sam Ropp, Ph.D., Chief Commercial Officer, and Susan Tousi as Chairman of Board of Directors joins the team. Martynas, Head of Hardware at Pulsetto, leaving the company for smth new. Janis joins Chaseit as Head of Sales (did they close the round?). Augustas from Kilo joins Holo AI as CRO (btw has also built Test Soft, A/B testing platform). Darius Kniuksta is joining Junior Achievement to create AI curriculum, and.. building smth new. Giedrius new COO at Finora Bank. Julius rejoined Bolt as VP of Legal and Compliance. Pratham is now Head of Support at Salesforge. Judita - Head of Customer Care at Saltz.app.

Calendar. May 27th meet Left Lane and Market One Capital in town (series A - C, focus on consumer internet companies, so they’ve got great leads to meet).

Race to a billion. Couple years ago Unicorns (billion enterprise value) where still miracles. Now people are voting, which company will hit 1B in revenue first? Is it Oxylabs, Hostinger, Pipedrive or Kilo?

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]

rounds and capital

Mistral AI acquires Emmi AI (rumored +€300M bid). Emmi AI Co-founder & COO Miks Mikelsons, originally from Latvia, now based in Lithuania, helped build Emmi AI from an early stage startup.

German Quantum Systems acquired the Estonian artificial intelligence startup SensusQ.

Integrated Optics secured ILTE’s loan of EUR 1.1M, company grew to approx EUR 2.8M in revenue last year.

three questions

Klaipėda-born, Cambridge trained biomedical engineer, Erika and the team launched auryx - and raised $2M pre-seed to build it (full interview)

How did your research in biomedical signal processing lead to starting auryx?

My research was focused on using machine learning to extract health information from acoustic signals — not tied to any particular device, but to the fundamental question of what sound can tell us about the body.

What kept surprising me was how much information is already there that we are simply not using. Cardiovascular signals, respiratory patterns, gastrointestinal activity — the body produces all of it acoustically and continuously, but most of that information is never captured or interpreted. At the same time, modern machine learning models can help extract subtle patterns from signals that are difficult for humans to interpret directly. The more I explored, the more the space kept expanding.

Kayla’s research, separately, focused on how in-ear microphones could be used to measure vital signs such as heart rate, respiratory rate, and cardiac output. My work approached the same broader question from another angle: how to extract clinically relevant cardiovascular information from audio signals. Over time, those two threads began to converge around the same idea — that sound could become a powerful new sensing modality for health, and that earbuds were the right place to start.

The moment it stopped feeling like an academic idea and started feeling like a company was a rainy evening in a Cambridge pub. Kayla and I were talking about the future of this problem space, and at some point realised that if we were ever going to build something, we would want to do it together. Cecilia, who had supervised both of us and whose research sits at the very foundation of this space, inevitably became a part of this conversation.

auryx grew quite organically from there. I am excited to now be building a company around the idea that first drove the research: that health monitoring can move into the devices people already wear every day.

roleplay

P.S. One of the best pieces recently written, how to get a job in tech:

How to enter side doors, a field guide to jobs, cold emails, and making yourself legible to the right people

brand + design

The biggest prize in AI is consumer. AI is almost entirely an enterprise right now (159 of 175 in the last YC batch were enterprise). The reason consumer is empty is that it's harder*.* Enterprise runs on tech and sales; consumer runs on design, taste, marketing, and culture. The Baltic region already has a proven track record of scaling massive consumer tech companies that is exactly where the biggest upside lies.

Future brand designer. Job is becoming less about making every brand expression and more about building the tools that let the company express the brand. The future brand designer is part designer, part product maker.

AI in Design Report 2026. How designers are evolving their tools, craft, and teams with AI. The data says that AI tools without collaboration features are creating version control challenges and silos where people work too independently. Individuals got faster. The team work got messier.

founder's guide

How to sell and what to build - these are now key questions for founders

Another European tech list to add your product

further insights

Send it to your favourite politician (who doesn’t read books) - The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think

AI hasn't overtaken human writers online - we are at 50/50 now

ecosystem

What I always want to write about policy makers and politicians in one tweet.

Countries get the cabinets they pay for. Singapore pays its Foreign Minister about S$1.1m, around US$800,000. The salary is benchmarked to 60% of the median income of the top 1,000 Singaporean earners. That is why you can get Vivian Balakrishnan, former eye surgeon and hospital chief executive, implementing karpathy's external brain idea (link below). The speech shows deep understanding of AI and fills one with confidence about Singapore's future.

The UK Foreign Secretary earns roughly £165,000: the MP salary plus a ministerial salary of about £67,000. The ministerial part is frozen since the crisis and is down by roughly a third in real terms since 2010. This is what a junior Magic Circle lawyer earns.

Spain pays its ministers around €85,000. So you do not get a surgeon who has run hospitals. You get a party loyalist who has never run anything.

Baltics need to get serious about this, ROI is massive.