Stacked / Layered

This week: very open chat with Giedrius, new CEO at Hostinger; the media asset play Mediatech and Wise are scaling; AI can make domain experts shine - will more experienced builders rise to occasion? And beyond Vinted, Bolt - we are thrilled to follow the next wave of marketplace scale-ups, many are impressively accelerating.

work in progress

AI employees. Superpal launches with the backing of FIRSTPICK and Outlast - and a fun video, too. You might have heard about Polish Viktor, and now Claude has launched a competitor; but as founder Fryd writes, the market is massive and there are likely to be space for multiple players (USV developed a thesis called The Rebel Alliance - betting that the best products at each layer will be built by teams who are obsessed with that layer).

New AI natives. Luvy has joined Saul Adomaitis as Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at OrbitronAI (based in the UAE, Saul spent 22 yrs with EY, latest as Global Oil and Gas Leader; this rhymes with YC talk featuring Webflow co-founder, who is back to building Ploy - it is time when domain experts can build incredible products). Ott is going all in on display.dev - will be building full-time together with Carl. Dainius started Sofidus.tech to orchestrate construction planning with AI. Stagecaptions.io is a real-time subtitling tool for conferences and events.

Second wave. Two strong signals from Vinted: now became most-downloaded shopping app in the US and launched Australia, with shipping from the UK. But besides Bolt, Vinted, also Printify/Printful, there is a new strong wave of marketplace scale-ups, that are emerging strong.

Ovoko | Eneba | Eldorado | IPXO | Contra | Saltz | Yaga | Eany.io | CGtrader (turned around - growing profitably)

Giving back. Recognition for Hostinger (MO Museum), BCG and sixteen.media (Blue/Yellow), and Pijus sharing Furniture1 philanthropic initiatives.

Edtech. Robotikos Akademija is raising private debt to accelerate growth, including Ireland / US. ALPA Kids google ads conversion: install to paying conversion is around 5%, MAU to paying is 22% and the cost of a new paying customer around €7.5. After building FastTrack, Kristijonas is open for smth new.

Social / consumer. Marijus and the team launched noProbs - faceless social platform for real connections. Joiner founder went all the way to meet the competitor - Timeleft. Joiner has already connected people leading to weddings!

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

Wise just acquired Expatica, a leading resource for people living abroad.

Wise have been buying and building media/content assets for years through a unit called Owned Sites (portfolio of 50 assets). It's also move up the funnel: the older properties (Exiap, Geldtransfer) are comparison/affiliate sites, Expatica is editorial - housing, healthcare, immigration - catching people months earlier.

Timely reminder of Mediatech machine - they broke EUR 100M revenue mark in 2025. Similar playbook, but Tesonet company productized it into a standalone company: media as a business, not media as marketing - and the proof is showing software-like economics on a publishing org.

Superpal receives EUR 500k funding from FIRSTPICK and Outlast Fund.

XTX Markets covered as they seem to have deployed north $500M since 2024. Gabriele recently added Kopa.ai in LT, and shares that they move with conviction -

“If we like the company and we’re really excited, more often than not we will go after it and we will invest. We do try to not have a lot of groupthink. We have conviction. In the wider market there’s a lot of ‘Oh, who else is investing?’”

Talents for Tech (known as Women Go Tech in Lithuania) received the largest support from Google.org - 2.3M - to provide AI training to everyone in CEE (7 markets) at no cost

Vilnius University Foundation receives another 1.2M - donation by Irena and Algirdas Juozapavičius. Other existing donors also added almost a million.

Vibe.co to be acquired by Walmart- Tesonet portfolio company (note Teso have new website, too)

Tesonet received a construction permit for a new multi-purpose development in Kaunas.

three questions

Giedrius has been at Hostinger through one of the most impressive growth runs in Baltic tech. Now, he’s stepping in as CEO. Interesting takes on what to expect from Hostinger next (full interview).

You joined around €3M ARR — Hostinger grew 100x. What hasn't changed in those 14 years?

Everyone reaches for "customer obsession" here, and it's a line every company uses. What actually held for us is more specific: we never let ourselves drift upmarket. The default move in this industry is that as customers get bigger and more profitable, you redesign everything around them and slowly stop caring about the person paying five dollars a month. We still build for that person. The mission I joined under, getting people online without fighting the technology, hasn't moved in fourteen years; AI just took over the parts that used to hurt.

What's the first opportunity you're going after as CEO?

I come from tech/product, so there might be an expectation to point to a new product. The first thing I'm fixing is more boring than that. We were built marketing-first, with product and marketing running as two separate machines, and that split has become the thing holding us back, so we’ll be making sure we have true cross-functional teams, with marketing being an essential part of that. The less glamorous half is hiring. The biggest lever I have right now is building a way to bring in world-class leaders quickly, because at our speed, one strong leader unblocks a whole part of the company. One of the first books on business I’ve read was “The Goal” and I embraced the theory of constraints, and I embraced it a lot and constantly think about it. You only move as fast as your worst bottleneck. Everything else is busywork that feels like progress.

Will you still find time to vibecode?

Sure, it's not separate from the job. Building with our own products keeps me closer to what customers actually experience than any dashboard can. It also keeps me accountable. If it's frustrating for me, it's frustrating for them. The day I stop building things is the day I lose touch with what we're actually making.

Full interview on our website >

roleplay

brand+design

The A.I.-Design Aesthetic. Anthropic’s own branding appears inside Claude’s outputs, and just like AI writing has it’s hints, AI design now has it’s own and that style is now spreading through the defaults of a tool becoming an extension of Anthropic’s brand in the wild.

Brand is proof of effort. The point of design, particularly in branding, is to appear unique and signal effort and intention. AI makes pretty-good design available to everyone, which means pretty-good stops being differentiating, and if a product looks like every other AI-native company, it signals low effort before anyone uses it.

further insights

AI reasoning - new research paper from Linas at Stanford

Stripe data - “The Age of Solopreneur”

Second, as we have shown previously, the story of spiking business applications is not confined to the United States. New business registrations have risen roughly 40% in Australia, 70% in Finland, and 80% in France since 2017, with meaningful acceleration in 2025 alone. Multicountry acceleration across different regulatory environments argues for a more fundamental driver than fraud activity. And in France, where more granular data is available, the surge in business formation is driven primarily by solo founders or microentrepreneurs rather than by traditional employer businesses—similar to the US.

Nathan Benaich - Europe cannot rent its way to AI sovereignty

ecosystem

Lithuanian founders. Building in the US.

Repeat Founders - 70 Lithuanian entrepreneurs on second, third, fourth gig

Weird takes = strong moats. 20 unusual Baltic bootstrapped firms, with strong defensibility.