The Baltic Way

work in progress

Baltic Way 2026. Play it loud tomorrow. Long way since 1989! Still bunda, still ambitious, still working hard to achieve our dreams and leave an impact in the world. Perfect time to double down and invest into the future, as Tomas wrote.

It is up to tech communities in the Baltics to lift countries to the next stage. Thank you all for getting so far, and respect to all checking work email on Saturday — just because you won’t settle here.

Recycle-upcycle, close the cycle. Clearly Vinted is just the largest in the field, going full Amazon way in second-hand. But there are enormous opportunities to specialize - just look at Ovoko in car parts (we had a survey - in a run towards 100M annual revenue, people believe Ovoko will get first, followed by Eneba, CarVertical and TransferGo). More segment plays: Tingit repairs boosts France with Vinted Go delivery network, suddenly available at 9000+ locations. Backed by Trind VC, Ringy has acquired UPGREAT, the Baltics’ largest retailer of used and refurbished electronics.

Vinted also up cycles talent into founders. Backed by Vinted leadership - fresh 1M Guideless round, led by Superhero Capital (interview). What other ex-Vinted founders are building.

Direct to consumer (unstoppable funnels?). Given Burga just opened a new factory…. they confirmed now building the second one! Furniture1 was early to unlock this - see new interview with Pijus - now at EUR 200M and beyond 20 markets. Kilo machine spins another one: 12 people built Memowrite into 15M+ in revenue, 100k customers, 20k books. Latvian Prime Prometics turns six - and closed beyond a 100M last year. What next, we asked? “Happier team, happier customers, and helping more women who need it most”. Pulsetto is in a building mode, smth new? Just a firm in Mazeikiai — suddenly takes e-comm seriously - and ramps to EUR 60M revenue last year, profitably.

Full AI mode. Hostinger launches AI builder. Full suite - not dozens of chats to solve multiple problems, unified assistant. Hostinger is taking full advantage of their edge (being entry point for entrepreneurs when business formation is accelerating, and offering critical set of infrastructure needed). Server orders tell the direction.

Fin+tech. Things happening at CUBE AI - they are growing very fast, multiple roles incl number in LT. VIALET reaches 100 people, still hiring, and doing solid job with their content. InRento returns 1.37M to investors: two projects realised, above projections. The dollar is the product - Rizon learnings after 450k users. NEO finance is not huge, but 30% margin is also ok.

Defence. “Three and a half years of supplier visits, factory floors and hard questions about where drone components really come from” - Defence Nordic talks to Justas about Monopulse.

Legal. Vasara building quickly - Anthropic approved their connector. Crespect - legal practice suite - growing revenues but still early.

Calendar. Startup Meetup Aug 25th - with early stage investors. Baltic VCA Summit in Estonia next week - Aug 27-28. Baltic network professionals meet in Riga Sept 23-24 for BalticNOG. Startup Fair coming - Sept 17 this year, see the speakers.

People moves. After five years with Wargaming - relocating and running at company of 700 people - Mantas leaves for smth new. Chris joins as Senior Partnerships Manager, Eneba (27 positions open now).

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]
Ovoko [join to transform Europe’s €30B+ used car parts market]
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]
Eneba [join the marketplace 20M gamers love]
InRento [Investments in real estate projects with income, growth, and impact]

rounds and capital

Brite secures EUR 500k credit from SEB to finance growth.

Guideless lands €1M pre-seed led by Superhero Capital, with participation from FIRSTPICK and angel investors Vytautas (Vinted Go), Thomas Plantenga and Mantas Mikuckas (Vinted).

LITILIT adds €8M loan from ILTE to take femtosecond lasers into mass manufacturing

In Lithuania, Ministry of Economy is about to launch a call for Unicorn Factory - combined public + private effort.

three questions

After six years at Vinted, seeing the problem repeat for years - Evaldas left comfort zone to launch Guideless. Out of stealth with 1M pre-seed round.

Why now — and how long did the idea sit before you moved on it?

The idea had been around for years. Dovydas had seen the problem repeatedly while building enterprise software and even built some earlier versions that we tested before the AI boom. But back then, neither the technology nor the timing was quite right for us to pull it off properly.

AI advancements changed that and made the product we actually wanted to build possible. Dovydas finally put everything together and soft-launched it in September 2025. We then spent months refining the product and experimenting with growth before fully committing to go all in.

Soon, we validated our hypothesis that employee training and onboarding were even less solved than customer onboarding, so we doubled down on this opportunity.

Overall, we probably could have done it somewhat earlier, but it also took us a while to grow some balls and leave our comfort zones. :)

The pain is clear, but the market is crowded and moving fast. Where’s the edge, and what turns it into a moat?

The TAM is massive, and despite the competition, we still see a lot of room to build a significantly better product. Today our edge is mainly the product experience and quality of the output. But that alone obviously isn’t a moat.

The moat starts with capturing workflows as structured operational context. The more a company uses Guideless, the more we understand about how it actually operates, eventually making training content creation and maintenance close to autopilot. Over time, that context also enables more advanced products, like AI-powered workflow auditing and automation. <...>

Full interview – including how they approached fundraising – on our website

roleplay

brand + design

Hot take. Brand marketing is going to be major differentiator: meaning knowing what the company stands for, reading the market, being consistent about it every week. Because you don't build a spaceship without a reason bigger than the spaceship. Paul Graham already wrote about it in his essay The Brand Age saying brand is what's left when technology erases the substantive differences between products.

founder guide

• Many ways to win a list of eighty strategies to find your moat.
• How to hire great people
• Directionally correct:

Better to be launching something every week instead of focusing on how to make a single-day traffic spike slightly larger (Nikita Bier)

• Two talks with Milda, Vinted co-founder - on life/money talks (LT) and GTM (EN)
• Travis talking to Senra is indeed world-class

ecosystem

Thinking about Baltic Way anniversary, saved these graphs – leaving for you to formulate views.

My view is these three words.