The Tesonet Machine

It is 1999. Two teenagers, one in Vilnius and one in Jurbarkas, two hundred kilometres apart, are running quiz nights on mIRC. They will talk for some six years before they are ever in the same room.

What came after is usually told in valuations. We think the bigger thing Tesonet built is harder to count. The founders never left Lithuania, and their success sends ripples through a small country: ambition, grit, a feeling of being let loose. In the age of AI, everything suddenly seems possible.

This week we publish the full story - all thirty-four failed attempts included.

Read The Tesonet Machine →

work in progress

Builders everywhere. We praise founder journeys not because they are glamorous. Typically, it's complete opposite. Hard things, mundane everyday, and owning endless problems.

In most cases, it does not work, either. But founders do this anyway, somehow deciding that it will be different this time – or perhaps it's too important not to try.

Here goes Goda and Rugile, soldering PCB to build a skin health tracker you could use at home. Here is Martin, preparing to file for bankruptcy at FleetFox, after raising 3.6M for the business. Here is Ieva, joining Lost Astronaut as a venture builder. Ryčka ran 7 marathons in a week — we know he is a dreamer — and can't wait to learn what erulla.com is.

Sometimes.. traction hits, momentum pulls. It's been a huge week. Onodrim claims unicorn status with EUR 300M Series A. Biomatter closed EUR 18M Series A to scale enzyme production with AI. And Marcin landing 1M pre-seed for Valkyrie, to help Ukraine defend.

Honorary list (of Lithuanian co-founder). Co-founded and led by Edward Maslaveckas, Bud Financial has secured US venture backing - with an investment from BankTech Ventures. Matas, also in the UK, is a CTO at Port - they just raised €14.5M, led by EBRD VC and Balnord, to robotise urban logistics.

There is a pattern. 2026 has been generous giving the world ambitious LT builders:

Aistis Šimaitis - Onodrim (Netherlands) - €40M +$300M Series A
Vitalis Vosylius - Machenta (UK) - $40M seed
Tumas Rackaitis - Rogo (US) - Series C $75M and Series D $160M
Justas Poderys - Monopulse (Denmark/LT) - over €2M
Erika Bondareva - auryx (UK) - $2M pre-seed
Skaistė Arbačiauskaitė - INTU Diagnostics (Germany) - €1.1M bridge
Eimantas Gladkauskas -Emulsi Biotech (Sweden) - SEK 7M pre-seed
Povilas Gudzius - Spike Technologies (US/LT) - acquired by Raintree Systems
Mindaugas Zukas - Altinity (US/LT) - acquired by EnterpriseDB

Girls >> Tech. That's the whole idea behind kibirkstys.lt - Vinted initiative for students in grades 5–12, helping them to practically "test" tech: workshops, shadowing, events, and a platform.

Defence. Onodrim raises $300M at a $1.3B valuation to scoop up smaller defence players and expand their capacities - co-founded and led by Aistis, with NL HQ, hiring across Europe including Vilnius. Marcin with Valkyrie Dynamics raises €1M pre-seed to help interceptors hunt in any weather. TD Autonomy has been selected for TALON, a €12.3 million European Defence Fund project, with other 12 parties. UDS introduces HAULER, the latest addition to their UAV portfolio. And another Iron Wolf portco - UFORCE - lands ridiculous $700M Series A at a $6B valuation.

People moves. Egle is new Head of Marketing at Corepetitus. Benoit to lead B2B growth in France for Burga. Kim is now product designer at Laelaps AI. Cambridge CS grad Simonas comes straight back to Vilnius for Spike Technologies.

GTA6 and others. Hear Eneba's story Nov24 in Kaunas - and ask Vytis how did they grew LATAM by smthing like 136% YoY? Eldorado is another rocketship — organizing Angular meetup Nov25.

Slush, last minute. FORWARD.one, Balnord and HCVC are looking for ambitious founders building in robotics, dual-use, space, energy, compute or quantum, from idea to seed. No Slush ticket needed, apply - deadline today.

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

Onodrim raised $300M at a $1.3B, led by Lux Capital, with General Catalyst, Lakestar, Altimeter, Strike Capital, 137 Ventures, 8090 and Expeditions joining.

Biomatter has raised $18M Series A funding round led by Astanor, with participation from existing investors UVC Partners, Inventure and Metaplanet.

Bud Financial secures investment round by BankTech Ventures (CEO Edward Maslaveckas).

Mindmax, language learning platform, has raised £2.5m from Concept Ventures, alongside Redrice Ventures, Daybreak Ventures, and Lerer Hippeau. Mindmax was founded by Ed Cooke and Daniel Zohar (in Riga, Latvia), who previously worked together at Memrise.

Valkyrie Dynamics joined Hexa Sprint Defense as their first team based in Ukraine, backed with €1M pre-seed to move faster.

Which VC fund already has most unicorns, we asked? Driven by defence (Onodrim and UFORCE), Iron Wolf already carriers two.

three questions

AI arrived to the natural / physical world, and Laurynas with the team brought 18M Series A this week for Biomatter — to accelerate AI-powered enzyme development. One of those slowly, then suddenly, stories.

You started Biomatter in 2018, well before generative AI took off. How has AI changed the company and the opportunity?

Even though in 2018 generative AI was not yet a cultural phenomenon, we saw clear signals in research. We could not have predicted the full scope of what it became, but looking at early work like GANs and Google’s BERT, we had zero doubt that building in this direction for biology, for enzymes, was a no-brainer. We gained a lot more clarity in 2019, when we showed that our algorithms, inspired by that early ML research, can generate functional, novel enzymes (published in Nature Machine Intelligence, 2021).

Since then the AI race has been a force multiplier for Biomatter: the general large models are available to everyone, but our proprietary enzyme models and lab data is not, and every wave of external innovation lets us get more out of it.

What are the Series A top priorities for you: lab, US expansion, team hires?

All of the above! In the last funding period we demonstrated that the enzymes coming out of our computational and physical platform are really useful for global players. This year Thermo Fisher launched a product built on one we jointly developed.

With 50+ previously non-existent enzymes delivered, our goal now is to double down on the new paradigm we are creating: how people think about enzymes, how easily they can start building with custom ones, and how ambitious they can be with new products. For that we are opening a new enzyme R&D center in Vilnius, growing the team, and expanding our US presence.

Full interview

TP recommends

Rokas Pečiulaitis, Contrarian Ventures
FT for general news, x for rabbit holes and memes, LP stuff - The Side Letter by David Zhou, The generalist, not boring, a bunch of other substacks and recently some really good stuff from yoni rechtman & great deepdive by ribbit - power letter

Laurynas Spangevičius, Robinhood Europe
The Rundown AI - AI news in five minutes.
Lenny's Newsletter - Product and growth, no fluff.
Robinhood Snacks - Daily finance, actually digestible.
But for the last few months, I've actually consumed my own personalized newsletter, made using Instinct and delivered every morning.

Julius Narkus, IPRoyal
Everything by Lyn Alden (podcast talks, newsletter, paid service) - calm macro voice focused on finances. Lenny's podcast, everything with Brad Gerstner and Patrick O'Shaughnessy (Colossus)

Julius Gregorauskas, Cloudvisor
Podcasts: In Good Company - I guess being the CEO of the largest investor in the world helps getting top business people to attend your podcast.
Du Bitai - supporting LT content creators!
Acquired - comes on a monthly basis, but also highly recommended
Newsletters: Tech Philomaths covers everything I need :)

Lukas Petrikas, Mokafund
Newsletter: Money Stuff by Matt Levine. Still the gold standard for finance. Rigorous, influential and deadpan funny all in one.

roleplay

brand + design

Experience is the new code. Open design roles just hit a record low, according to Lenny Rachitsky’s State of the tech job market: late 2026. Look closer and the role is changing more than it is vanishing.

Same week in Lithuania, Erikas (Kaching Appz) says his design team asked to cancel Figma and now works in Paper, where the design is already code. Adomas from Fieldy is hiring designers to build and lead the product. He says they now create the feeling of the product themselves, with no middle man.

There are fewer design jobs, but the ones left carry more weight. Experience is the new code, and nobody is better equipped to write it than a designer.

founders guide

also happens to be a feature of top VCs: