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Newsfeed: to help you track what’s happening in Baltic tech and global tech that matters to builders here. No algorithms. No AI-curated feed. Just people who build things, following other people who build things, and surfacing what’s worth your attention.
Email - editor@philomaths.tech
work in progress
Valley and Baltics and atoms. Remember Bezos’ Project Prometheus, that acquired Jurgis Pasukonis’ startup? Jeff is reportedly seeking $100 billion (no typo) for a new fund to buy up companies in major industrial sectors and, ultimately, modernize and automate them with AI.
Despite all the long list of objections - "you have no experience, this will never work, this requires too much capital” Whoop founder faced, now hitting 10B valuation despite it all; (makes me think all challenges our founders went through building wearables; like Pulsetto (revenue grew 3.5x compared to Q1 last year), Fieldy (hearing rumours of 9x YoY trend), or Samphire).
Network effects is an incredible moat, so we track marketplace builders - emerging Traxlo, Nannow, GIFQ, scaling Eneba and Eldorado (added 37 talents to the team in Q1, escape velocity?).
Protect: what is most promising in defence? Perhaps NGL or Coinvest Capital, who backed majority of these players? Iron Wolf Capital alongside top league, got into Onodrim, UForce deals, leading Copla's Series A. Astrolight is in orbit – impressive company in the making. DBOX is making moves. Audrius building. And let's not forget the likes of Onodrim Industries (40M inaugural round), Ripplc, or Repsense. Defence ventures raised largest rounds in the Baltics.

Demos and onboarding by agents - Georg building Handhold, Mantas leading Cor and betting heavy on voice UI.
Fintech: healthy competition never hurt anyone, right? Alexandre reviews how Latvia is stacking up VS Lithuania. Got smth for you to watch, closer: CUBE3 is now CUBE AI, The Conversational Crime Intelligence Platform. Borgline has launched educational series covering main structures in today's European evergreen landscape.
New gen. SHIPYARD AI #1 Batch ran demos, excited about Riga! Entrepreneurs First run the Bridge - 8-week residency in the Bay Area - and will have Jaroslavs, Nojus, Andri, and Lauri joining the program (tagging them to facilitate term sheets).
People moves. Milda is now VP of Corporate Development at Vinted, also running their ventures arm. Jana joins BSV as a partner. Marija is now CCO at Oxylabs. Lina is building House Celestre, "a new kind of technology institution, built for public good” - intriguing. Juozas Kaminskas wraps up NEO Finance chapter.
"Queens of Tech” : ARTE TV Documentary talks with Monika Da Silva Xavier, Michelin Star chef Vita Bartininkaitė and Vinted co-founder Milda Mitkutė.
"King of Basketball (and tech)"? - basketnews pod with Tomas Okmanas (intro, subscribe for full).
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]
Ace Waves [Enterprise ready AI agents for CS, hiring]
Surfshark [Top 50 among fastest growing in EU, hiring]
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]
Eldorado.gg [world’s largest in-game trading marketplace, hiring]
Saily [eSIM data for travel, hiring – suggest candidate for a bonus]
rounds and capital
Spotwise.ai raised $450K pre-seed round, led by Outlast and with the participation of BADideas.fund and 500 Global.
After Skaylink exit to Vodafone, Donatas Zaveckas starting VatiCapital - interpreted as family office / operator angels / micro-PE hybrid.
Madrid’s Webel closes €4.3 million pre-Series A, led by Trind Ventures, and Mantas Mikuckas gets involved, too.
three questions

This week we caught up with Erikas Mališauskas - designer turned entrepreneur turned football club co-owner.
We spoke about scaling bootstrapped Kaching Appz from 1M+ MRR, what it means to help rebuild FK Žalgiris from the inside, fashion as identity, and the creative energy of building in Paris. Impressive builder!
Read the full interview here →
roleplay
VIALET - Senior Product Manager (Acquiring)
Eldorado - Head of Engineering, Fraud and Risk Manager
Oxylabs - Head of Customer Experience + Head of Marketing
Ace Waves - Agent engineering and Software engineers
Surfshark - DevOps Team Lead (Incogni)
Saily - rapidly growing - 30+ positions
Cloudvisor - Outbound sales, more sales jobs
Burga - COO
Vilniaus Zalgiris - COO
Kaching Appz - Senior Affiliate & Partnerships Manager
Mbito - B2B Sales Manager
Might be open for smth new - Miroslav, Product Designer, and Marius, CTO at Corner Case Technologies.
brand + design
Winners create myths. Myths create winners. Sabonis, Žalgiris as a resistance symbol, Olympic bronze. Every kid who touched a ball inherited a narrative: you can compete with anyone. Lithuanian tech has the capital, the talent, the global-by-default mindset - Vinted approaching €8B, Hostinger, Nord Security as unicorns, FIRSTPICK and Lost Astronaut backing 100 early-stage startups. All from ~2.8 million people. What's missing is mythology - the most durable form of brand. Isolated wins don't create movements. Stories do.
founder's guide
Decide and act. “This is option rot, the slow decay of potential that comes when we refuse to choose. When we refuse to pluck the fruit.”
Media asset acquisitions in new high - OpenAI just acquired TBPN, popular tech show, for reported $100M+ (or more).
Ugly Baby is a curated list of VCs in Europe, might actually work?
further insights
Parenting seems to be different in France.
Why older music is strangling new music? And pattern repeats in other fields (movies, books, video games).
World's largest ports… are not exactly Rotterdams anymore

ecosystem
All about talent. Seriously, Baltics have amazing tech scaleups that constrained only by... finding world-class talent to scale. Even Aerones, a fresh Latvian robotics player, is already at 500 people globally. Nord Security will give EUR 1000 referral fee for anyone – just suggest them a bright candidate to be hired. And Vinted goes extra mile for international talent to relocate to Vilnius: Senior Engineers, Data Scientists, and other top talent are eligible for a €30,000 relocation bonus.
Turnover. Saulius tries to measure turnover of emplyees in tech scaleups, but most significant movements are simply because entities change, not that people are rapidly leaving around. One of those – when you don't want facts to spoil a good story (but they do)
Member discussion