Lithuanian startup ecosystem at Slush 2022
From Cyber security solutions to gateways for blockchain payments, the Baltic nation is creating the hub to grow unicorns
Around 1000 startups, two unicorns, and record VC investment are just a few of Lithuania’s startup ecosystem achievements last year. The country will showcase its potential to become one of leading Europe’s startup pools this week in Slush 2022, Helsinki.
The guide of the Lithuanian team – Startup Lithuania – will bring together 16 leading Lithuanian startups and other ecosystem representatives, including local VCs and governmental agencies, demonstrating why Lithuania is a perfect place to launch a game-changing startup.
The companies Startup Lithuania will bring to the podium
Investors
- Practica Capital is an early-stage VC dedicated to backing Baltic founders. They invested exclusively in tech potential in the Baltic States for the last 10 years.
They back great founders in their ambition in seed and selected pre-seed and A stages partnering with them as company builders.
Practica Capital manages three funds with €52M in AUM. To date, more than 65 investments, including great companies like TransferGo, PVcase, Interactio, Eneba, Ovoko, Trafi, CGtrader, and others.
Contact – Vilius Kateiva, Investment Analyst at Practica Capital - Litban was founded on the 14th of March, 2018 and marked a crucial step forward in the young Lithuanian startup ecosystem. LitBAN now has over 200 members, and our community grows stronger with each individual joining it: unheard insights, larger networks and new joint investment possibilities.
Contact – Justinas Pasys, Managing Director at LitBAN. - Open Circle Capital – a venture fund management company. They make equity investments into early-stage Lithuanian start-ups with global ambitions and the aim to invest in innovative and disruptive technologies.
The focus on Deep-Tech, ICT and robotics technologies, where their management team, advisory partners, and mentor community can add significant value.
Contact – Andrius Bajoras, Principal and Audrius Milukas, Partner. - Contrarian ventures, Firstpick, VCA
Startups
- Nord Security – is home to industry-leading cybersecurity solutions praised by major cybersec experts and the most influential tech sites.
At the moment, the company has 5 cybersecurity products, trusted by millions of users worldwide: the world’s most advanced VPN service NordVPN; the next-generation password manager NordPass, the file encryption tool NordLocker; the advanced network access security solution NordLayer; and the tools to build your VPN products, NordWL. - Coingate is a Lithuanian-based fintech company founded in 2017.
Its payment gateway allows businesses to accept cryptocurrency payments while taking care of all the rest. Permission-based account management, fiat payouts to the bank account and brand-new email billing features are just a few reasons why CoinGate has become a go-to payment processor for many prominent businesses. - Oxus.ai helps sales teams convert more deals (improve the bottom of the funnel) by providing actionable, almost real-time insights from 100% of sales phone/video calls.
Its mission is to democratize access to speech analytics for sales/CS teams in any language. - Oxylabs mission is to ensure that every company, no matter big or small, has access to publicly available big data.
Public data gathering is extremely important for every company to achieve success. - Whatagraph – Marketing agency reporting automation platform
- Billo – the fastest, easiest and most affordable solution for custom-made videos at scale. Its network of home studios across the USA ensures fast video production for any company, brand or agency. They have created more than 67k videos for over 16k companies to date.
- Frontu – Technician-First Field Service Management Solution
Get rid of manual paperwork, cut costs, and bring clarity to your employees and customers with one fully automated field service management software. - SMEFinance – Established in 2016, SME Finance is reinventing financing for SMEs and building an AI-driven financial technology platform that takes incredibly quick lending decisions to bring the best financing solutions for small and medium enterprises in the Baltics and the larger EU region.
- Islucid – a SaaS platform that centralizes transcripts of all virtual meetings.
isLucid, on behalf of the user, will manage meeting agendas, capture tasks, and orchestrate such information distribution to all stakeholders and systems. - Pixevia – an AI-powered, autonomous store.
Pixevia provides reliable, cost-efficient technology for grocery stores and gas stations without cashiers and waiting lines. You walk in, grab what you need, and go.
No need to wait in line to pay for groceries, and no need to manually scan all the items at self-service machines. - Traxlo operates Tasku.app – grocery store tasks & staff marketplace.
Tasku enables local communities around the stores to earn important extra income and make retail operations more sustainable. - Aciety, Tesonet, Overizon, Benme, Litilit, BBright
Organisations to support and accelerate – Invest Lithuania, Baltic sandbox, Rockit
Last year, the combined value of Lithuanian startups reached €7.1B – 17 times up since 2016.
2021 was also the year of the investment record – VCs invested €428M in Lithuanian-founded companies, 2.2 times, smashing the previous record of 2018. Only 14% of the VC funding came from Baltics investors, other European investors granted 45%, and 37% came from the US.
Considering Lithuania’s size and the number of startups and unicorns per capita, Lithuania is showing incredible growth and value in the worldwide startup map.
says Roberta Rudokiene, Head of Startup Lithuania.
The market’s perspective is justified by the record interest from foreign investors and large corporations. Even early-stage funding grew 2.4 times from last year, reaching €118M.
We also have some startups that are successfully booming worldwide without external investment.
She notes that even during the pandemic, most Lithuanian startups showed remarkable resilience and managed to grow. The number of employees in Lithuanian startups rose by 15% in 2021, and their revenues and export volumes were up 192% compared to the first half of 2020.
2021 is a record year for the Lithuanian startup ecosystem, and we believe it’s only the beginning of exceptional growth.
adds Roberta Rudokiene.
And the key to achieving this is governmental support, flexible and forward-thinking regulation, low tax burden, forward-thinking ideas, supporting infrastructure, and definitely – a talent pool.
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