Overview of Lithuanian startups in 2017

2018-01-19

Last year, the startup funding in Lithuania hit the highest level since 2011. Over €100M was raised: €80M+ during 7 ICOs, the rest during 11 VC-funded rounds, including from Practica.

On the ICO side, where the Lithuania-origin startups have been highly active, the funding was driven by the €33.2M Bankera & €31M Monetha, the fintech startups, and €11.4M Mysterium Network, decentralised VPN marketplace, ICOs. We currently observe several other large-scale Lithuanian-origin offerings in the ICO lists.  

The VC funding was driven by our portfolio's urban mobility Trafi €6M Series B from EBRD Venture Capital and Octopus Ventures, fintech TransferGo €2.5M pre-B bridge from Vostok Emerging Finance and 3D tech CGTrader €2M Series A from Karma Ventures, Intel Capital and Practica Capital as well as by biometrics AimBrain €4.5M Series A from BGF Ventures and AI startup GenusAI €0.9M seed from Picus Capital & angels. Also, data company RoyaltyRange raised €0.4M seed from Practica and event tech Interactio raised €0.3m late seed from Practica, Change Ventures and Kima Ventures.

Additionally, a luxury watch startup Filippo Loreti was crowdfunded €3.5M via Kickstarter.

A number of startups also received sizeable R&D and other aids. From our portfolio, space-/satellite-tech NanoAvionics was granted €3.2M IntelektasLT and Horizon 2020 aid, incl. the requirement for €0.8M private-sector matching funding; Rubedo Sistemos, robotics, and Softneta, medical device, were granted respectively €0.5M & €0.3M of IntelektasLT aid.

On the exit side, Oberlo, e-commerce, was acquired by Shopify for US$15M, while our portfolio TrackDuck, feedback solution for web development, was exited to InVision. Also, there was a number of exists to founders, like WebRobots, big data, and Lithuanian-Latvian insurtech Mobassurance from our portfolio.

The top VC-funded Lithuanian startup Vinted (ca€50M raised to-date), a secondhand marketplace, after the shift in its strategy and business model, saw a 16x growth in revenue. The Lithuanian self-funded heavyweights like Pixelmator, image editor, Bored Panda, media, Omnisend, email marketing, and Tesonet, cybersecurity and other tools, also continued their growth on a global, regional or local scale in 2017. 

According to Arvydas Bložė, the CEO of our Startup.lt accelerator, despite talks a year ago about possible funding gap and stagnant development of the ecosystem, it turned out the opposite way in 2017. We also saw a huge success of Lithuanian self-funded startups.

Sources: Verslo Žinios: http://bit.ly/2DsXhvG; Verslo Žinios (premium users): http://bit.ly/2mUIbVA and http://bit.ly/2BgUfEY; Practica Capital. 

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