This year, Lithuanian startups can be proud: in the first half-year of 2021, a record amount of funds was raised – over EUR 311 million of investments from foreign and Lithuanian investment funds, and the turnover of as much as 61 per cent of Lithuanian startups more than doubled. These figures lead to an optimistic forecast of the second half-year as well.

“This year, the growing ecosystem of Lithuanian startups has achieved perfect performance results – the sales volume jumped by 110% in the first half-year, compared to the previous year. It shows that startups are able to take advantage of the situation even during the pandemic. Investments in startups have been growing, yet maintaining the pace is essential, thus we will strengthen the startup ecosystem by initiating new promotion measures for startup development, improving the business environment, and carrying out the reform of innovation. In this way, we will create even more favourable conditions for their growth,” says Aušrinė Armonaitė, Minister of the Economy and Innovation.

In the first half-year, Lithuanian startups managed to raise a record investment amount of EUR 311 million, compared to the record amount of EUR 169 million back in 2019. The major share of this year’s investments consists of foreign investors’ funds, yet Lithuanian investors also invested intensively – they were involved in as many as 20 out of 25 transactions carried out in the first half-year.

EUR 250 million – the investment raised by Lithuanian unicorn Vinted – was a significant contribution to the record investment amount of this year and it is indeed so far the biggest amount raised by Lithuanian startups. An investment of EUR 24.4 million raised by Interactio and announced to be the largest investment amount raised in a Series A round in Lithuania and the Baltic countries over recent 10 years is also worth mentioning.

“We are noticing this fantastic phase of spurt in the Lithuanian startup ecosystem – we have quite a number of startups that have grown into global companies trusted and invested in by well-known foreign investors. We consider that the number of such transactions will only grow and the amounts invested in startups will increase in the future. It should be nevertheless noted that the raised investments do not show the full ecosystem potential, since we also have quite a number of startups operating globally without external investments, for instance, Tesonet, Omnisend or Kilo Health,” comments Roberta Rudokienė, Head of Startup Lithuania, a startup ecosystem development unit of Public Institution Enterprise Lithuania.

According to Ms. Rudokienė, they expect the same pace in the second half-year as well as new transactions and investments raised by Lithuanian startups. This hope is supported by the positive tendency of more active investments by the founders of successful startups or local IT companies in innovative businesses such as business angels. Among the perfect examples is Kilo Health that invested in Revolab or TeleSoftas that invested in the Aichom startup.

Startups grew with the sales and export volumes not lagging behind

The analysis of startup performance results conducted by Enterprise Lithuania analysts is really optimistic. In the first quarter of 2021, the total sales of Lithuanian startups in domestic and foreign markets accounted for EUR 520.2 million, recording a 110% increase, compared to the same period in 2020. Of course, the results of the previous year were affected by the lockdown. In the first quarter of this year, the exports of high added value goods and services created by Lithuanian startups also hit record highs, i.e. EUR 348.4 million, which exceeds the amount of EUR 168.1 million of the first quarter of 2020 by 107%.

The growth of the startup ecosystem is also proved by data from the data platform Unicorns.lt. Although the number of startups has remained rather stable this year, the number of startup employees increased by 15% in the first half-year to reach 12 400 talents. A significant growth of startup talents can be observed if we take a yearly timespan – the growth has exceeded 33% over a year. In the first half-year, taxes paid by startups also increased to EUR 48.3 million, compared to EUR 30.1 million of taxes paid during the same period in the previous year.

The latest data of the Startup Lithuania’s startup database record 1 087 startups. The national startup ecosystem facilitator invites to take the chance and register your startup in the main Lithuanian startup database available at www.startuplithuania.com.