FIRSTPICK

Founders, the #1 fundraising mistake to avoid 👇 You're raising a pre-seed, so you build a plan for the pre-seed. Wrong move 🙅 The fix is simple, plan two rounds ahead. You're not raising to survive the next 12 months, you're raising to walk into your seed round with a story too strong to ignore 📈 So work backwards 🔁 🟣 Decide what you'll pitch AT the seed (say 50K MRR, a team of 12, 360% growth, 10 marquee logos) 🟣 Measure the gap from where you are today (say 10K MRR) 🟣 Add up what closing that gap actually costs, and that's your round Do the math and the number finds itself 🧮 In this example it lands around €500K, and every euro holds up when a VC's analysts dig into your model 🔍 Don't copy-paste round sizes off a slide. Build them from the ground up 💜 Full breakdown in the carousel 👉 #FIRSTPICK #vc #startups #fundraising #Baltics #founders

Dear European Central Bank, we went ahead and finished your redesign for you 💶 Everyone's slapping their faces on euro notes this week. So we did it properly, with the people who actually built modern Europe 🇪🇺 Three small countries. One very good reason to reprint 📈 No thanks needed, ECB. Let's build 💜 Markus Villig, Milda Mitkutė, Justas Janauskas, Tomas Okmanas, Eimantas S., Davis Siksnans, Kristo Käärmann, Taavet Hinrikus, Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn #FIRSTPICK #vc #startups #Baltics #founders

Another one for the Baltic build 🇱🇹 Ordero has raised 💶 €150K to fix one of the most quietly chaotic parts of the day: getting large groups of people fed. The round is backed by us at FIRSTPICK together with Lost Astronaut 🚀 What they do: Ordero is a Vilnius-born platform that turns meal ordering into one clean system. It started with kids (parents order, adjust, cancel and flag allergies from an app), but the same headache lives everywhere people eat together: schools and kindergartens, offices, construction sites, and any place with a canteen. Providers get accurate demand and waste less food, and whoever runs the kitchen stops reconciling orders at the last minute 🍽️ Already live with 100+ partners in Lithuania, including Vaikystės Sodas, Demokratinė mokykla, Šiaurės licėjus, Vitlio licėjus, Montesori akademija and KD International School. The money goes into product and into crossing the border: the goal is 100+ partners in Poland over the next 12 months 🇵🇱 Huge congrats to the whole Ordero team. Exactly the kind of founder we love backing: someone who saw a real, everyday mess and turned it into a solution that can become the standard for the whole sector. Let's build 💜 #FIRSTPICK #vc #investment #portfolio #startups

🎬 Flashback to TechChill 2026 in Riga 👇 Andra took the stage to tackle the question every Baltic founder is asking: what does it actually take to graduate from Seed to Series A? 🚀 She opened with the Baltic Startup Funding Report, the one dataset you won't find on Dealroom or Crunchbase, because we build it the hard way: calling every founder one by one, asking exactly how much they raised and on what terms 📞 A few things that stood out: 🇱🇹 Lithuanian startups raised €240M and hit a record 11 exits, capital flowing back to founders and investors alike 📈 The gap between companies that graduate and those that plateau is rarely about the idea 🤝 Joined on stage by Tim Vaino (Practica Capital) and Andrius Slimas (Saltz.app) for an honest, no-headlines look at the real leap 33 minutes well spent, full session linked below 💜

Summer Closing is back 😎🎉 Last year it became an instant favourite, so we're making it official: a FIRSTPICK tradition. On September 3rd we're taking over Kiki in Vilnius for one more evening of fireside chats, big laughs and late-night talks that run until the venue closes on us 💜 How the night goes 👇 🟣 18:00 Doors open 🟣 18:30 to 19:30 Knowledge program: fast-paced fireside chats and speakers 🟣 19:30 to 22:00 Laughs, fun and the kind of evening where inside jokes are born Brought to you by Google, SEB Lietuvoje, Solidgate and FIRSTPICK. Heads up: registration is subject to approval by the organiser. We keep it that way for crowd quality and because space at the venue is limited, so request your spot early 👇 🔗 Request to join: luma.com/x9o9u93p #FIRSTPICK #startups #community #Vilnius

"Do you have any questions for us?" Most founders freeze here, or ask about the check size. But every founder should understand how a VC actually runs, because where a fund sits on its own clock decides how much it can invest, how patient it can be, and whether it can back you again in the next round 👇 🟣 When did you first close this fund? (its vintage) Tells you if you're getting fresh capital and a long runway, or a fund already thinking about exits. FIRSTPICK: We held our first close in 2026, it's a fresh fund. You're getting new capital and our full attention. 🟣 Are you still in your investment period, or already in follow-on mode? Early on they make new bets. Later, most of the money is already spoken for. FIRSTPICK: Firmly in our investment period. We're actively writing first checks right now. 🟣 How much of the fund is still uninvested? The dry powder is what's actually left to deploy. It's the real answer to "can you invest in me." FIRSTPICK: Most of it. We've only just started deploying. 🟣 What share is reserved for follow-ons? This is the money set aside to back you in the next round. Low reserves mean you're mostly on your own later. FIRSTPICK: We reserve meaningfully for follow-ons, initial checks of €100K-500K with follow-ons up to €1M. Here's the part nobody says out loud: you won't always get a straight number. Dry powder often gets a soft answer, sometimes a fund legally can't say much about its raise. That's fine. The point was never the exact figure. A confident, well-run fund answers the easy ones comfortably, and how they handle the hard ones tells you just as much. Ask us. We'll answer every one 🫶 #FIRSTPICK #vc #startups #founders #fundraising #Baltics 💜

Writing the cheque is the easy part, any fund can wire money and then disappear 💸 What actually matters is everything that comes after. We're in it with our founders from day one, and part of that is stacking their toolkit so they're not starting from zero 👇 🟣 NVIDIA and Microsoft Azure for compute 🟣 Google Cloud, DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for infra 🟣 Stripe, Intercom, HubSpot, Notion and Linear to run the shop 🟣 OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, ElevenLabs and dozens more Year one is usually when founders quietly bleed cash on cloud and tooling, and that is exactly the money ours get to keep and pour into product instead of invoices. But the tools are just the start, the real work is everything we do beside you after the wire clears, and that's why founders pick us first. So if you’re building something serious, let’s talk 💬 #FIRSTPICK #vc #startups #Baltics

“Do I see myself building a €3B business?” 🤔 That's the question every founder should ask in the mirror before raising a single euro of VC money. Most don't realise why 👀 So we broke down how a venture fund actually works: where the money comes from, the brutal power-law math, and why your friendly VC needs you to be a unicorn (or bigger) 🦄 The honest version of how we think 👇💜 #FIRSTPICK #vc #startups #fundraising

10 investments in 4 months. And then we went on holiday ☀️ Well… sort of 😅 The out-of-office is on, the toes are in the sand, but the laptops? Still open. Because deals don't wait for tan lines 🌊💻 Some founders we go and find ourselves. Others find us. Both work. If you're building something great, reach out. And if you don't, don't be surprised when we come knocking. Hesitation is expensive. Become an All-star. #FIRSTPICK #vc #startups #Baltics

#ourpicks ⭐️ Meet display.dev, the home for everything your AI agents create. A URL anyone can open, review and improve. 🤭👇 WHAT INSPIRED ✨ YOU TO CREATE YOUR STARTUP? It started with Carl's own frustration. His AI agents kept generating HTML and Markdown files, but there was no good way to share them or collaborate. Every human has Google Drive; agents had nowhere to put their work. The deeper we dug, the clearer the gap became: agents produce enormous amounts of output, but almost none of it makes it into how companies actually work. So we built the home for it. WHAT GOOD 🙏 DOES YOUR STARTUP BRING TO THE WORLD? Agents generate a lot of valuable work that today just disappears into local files and chat windows. Display.dev gives that output a place to live, be reviewed, and improved: a URL anyone can open and comment on, with the agent reading the feedback and publishing a better version back. It closes the loop between people and AI, and it's agent-agnostic, so companies never get locked to one model or tool. EXPLAIN YOUR STARTUP LIKE YOU WOULD TO A 5-YEAR-OLD 🧸 Robots that help you work make lots of drawings, but they have nowhere to keep them. We built the robots their own fridge door, so they can hang up what they made, you can say "make this part better," and the robot fixes it right there. WHY DID YOU CHOOSE 💜 FIRSTPICK? FIRSTPICK walk the walk, they were the first to back us. We met Rūta at 4 PM on the Friday of Latitude59, the very end, when everyone was tired and groggy. We gave a four-minute pitch and said we wanted to sign within a week. Term sheets landed Tuesday, and we signed that Friday. Helpful and professional at every step. Would recommend. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST UPCOMING 🪨 MILESTONE? Our next big product update ships in three to four weeks, and it expands what display.dev covers significantly. We're excited because it changes how agents and humans collaborate, not just on documents, but across all kinds of knowledge work. WHO IS BEHIND YOUR 🦸 STARTUP? display.dev was co-founded by Ott Ilves and Carl Rannaberg. We're both ex-Pipedrive and met there over a decade ago. This is my second startup; before my first, my background was marketing and user acquisition. Carl is a career-long developer and engineering lead, from Pipedrive to Outfunnel and Pactum AI. WHAT 3 QUALITIES ARE YOU LOOKING FOR IN YOUR TEAMMATES 🤜🤛? 1️⃣ Ownership: people who see a problem and fix it without being asked. At this stage there's no one to hand things off to. 2️⃣ Taste and craft: we're building infrastructure that has to feel effortless, so the details matter, not just that it works. 3️⃣ Fast learners who move with AI, not around it: we build for an agent-native world, so we want people already living in it. THANK YOU 💜 for the chat, display.dev team. Here's to giving every agent's work a home. 😎 #FIRSTPICK #vc #startup #portfolio