FIRSTPICK closes €25M second fund to back Baltic founders before anyone else does

When FIRSTPICK backed Emilė Radytė in 2021, her company Samphire Neuroscience was still building its first product and the risk, by the fund’s own assessment, was high.

There was no revenue, no clear route to market, and a proposition, a neurotechnology wearable for menstrual pain, that most European investors would have politely declined to engage with.

Three years later, Samphire has sold out twice since its European launch, closed a $5 million seed round led by Inventure, and established itself as one of the more credible femtech hardware companies on the continent.

FIRSTPICK was the first cheque.

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That is the thesis on which the Vilnius-based fund has now closed a second vehicle: a €25 million fund to back Baltic founders at inception and pre-seed, with initial investments ranging from €100,000 to €500,000 and follow-on capacity up to €1 million.

The fund is backed by Lithuanian entrepreneurs and angels, including founders of Tesonet, the accelerator behind Nord Security and Surfshark, as well as alumni of Oberlo (acquired by Shopify in 2017) and health-tech company Kilo Health.

Lithuania’s Ministry of Economy and Innovation and the state-financed ILTE fund are also among the limited partners, with ILTE committing €9 million.

The new vehicle is FIRSTPICK’s second. Its first fund, a €20 million vehicle launched when the firm separated from Startup Wise Guys in late 2022, has now been substantially deployed across roughly 100 Baltic startups, according to the firm.

The unfashionable end of venture

Pre-seed investing in emerging European markets is not a glamorous business. Ticket sizes are small, portfolio companies are often pre-revenue, and the work, identifying founders before there is anything obvious to identify,  is labour-intensive in a way that does not scale easily.

Most larger funds prefer to enter later, once a company has demonstrated traction, and leave the earliest stage to angels, accelerators, and the occasional conviction bet.

FIRSTPICK’s managing partner Dmitrij Sosunov is unsentimental about what fills that gap.

“Strong founders often follow unconventional paths,” he said in a statement. “Drawing on seven years of experience investing in nearly 100 Baltic startups, FIRSTPICK has seen the market consistently underestimate the kind of talent they’re looking for.”

The fund’s specific claim is that when foreign investors arrive in emerging markets with standardised checklists, FAANG employment history, Ivy League credentials, previous exits, they routinely walk past the people who will actually build the companies that matter. FIRSTPICK wants to be faster, and more willing to look different.

The portfolio evidence is at least suggestive. Beyond Samphire, the fund’s most-cited example is Copla, a cybersecurity compliance startup founded by serial entrepreneur Aurimas Bakas and his co-founders in 2023.

FIRSTPICK joined Copla’s €650,000 pre-seed round as the first institutional investor, when the product was still early and competing for attention against more established regtech incumbents.

Copla has since grown to serve more than 100 regulated European customers, reached seven-figure annual recurring revenue, and closed a €6 million Series A in February 2026.

What the fund will focus on

The new vehicle has a sharper thematic focus than FIRSTPICK’s first. It will concentrate on AI-first software and the earliest stages of company formation, conception and pre-seed, across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

That geographic scope matters: while Estonia has a mature early-stage ecosystem built on the legacy of Skype and Transferwise, Latvia and Lithuania have historically lacked pre-seed infrastructure, with seed funds and growth investors present but relatively few players willing to write the very first cheque.

FIRSTPICK has operated in that gap since its founding.

The Baltic region’s startup ecosystem has been growing quickly. According to the Baltic Startup Funding Report compiled jointly by FIRSTPICK and Practica Capital, venture investment in the three countries rose from €505 million in 2024 to €607 million in 2025, with much of the growth concentrated at earlier stages.

AI was the dominant sector by capital deployed, accounting for 46 per cent of investment, a higher proportion than in Europe overall, where the equivalent figure was 35.5 per cent, though still well below the US at 65 per cent.

Tadas Gudaitis, Member of the Board at ILTE, framed the state fund’s continued participation in strategic terms. “We are continuing our collaboration with FIRSTPICK, having witnessed their strong ability to professionally select and nurture early-stage companies,” he said.

“As a strategic investor with a €9 million commitment, our role is not only to provide capital, but also to encourage the involvement of private investors.”

The structure, public anchor alongside private co-investors, mirrors the approach ILTE’s predecessor INVEGA used to backstop FIRSTPICK’s first fund.

The limits of the argument

The fund’s pitch for backing non-traditional founders is genuinely distinct from the typical VC positioning exercise, and the portfolio examples are real.

But it is worth noting that both Copla’s Bakas and Samphire’s Radytė are experienced professionals with track records directly tied to their companies, exactly the founder profile that the Baltic Startup Funding Report identifies as having dominated funded rounds in 2025.

The “overlooked founder” and the “experienced operator” are not always different people; what FIRSTPICK is arguably doing is identifying operators in domains or geographies that larger funds have not yet paid attention to, which is a more precise and arguably more defensible claim.

At €25 million, the fund is small enough that even modest outcomes, a portfolio company reaching Series B with follow-on participation from larger funds, can generate meaningful returns.

The question for FIRSTPICK, as for any pre-seed fund in an ecosystem that is growing but remains relatively small, is whether enough of those outcomes materialise at sufficient scale.

The Baltic region has produced a handful of substantial exits and a growing number of funded companies.

Whether it produces enough of them quickly enough to drive the returns the new fund’s LP base will expect is the bet that this €25 million is making.

“We see our investments as the start of a wider impact,” Sosunov said. “When the Baltic tech sector grows, the entire economy becomes stronger. Our goal is to help the best people kickstart their ideas right here, and build resilient businesses that benefit the whole region.”

That is a fund manager’s statement, but it is also a reasonable description of what early-stage investors in smaller ecosystems actually do when they work, they create the pipeline that later-stage capital follows.