FIRSTPICK Closes €25M Fund II to Champion Overlooked Baltic Founders in the AI Era

The Baltic startup ecosystem has a quiet but persistent problem — and a Vilnius-based venture capital firm is determined to solve it. FIRSTPICK, the region's leading first-check investor, has officially closed its second fund at €25 million, doubling down on its core conviction: the most promising founders are often the ones that mainstream venture capital walks right past. In a world where AI funding news is dominated by Silicon Valley giants and European mega-rounds, FIRSTPICK is making a different kind of bet — one written in smaller cheques, at earlier stages, and on founders who have yet to prove themselves to the world but are already doing the hard work beneath the radar. This latest development in AI funding is a significant signal for the broader European and Baltic startup landscape, underscoring that early-stage, region-specific investors can play an outsized role in building the next generation of global AI companies.

The fund was formally announced in early March 2026, and it builds directly on the momentum generated by FIRSTPICK's inaugural €20 million fund, which was launched in late 2022 after the firm separated from Startup Wise Guys, one of Europe's most well-known accelerator networks. That first vehicle has now been substantially deployed across approximately 100 Baltic startups, giving FIRSTPICK a rich operational dataset of what early-stage success actually looks like in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — the three Baltic states that form the geographic core of the fund's mandate. Fund II is not simply more capital; it represents a sharper, more refined thesis about where value is being created in the Baltics, and how best to capture it from the very first day a company exists.​

The 'Cinderella' Philosophy: Finding Brilliance Before the Ball

To understand FIRSTPICK's approach to AI funding and early-stage venture investing, you need to understand the metaphor that sits at the center of its philosophy. Andra Bagdonaitė, one of the fund's founding partners, has described the firm's work as being not unlike a fairy godmother — the kind who recognizes Cinderella's talent long before the ball, before the glass slipper, and before anyone else is paying attention. "It's not so different from the fairy godmother who knew Cinderella before the ball. Everyone wants to back success once it's visible and on the biggest stage, but we prefer to meet founders while they're still hustling below the radar. It's about recognizing the real work and character behind the scenes," Bagdonaitė has said in describing the fund's investment mindset. This is not a poetic flourish — it is a deeply practical investment strategy that reflects years of ground-level observation in a region that has historically been underserved by early-stage capital.​

The Baltics present a unique structural challenge for founders who don't fit traditional VC pattern-matching criteria. Foreign venture capitalists accounted for 43% of Baltic startup deals in 2025, representing €607 million in deployed capital — a meaningful number that signals growing international interest in the region. However, the same data reveals a critical gap: foreign investors, while enthusiastic about the Baltics at growth stages, frequently miss first-time founders who don't have the kind of CV that reads well from a distance. Founders without FAANG experience, Ivy League degrees, or prior exits are routinely overlooked by international VCs who rely on proxies rather than deep local knowledge. This gap in local judgment translates into billions of euros in unrealized regional potential — a problem that FIRSTPICK has positioned itself to solve through consistency, community, and an unwillingness to wait for someone else to write the first cheque.​

Dmitrij Sosunov, FIRSTPICK's managing partner, frames this opportunity in straightforward terms. "Strong founders often follow unconventional paths," he has stated, drawing on seven years of investing experience across nearly 100 Baltic startups. The firm has seen, time and again, how the market consistently underestimates precisely the kind of talent it is looking for — founders who are building in overlooked sectors, in overlooked geographies, or simply at a stage too early for most institutional investors to stomach. FIRSTPICK's Fund II is a direct response to that consistent pattern of market misjudgment, and it is backed by a coalition of limited partners who share that conviction.​

Fund Architecture: How the Capital Is Structured and Deployed

Fund II's architecture is deliberately designed to give FIRSTPICK maximum flexibility at the earliest stages of company formation. The fund writes initial cheques ranging from €100,000 to €500,000, with the capacity to follow on in subsequent rounds up to a total of €1 million per company. This ticket size is intentionally calibrated to the needs of inception-stage and pre-seed founders — amounts large enough to give a team meaningful runway, but small enough that FIRSTPICK can back a diverse portfolio of companies across the full Baltic geography without over-concentrating in any single bet. For context, this is the kind of AI funding that enables a two-person team to hire their first engineer, build an initial prototype, and begin generating real market signal — the pre-conditions for every subsequent funding round that follows.​

The limited partner base for Fund II is a carefully assembled mix of private and public capital that reflects both market confidence and strategic institutional intent. Among the private backers are entrepreneurs and angel investors from Tesonet — the Lithuanian company behind Nord Security and Surfshark, two of the most globally successful cybersecurity brands to emerge from the Baltics — as well as alumni of Oberlo, the Shopify-acquired e-commerce tooling startup, and founders from health-tech company Kilo Health. These aren't passive financial backers; they are operators who have built companies from the ground up in the same regional context and who understand what early-stage founders in the Baltics actually need. Their participation in the fund creates a direct feedback loop between capital and mentorship that strengthens the entire portfolio ecosystem.​

On the institutional side, Lithuania's Ministry of Economy and Innovation and the state-financed ILTE fund are both participating as limited partners, with ILTE making a €9 million anchor commitment — the single largest allocation in the fund's LP structure. This is a continuation of a public-private partnership model that traces back to FIRSTPICK's first fund, where ILTE's predecessor INVEGA played a similar anchoring role. Tadas Gudaitis, a Member of the Board at ILTE and Head of Business Development, has articulated the institution's reasoning clearly: "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. We believe that this partnership will help ensure a consistent funding pipeline for high-growth-potential startups, from acceleration to later stages of development, and will strengthen Lithuania's innovation ecosystem in the long term." This kind of public anchor investment is increasingly common across European innovation ecosystems, but ILTE's multi-fund commitment to FIRSTPICK specifically speaks to the quality of the relationship and the confidence that institutional stakeholders have developed in the team's approach to early-stage AI funding and deal sourcing.​

The AI-First Thesis: Why Baltic Founders Are Positioned to Win

One of the most striking elements of the AI funding news coming out of the Baltics in early 2026 is the degree to which artificial intelligence has taken over as the dominant investment theme in the region. According to data from the Baltic Startup Funding Report — compiled jointly by FIRSTPICK and Practica Capital — total venture investment in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania rose from €505 million in 2024 to €607 million in 2025, representing strong year-on-year growth even in a period when global venture markets remained cautious. More importantly, AI was the single largest sector by capital deployed, accounting for 46% of all investment in the Baltics in 2025 — a proportion that actually exceeds the European average of 35.5%, though it still trails the United States' dominant share of 65%. This is not a peripheral trend. The Baltics, and Lithuania in particular, are increasingly becoming serious destinations for AI-native company building.​

FIRSTPICK's Fund II leans directly into this reality. The fund's thematic focus has been sharpened from its first vehicle to concentrate specifically on AI-first software companies at inception and pre-seed stages. This means backing teams who are not just building with AI as a feature layer, but who are architecting entire business models around the transformative capabilities that modern AI systems enable. The Baltics have several structural advantages that make this a compelling place to pursue that thesis: a strong tradition of technical education, English-language proficiency that enables global product design from day one, favorable regulatory environments compared to Western Europe, and a growing alumni network of successful exits and unicorn-stage companies that creates a natural mentorship flywheel. FIRSTPICK's 250-plus founder community provides direct access to that network for every company in the portfolio.

The geographic scope of the fund also matters in ways that are easy to underestimate. While Estonia has developed a relatively mature early-stage ecosystem, built on the enduring legacy of Skype and Transferwise (now Wise), both Latvia and Lithuania have historically lacked the kind of pre-seed infrastructure that the broader European startup ecosystem takes for granted. Seed funds and growth-stage investors are present across all three Baltic countries, but very few players have been willing to write the very first institutional cheque — the one that takes a team from an idea on a napkin to a company with a product in the hands of real customers. That is the specific market gap that FIRSTPICK has operated in since its founding, and Fund II is a direct expression of the belief that this gap remains wide open and deeply underserved despite the region's growing reputation.​

Portfolio Evidence: What FIRSTPICK's Track Record Actually Shows

Any discussion of AI funding and early-stage venture strategy must ultimately be grounded in the portfolio evidence — what has actually happened to the companies that FIRSTPICK backed with its first €20 million fund. The most visible data point is Copla, a legal technology startup that FIRSTPICK backed at the very beginning with a €650,000 pre-seed round, serving as the first institutional investor before the product had meaningfully differentiated itself from larger, more established regtech competitors. That initial bet has since paid off in highly visible fashion: Copla now serves more than 100 regulated European customers, has crossed the milestone of seven-figure annual recurring revenue, and in February 2026 — just weeks before FIRSTPICK's Fund II announcement — closed a €6 million Series A round. The timeline from an uncertain pre-seed to a sizeable Series A, with real revenue and a meaningful customer base, is exactly the kind of outcome that validates the 'Cinderella' thesis.​

Other portfolio companies include Samphire Neuroscience, a mental health technology startup focused on neurostimulation, and Holo, which operates in the AI-enabled space. Across the full portfolio of approximately 100 companies built using Fund I, FIRSTPICK has developed a granular, empirical understanding of what the early-warning signals of success look like in the Baltic context — which founder archetypes consistently outperform, which sectors carry the highest intrinsic risk, and which kinds of operational support create the most leverage for pre-seed teams. Fund II is, in that sense, not just a second pool of capital; it is the application of hard-won institutional knowledge to a region that is growing faster than the capital available to serve it.​

For the broader AI funding news ecosystem in Europe, FIRSTPICK's Fund II close carries a clear signal: the Eastern European tech corridor is maturing, and the companies being built in Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn today are increasingly competitive on a global scale. The combination of strong technical talent, growing local VC infrastructure, meaningful state backing, and a genuine network of successful founder alumni is creating the conditions for Baltic startups to compete for international capital and international customers. The question, as always with pre-seed investing, is whether enough of those outcomes materialize at sufficient scale and speed to drive the returns that Fund II's limited partners will ultimately expect.

What FIRSTPICK's Rise Signals for European Deep Tech and AI Investment

Stepping back from the specifics of this particular AI funding news, the FIRSTPICK story is part of a much larger narrative about how the European startup ecosystem is evolving in the age of artificial intelligence. Across the continent, there is growing recognition that the best opportunities in AI-native company building are not always found in London, Berlin, or Paris — they are increasingly being discovered in overlooked regional ecosystems that have been quietly developing strong technical cultures for decades without the benefit of significant early-stage venture infrastructure. The Baltics are one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon, but similar dynamics are playing out in Eastern Europe more broadly, as well as in parts of Scandinavia, Southern Europe, and the Middle East.

The structural logic of what FIRSTPICK is doing with Fund II is applicable across all of these contexts: identify the regions where talent outpaces the available capital at early stages, build a local presence and reputation that gives you deal flow before anyone else, write the first cheque at a valuation that reflects genuine risk rather than competitive pressure, and then support founders with the operational expertise and network access that their stage demands. This is not a novel VC model in theory, but executing it consistently in markets that larger funds overlook requires a specific kind of institutional discipline and regional commitment that very few funds have demonstrated. FIRSTPICK's track record across Fund I and now the successful close of Fund II suggests that the Vilnius-based team has developed exactly that kind of disciplined, regionally anchored AI funding approach.

For anyone following AI funding news out of Europe in 2026, FIRSTPICK's €25 million close is a reminder that some of the most important capital in the innovation economy is not measured in billions. It is measured in the quality of the bet, the depth of the relationship, and the conviction to back a founder before anyone else in the world has decided they are worth backing. That is the Cinderella story that FIRSTPICK is writing — and based on the early evidence from Fund I, it is a story that is increasingly ending with glass slippers rather than overlooked talent left behind.