I never set out to be a small business CEO. The plan was to be the CEO of a rocketship, the next really big thing. Evidently, these plans haven’t materialised. One day, I woke up with the realization that I’m a small business CEO. I’m leading a team of three senior engineers and two co-founders (and a bunch of coding agents, but that’s a topic for another post).

I never set out to be a small business CEO. The plan was to be the CEO of a rocketship, the next really big thing. Evidently, these plans haven’t materialised.

I don’t remember the day I stopped being the CEO of the next big thing and became the CEO of a small business.

Was it when we realised our product strategy needs to change for the fourth time?

Or when we couldn’t raise our $3 million Seed and settled for a $1 million bridge?

Or when I had to lay off our head of engineering?

Or when I realised I’m doing some marketing task that I first learned about 12 years ago?

As a small business CEO, I need to make ends meet. Bootstrap, if you will. I’m typing this post on a computer that is, at times, too slow for me. In my previous setups, I would have needed to request a new machine or email my account manager, and it would have appeared a few days later. Now, I consult AI tools to see which upgrades or uninstalls would make a computer with my specs faster.

I also do very little management and quite a bit of IC (individual contributor) work. I’ve taught myself to use some quite exotic features of our CMS, implemented affiliate management software, and, this morning, updated our listing in the ActiveCampaign Integrations directory. Previously, I would have delegated all of this. Now, I do it myself or learn how to get it done via prompts.

As a small business CEO, I’ve made fewer friends and connections over the last couple of years. I go to fewer events and travel less, which are quite welcome developments.

On the flipside, my professional connections are deeper. Not only do I know that my colleague has two kids, but also how they did at a hockey competition last weekend, or what they used for house insulation.

One thing that is working amazingly well in a small business is that my co-founder, Markus, is both head of customer support and head of product, and I’m also part of the round-robin system that handles support and onboarding calls. It’s truly beautiful how this shortens feedback cycles. And now that Markus is a part-time vibe-coder, product functionality has repeatedly changed an hour or two after a chat with a customer.

In many ways, running a five-person tech startup is exactly like running a five-person hair salon.

But there are key differences:

• Hair salon customers seldom come in and pay 40x your starting price, while stretching your system capabilities and onboarding processes.

• When you’re running a hair salon, you’re probably striving to be better than other hair salons in the neighbourhood or town. In a five-person software startup, we have to do something, even if something highly specific, better than anyone in the world.

(Outfunnel is now the best possible tool to connect specific CRM and marketing platforms. Not perfect, but the best in the world.)

Last but not least, there’s always the faint smell of massive success. If we get the next thing right, we can 5x or 50x our growth rates. I think about it every time we pull something bigger into the sprint. Every time.

Otherwise, I would have just founded a five-person hair salon, I guess.

Andrus Purde, currently the founder of Outfunnel, joins the platform as an entrepreneur whose background reinforces Fomo.Observer's mission to provide an expert view on the regional startup ecosystem. As part of a team of columnists/practitioners, he is dedicated to sharing the "unvarnished truth" of startup life — a perspective shaped by his previous experience leading marketing efforts at Pipedrive.

Esgrid, which launched at the peak of ESG interest in late 2023, won a pitching competition at Startup Day in Tartu and raised some €1.4 million from investors like 2C Ventures.

“When the sustainability market collapsed in 2025, we didn’t fold. We pivoted. Then pivoted again. Kept fighting until it genuinely stopped making sense - and decided to stop with 6 months of runway still in the bank,” co-founder and CEO Oksana Tolmatshova said on LinkedIn. ”In the end, we knew we'd done something right when customers asked what it would take for us to continue, and investors asked to call should we build something new.”

”To every founder still fighting every day - you're a hero by default. Even if it doesn't end the way you planned,” Tolmatshova wrote.

Based in London since 2012, she originally launched her career in Estonia by founding consumer lending businesses aimed at the UK market. This early experience sparked her initial interest in moving to London.

She asks me how I ended up in Estonia, and aside from my usual ‘I like the tech scene’ spiel, I tell her I like the quiet and how small my life is here. She’s quite the opposite.

“I don’t love the quiet. I mean, I love coming here for quiet, but just for a little while, I love going back to the crazy. So I think it was a perfect place for me to be, and to start growing what I was growing at the time,” she says.

“It was really exciting. And I really felt I fit in immediately. There’s so much going on all the time, and just coming back to Estonia, and the ecosystem here at the time, just felt boring to me. I think it was about the mindset, and I love the busy city and always being challenged.”

She does admit to me that the move to London was her second attempt. A previous attempt had not worked out. Her return home gave her the understanding that she wanted to go back and find something; it was the life she craved. But, she didn’t leave without turning down what could have ended up as a very lucrative opportunity, an early start in Wise.

“Do I have regrets? I don’t think I ever had regrets as such, because I went on to do things on my own. And I think if I joined TransferWise [as it was first known] at the time, I would have just been an employee, rather than really founding something on my own.”

“It was just a time of my life where I felt it was time to move and explore something else. I also had the idea of building this job interview platform,” she explains. That is exactly what she did.

She co-founded Jobatar with Simon Hughes when she moved to London. She later parted ways with the company in 2017, when she and Simon wanted to take it in different directions. She wanted to go big, and he didn’t.

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Investments beckoned

“At some point, we started to see competitors coming from the US, very well funded, building better than we did, taking over the customers. A very typical startup journey, when you don’t have enough funding to move fast enough,” she explains.

This opened the door for her to move into helping startup founders rather than being one. Linamägi had already been helping out at Startupbootcamp FinTech, an accelerator backed by banks and financial institutions, so she moved to the role full-time.

“I looked after a portfolio of 30 FinTech companies there. We did all the sourcing, all the investments, all the portfolio support,” she says.

“Then moved to Founders Factory, which was my first, I would say, decent investment job, where I was looking after the investments of the Guardian Media Group, EasyJet, and Aviva, as well as a couple of other corporate LPs that we had in the fund,” she tells me.

One of the founders she’s invested in went on to raise his own fund and invited her to join as a founding team member of The Venture Collective. “It was a great start, but we ended up investing primarily in the US,” she says. “The rounds got filled much quicker, and as we were a new fund, we needed to move fast. We needed to build our track record.”

Linamägi was starting to notice something about the investments, “We continued investing in the same type of people. You constantly have calls with, and see on the investment committees that the people we are backing are white males.”

“The women that I always saw pitching, no matter how good a performance they had, or how good a track record they had, how great revenues they had in the businesses they were in, were not selected to be invested in,” she explains.

“Women have to educate male investors about the market that actually even exists; they spend too much time explaining and educating about the market,” she tells me, noting that male founders don’t have to spend that extra time convincing investors of a market.

I asked her, “Couldn’t you have influenced that?” to which she replied, “You do, but very limited. And that’s why I left, and why I always say, if you can’t change the industry inside, you have to go and build it outside, which is why I did what I did.”

Sie Ventures

So what did she do? She started her own investment firm and called it Sie Ventures, from the German word for she.

“I want to invest on my own terms, in people I believe that can build great things, and in people that are absolutely, completely overlooked in the market and just don’t get access to the capital,” she says.

She not only wants to get capital into the accounts of women-led businesses, “but also unlock the knowledge of how to navigate raising venture capital money.” Sie Ventures has founder programmes and an angel syndicate platform, and a new VC fund is in the making.

“I always feel like when women do something, they kind of have to really validate and build a track record before they actually go and build the next thing, right? I feel like that’s what I’ve been doing for the last five years,” she explains.

“I’ve always wanted to build my own fund, and I tried earlier as well - I clearly wasn’t quite ready for it. First of all, we had to prove our thesis that there are enough women-led businesses that are high performers, that are strong deals. And today, I built this portfolio of 25 women-led tech companies. I have multiples of 10x to 20x already to show in terms of the return. And I had my first exit.”

“So this had to happen before we can start building out something bigger - now it’s time for us to launch our first fund,” she says. In the making since last summer, it’s a partner fund called Arãya Sie Fund. Fund size: £15 million with a £20 million cap.

“This fund invests in women-led tech companies. It doesn’t have to have women only in the teams; we’re all about diversity, really. We invest early in pre-seed and seed, write cheques of £100,000 to £300,000, and we invest primarily in the UK,” she explains.

She goes on to say that 70% of investments are UK-focused, with around 30% going to the rest of the European market.

A future for women

As we wrap up our chat, I ask her, ‘What’s the dream?’

“I think I just want to look back one day and be really proud of what I’ve achieved, but also make money by doing it. I think today I’m really proud of what I’ve achieved and what I do, I wouldn’t say I’m quite at the point where I can say I’ve made enough money to say I made it,” she says.

“I want to be at the point where I feel like I made it, that I made it by doing what I love doing, and also being able to kind of pass that on to the next generation, which is my daughter, and maybe her understanding that the future is different because of what I’ve been doing, and I’ve been trying to do for a long time now,” she adds.

I’m writing this interview on the day that a woman just returned from a space mission around the moon. I’ve no doubt that by the time Linamägi’s daughter grows up, the opportunities will look a lot different because of the women who went before her. Linamägi’s dream will come true.

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MOVES

Äio also named Matthew Ottaway as head of sales, bringing over 20 years of global experience across personal care, food, and life sciences, including senior leadership roles with full P&L responsibility and building high-performing commercial teams across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and beyond. The firm also said, the first consumer product made with its raw material hit the shelves in collaboration with the Estonian brand Tilk.

INNOVATION

Spiral Hydrogen said that over the course of the next 2 years it will be building a 100kW bubble-free electrolyzer pilot at the Port of Rotterdam together with SwitcH2 Offshore, an offshore ammonia scale-up.

“It is crazy to think that less than two years ago, all we had was an idea and a garage. This is the magic of startups: with the right effort and partners, anything is possible,” the team said in their Linkedin post.

NORDIC NEIGHBOURS

Slush survey of Finnish founders revealed that 56% believe the local mindset must change, and over half have considered relocating. This "relocation urge" signals an opportunity for Estonia, as Finns lobby for reforms - like taxing stock options only upon realisation - that are already cornerstones of our model.

While Finland boasts a legacy of unicorns like Supercell, their founders’ plea for media to better celebrate risk and failure reinforces our mission here at Fomo.Observer. It’s a stark reminder that while the "marriage" of a deal is brokered in the backrooms, the long-term survival of a hub depends on the "unvarnished truth" of its business environment.

DEADLINE

April 15: Latitude59 pitching competition.

Have a great week, everyone!

“At the stage where we invest, the nature of the startup is much more important than the business,” says Lauri Antalainen, President of Estonian Business Angels Network (EstBAN).

No aspiring entrepreneur ever glows with as much radiance as on the day they are handed a cheque almost as big as they are, with a few lovely zeroes written across its front. This Hollywood game-show flair is part of the act, helping to gather crowds in the final hours of conferences.

In reality, these competitions are marketing events designed to bring attention to all parties involved — a process Madis Lehtmets, managing director of EstVCA, calls “completely logical”.

The hunger games of funding

Despite the bright lights, the idea that winners receive actual cheques is a fantasy. It’s an investment like any other, but it looks different. A bit like a scene from The Hunger Games, where mentors scramble to convince wealthy sponsors to send life-saving gifts to contestants — only in this case, the contestant is trying to scale a deep-tech app.

Not everything is agreed upon two months before the event when we meet with Jana Saastamoinen, managing director of EstBAN. “The negotiations are ongoing,” she says. “We’ve promised up to €300,000 between the three BANs, but how much each BAN’s angels will contribute will be determined by the day of the finals”. This inherent uncertainty is why PR materials are deliberately vague.

Three top performers, post-win

Fractory (2018). Since its €170K win, Fractory has raised over €15 million and has reported an annual turnover of over €10 million since 2022.

Cino (2023). After winning a €500K syndicate, the bill-splitting startup parlayed that visibility into a €3.5 million seed round led by Balderton Capital.

ÄIO Tech (2023) Despite receiving the smallest split of the record 2023 prize (€150K), ÄIO utilised the credibility to raise €5.6m by early 2025.

Lessons from the North

The caution is built into the competition model based on historical lessons. In the early years of the Slush pitching competition, some winning startups famously turned down investment offers after the cameras stopped rolling.

The resulting PR nightmare taught regional organisers —including those at Latitude59 — a harsh lesson: the ‘marriage’ must be brokered before the wedding ceremony.

To avoid such public fallout, today’s organisers work to ensure that startups agree to the terms of the investment deal (a term sheet in industry slang) before any winner is announced. “You can’t announce a winner and then later find out that they actually had completely different term sheets in mind,” Antalainen notes.

However, the unvarnished truth includes the friction of the aftermath: Not all competitions are created equal. A Startup Fair 2025 pitching competition in Lithuania promised tens of millions in prizes — more than any fund in the country could invest, as an investor pointed out. We are looking closely for the results.

Networks perform “at least the bare minimum” due diligence before the event, but the heavy lifting of formalising equity and investment vehicles happens in the weeks following the show. It will likely take many months before your winnings hit the account,

While success stories like Nanordica Medical used their €150,000 ‘win’ to secure major grants and complete clinical trials, others face harsher realities. Ukrainian startup Ender Turing received €250,000 at Latitude59, but unfortunately, due to the war's impact on the business, it had to rebuild.

The reality check: When the "Winner’s curse" hits

VideoCV.io (2019). Secured €225K syndicate; struggled against integrated HR giants. Founders recently announced a wind-down.

Vumonic Datalabs (2021) €150K winner. 2025 revenues of Estonian mother company remained at €76K against a €185K loss; currently a niche play in India.

Zelos Team Management (2019). Won €250K syndicate. Despite a high-rated app, it has remained in a "scrappy" seed stage for 7 years without broader market capture.

Looking ahead

For those seeking to navigate this gauntlet, the path to the 2026 ‘New Nordics’ prize follows a strict, non-negotiable timeline:

• April 15: Deadline for submissions.

• April 29: Announcement of the Top 30 companies.

• May 4-8: The crucial semi-finals.

• May 21-22: The final show at Latitude59’s steampunk-inspired Tallinn Creative Hub.

As Antalainen points out, even a win doesn’t guarantee universal backing; typically, ten to fifteen percent of investors in a syndicate will still choose not to follow the lead into the deal. In this world, the pitch gets you the meeting.
* * *
Editor’s note: The ‘backroom’ negotiations mentioned in this piece are the gold standard of professional startup competitions. By agreeing to term sheets in the days before the finals, Latitude59 ensures that the ‘Hollywood moment’ on stage is backed by real commitment — not just a symbolic gesture.

Handhold is on a mission to end the era of the sales pitch. Humans should only step into a sales conversation when the AI has already done the heavy lifting.

The company announced today that it has closed a €3 million seed round to accelerate growth. The round was led by Entourage Capital, with the likes of Markus Villig (Bolt) and Janer Gorohhov (Veriff) joining the cap table.

Efficiency first

Handhold CEO Georg Vooglaid lived that reality while leading revenue at Passbase. He found that while every customer wants a 24/7 personal handler, the math simply doesn’t add up for anyone but the biggest spenders.

“With our biggest client, I was available on WhatsApp 24/7,” Vooglaid recalls. “We would’ve liked to give that level of attention to every customer, but there was no way we could afford to staff it.”

By using AI agents, Handhold is essentially “downloading” that high-level expertise into a digital account manager that never sleeps, speaks every language, and - crucially - doesn’t increase the company’s headcount.

The end of the “bad-fit” demo

The platform isn’t just a chatbot; it’s a three-pronged system designed to make products “sell themselves”:

• The Qualifier: Identifies who is serious and who is just kicking tires.

• The Voice Agent: Runs personalized demos based on the prospect’s actual problems.

• The Navigator: Sits inside the app to ensure the user actually knows how to use what they just bought.

Handhold said the results are already showing up in the data. Parim, a workforce management firm, saw a 60% drop in bad-fit demos since letting Handhold’s agents take the lead. This allows human sales teams to stop acting like “automated” presenters and start acting like strategic partners for enterprise-level deals.

With a six-figure ARR run rate achieved only months after their soft launch, the market seems to agree: if a machine can explain it better, faster, and at 3:00 AM, why wait for a human?

Drawing from his journey - from a four-person team living in a house to running a global firm with $535 million in funding - Cunningham outlined a tactical playbook for winning on social media in 2026.

Here are the key takeaways from his “ClickUp on Stage” address:

1. Master Your “True” ICP

Cunningham argued that most companies fail because they only know their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) on paper.

• The Advice: Go beyond basic demographics like age and gender.

“I mean you really need to know your ideal customer profile... interview them, talk to them. Once a week, I speak to somebody—might be a customer, might be a potential customer. I take a 20-minute call... and I’m just asking them things: What do you watch on social? What do you learn from? What makes you laugh?”

2. Follow the “Rule of Three” Before You Post

Your content must serve a specific purpose for the viewer, not the brand’s ego.

• The Advice: Ensure every post does one of three things: Adds Value, Teaches Something, or Makes Them Feel Something (ideally, laughter).

“Most people just post to post... ‘Here’s an image of our team.’ No one cares. They don’t. Especially if you’re trying to reach new people”.

3. “Stop Talking About Your Product”

Cunningham insists that constant selling is the fastest way to be ignored.

• The Advice: Build trust by becoming a thought-leader first. If you teach someone how to be better at their job, they will naturally look to your software when it’s time to buy.

“I have millions of followers now because I don’t talk about the product... If you keep talking about your product, it’ll never go viral, no one will care, and no one will share it”.

4. Build a “UGC Machine”

Authenticity cannot be faked through a corporate brief.

• The Advice: Hire creators, but don’t over-manage them. Let them learn the product and talk about it naturally.

“People can feel if something’s fake. They’re done... Reach out to this creator. Say, ‘Hey, let me train you. Let me help you.’ Let them make the video natural”.

5. Utilize “Internal Influencers” on LinkedIn

Building a brand page from scratch is difficult; leveraging human faces is more effective.

• The Advice: Pick 4–5 key leaders within your company (CEO, CFO, COO) and create content for them that focuses on real business situations.

“What is more valuable for you: Hearing someone brag about themselves... or just saying, ‘Hey today, this is a conversation I had with my CEO. This is what happened.’... Get more real on your LinkedIn”.

6. The “ABCD” Formula for Short-Form Video

Cunningham uses a systematic approach to finding viral hits on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels.

• A: Adopt a Winner. Post for 30–50 days, find the one video that outperforms, and double down on that style.

• B: Better. Innovate on what has already been done or copy successful formats with your own twist.

• C: Capitalize on Trends. Jump on trends when they are hot, but don’t let them be your only content.

• D: Differential/Unconventional. Experiment with “random” ideas that break the generic mold.

7. Human-Guided AI Content

While ClickUp uses AI tools like Claude for copywriting and brainstorming, Cunningham warns against “lazy” AI content.

• The Advice: Use AI to remove “busy work” (like drafting social copy from meeting notes), but keep a human in the loop for the final script and performance.

“I don’t like watching AI content... Right now, people want real... Humans have to guide it. You can’t just lean on AI to make the script. You can’t just lean on AI to build the video”.

Although we are focusing on Estonia, we also shared a few more stories from around the world — a bit like a glimpse of foreign news in local newspapers.

I met Chris Cunningham, one of the first members of ClickUp, to get a glimpse of the backstory of this Silicon Valley unicorn. We met a few hours before his speech at TechChill the other week, and, listening to him on stage later, presenting the social media strategies for 2026, I thought back to the interview and realised we had not even mentioned marketing and advertising a word during our discussion.

Fiona wrote up the story of the 14-year-old edtech founder from Kosovo, who is already creating some nice FOMO on social media.

FUNDING

Turkish-founded, Estonia-registered, life sciences compliance startup Validfor has raised $1.2 million in a pre-seed round led by DOMiNO Ventures, to modernise validation processes across pharma, biotech, and medtech.

More locally, Pickmybrain.com, a Tallinn-based startup building AI-powered digital “brains” for celebrities, experts, and public figures, raised a €1.8 million pre-seed round to fuel its growth.

MOVES

Former Beamline and Prototron CEO Jana Budkovskaja joined BSV Ventures as a Partner, becoming part of a tiny tribe of Estonian female partners at venture funds.

The new EstBAN board now includes Lauri Antalainen, Jan Lätt, Martin Gorosko, Jana Budkovskaja, Olga Lustsik, Aleksander Tõnnisson, and Peeter P. Mõtsküla. Lauri, Jan, and Martin were elected for another term, and Peeter is a new board member. EstBAN awarded Jana the “Lead Investor of the Year” title.

Sergei Anikin (ex-Pipedrive) left Bolt after running their engineering for just 5 months and set up his own AI consultancy Kodulabor.ai.

The Balkan teenager told Degeler he had been coding since he was seven years old. “I was always the curious kid who asked the teacher never-ending questions. I was always the kid who wanted to solve problems, not just sit in the classroom,” Krasniqi told the audience.

With a dream of “making people’s lives better” and wanting to be known as “the guy who changed education, 20 years from now,” Krasniqi told us he was really good at maths and had been programming in his bedroom when he decided to build an AI-powered operating system for schools, Mindloop.

“Some of my peers play football or watch movies in their free time. But all the free time that I have, because I love the journey and I’m not doing it just to build a startup, I use to build – weekends, after school, up until night,” he said.

Krasniqi had actually emailed TechChill the previous year, as a thirteen-year-old, to see if he could attend the conference; the email was displayed on the very stage he was sitting on a year later, as he told his story.

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When asked if he always had the ambition to become an entrepreneur, he replied, “I believe if the goal, before having a great problem to solve, is just to be an entrepreneur, it’s wrong. It should come naturally. I didn’t say, ‘I want to start a company,’ but I had a problem around me, and I thought the best way to solve this problem was to create a company.”

The company

MindLoop is an AI-powered operating system for schools, built on top of existing LMS (learning management systems). The main focus is to create personalised content for each student, while keeping teachers in control. It claims to save teachers 10+ hours per week on lesson planning. The system should easily plug into the school’s existing curriculum.

MindLoop is currently in the pilot stage, and Krasniqi noted that some regions were slower to adopt the pilots due to regulations, particularly in Europe.

To date, he has not raised any capital and said he will consider that after the pilot stage to scale and build a team.

Going it alone

Krasniqi told us that his age limits his ability to join some startup programs and opportunities for founders, but he accepts that he can’t change that and is happy to bootstrap and build his company as a solo founder.

“What can’t a solo founder do these days? You have powerful tools, so you can just go out and build. Until the validation stage, I don’t believe you essentially need a co‑founder,” he said.

Do what you love

So how did his parents take it when he said he wanted to start his own company? His father is a professor of entrepreneurship, so naturally, you’d expect this conversation to go well.

“My parents were a bit surprised, of course, but they are supportive all the time in all the decisions I make and what career I want to pursue. That really helps me. They didn’t give any direct advice; they just said, ‘Do what you love,” she said.

If you are spending every waking hour outside of your school activities building a startup, then that's doing what you love, right?!

“It’s the impact – making people’s lives better. It’s a great feeling to see that your work is valued so much that it puts a smile on people’s faces. That’s why I believe every entrepreneur keeps going,” says Krasniqi.

To all the young readers out there - you don’t need to move to Kosovo to launch your company. Yes, the youngest-ever member of the Estonian Founder Society joined when he turned 18, but, for example, the Estonian student firm program is a great first step into entrepreneurship, and one can launch a mini version of a student firm in 7th to 9th grade, starting at age 13 or 14.

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European leaders weren’t even consulted ahead of the American-Israeli joint attack on Iran that began this February, and which has rattled energy markets.

Oil and gas remain the engines of the global economy, with much of it coming from the Middle East. Major producers such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, and Iran export oil and gas via the Strait of Hormuz. It’s the only sea passage from the Persian Gulf to the open ocean.

Around 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) passes through the Strait.

Since the war began, Iran has blocked passage of ships through the Strait, which at its narrowest point is only 33 km wide. Closing the Strait is illegal under international law, but because of Iran’s coastal position, it can easily choke the flow of ships with threats of missiles and underwater mines. Shipowners, naturally, are not risking their tankers’ destruction or the lives of crews. The region’s oil and gas are stuck with few options.

Oil prices have risen by over 50% in Europe and the US since the outbreak of the war.

Natural gas prices are up a whopping 70% in Europe. However, natural gas prices in the US are actually down 1%. More on this in a moment.

Spain, Italy, Germany, and Belgium are highly dependent on oil and gas in their total energy consumption. To make matters worse, they import almost all of it.

In other words, Europe is highly exposed to the risks of both high prices and supply shocks.

Check out these two charts from JP Morgan. One chart shows a country’s use of oil as a share of its total energy consumption (x-axis) and how much of that oil is imported (y-axis). The other chart does the same, but for gas.

The most vulnerable countries are towards the upper right.

Don’t be fooled by all the social media posts celebrating Spain’s energy independence, driven by its extensive green electricity. These posts are incomplete. Electricity is just one portion of total energy consumption. While Spain’s electricity is indeed mostly green, the majority of the country’s overall energy consumption, which includes transportation, heating, and manufacturing, still relies heavily on oil and gas. Therefore, Spain’s total energy consumption is still 65% reliant on oil and gas, both of which are imported. A far cry from energy independence.

The US, conversely, is a net exporter of oil and gas. And, as mentioned earlier, US natural gas prices are down 1% since the war began. The US produces its own gas and consumes it locally, making the nation less vulnerable to supply shocks. In fact, most gas across the world is consumed where it’s produced, making prices local. LNG, the gas shipped globally after a complex process of liquefaction, is only 14% of the world’s gas. As Europe isn’t a major gas producer, it needs to import LNG at higher global prices.

If the war persists, inflation could again become a problem in Europe. Oil and gas are major cost components in manufacturing, transportation, heating, plastics for medical supplies, and fertilizers for food, all of which push up the final price of goods. Oil and gas also feed into higher electricity prices on cloudy and windless days when there’s no solar or wind energy production (see my Fomo.Observer article from Feb 9 on how electricity prices are set).

Europe’s economic growth has lagged the US for years, with giant Germany stuck in a rut for the last three. The US’s cheaper natural gas will make it even more cost-competitive vs Europe.

Once the war ends, Europe might be stuck with higher permanent costs. Iran may apply tolls to all ships crossing the Strait going forward. A 10% toll on the total cargo value has been discussed, a cost the final consumer would likely bear.

There’s a common saying, “a war is ‘easy’ to start but very difficult to end”, and it’s not clear where this conflict goes from here.

Iran and Israel’s fight is existential, meaning they can withstand a longer and more painful war than the West. The US’s goal, although not fully clear, is definitely not about survival. The objectives of Israel and the US are misaligned. The US has likely lost control of this war, even if it declares “victory” and exits the conflict on the basis of some vaguely defined achievement. Iran and Israel will ultimately decide how this war ends.

Despite the US’s stronger energy position, Trump is not immune. Unlike natural gas, oil prices are global. Oil can be shipped around the world and sold to the highest-paying global buyer. Around 75% of global oil trade is maritime compared with just 14% for natural gas. Consequently, this affects petrol prices for US drivers. Americans love their big, petrol-guzzling cars. Therefore, high prices at the pump could make voters turn against Trump’s Republican Party ahead of November’s midterm elections. Trump is keenly aware of this, and his tolerance for a long war is low.

If the US exits the war and leaves Europe to deal with the mess, Europe can emphatically say, “But he started it!”

P.S. Geopolitical events underscore the vital importance of predictable business costs to stay competitive. If your company is uncomfortably exposed to gas, electricity, or oil prices, a long-term hedging strategy could help reduce cash flow volatility. At TriHeritage we offer advisory services and can help you plan a strategy. Reach out to me.

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Alejandro Jimenez is Co-founder & Managing Partner at TriHeritage Global Capital, an Estonia-based firm providing loans to small and midsize companies across the EU. Previously, Alejandro was a partner in New York and Geneva at J.P. Morgan, the world’s largest financial institution. He also ran the energy trading desk at Enefit and managed sustainable investment portfolios at Grunfin.

The most common response is also the most convenient one.

At this stage, you just need to hire the best people. It’s too early to think about diversity.

I have heard some version of that sentence for years, and every time I hear it, I wonder how so many otherwise intelligent people can say it with a straight face.

Of course you should hire the best people. Who exactly is arguing for hiring the mediocre? But that line often disguises something much less noble than meritocracy. It usually means: hire the people who feel familiar to you. That may feel efficient. It may even feel rational. But it is not the same thing as “best.”

And more importantly, it is not the same thing as building a good company.

I’ve spent years trying to understand what the diversity problem in tech actually is. Why do so few women or people from other minority groups become venture-backed founders? Why do so many early teams still look like clones of each other, and why do we keep acting as if that is not only normal, but somehow optimal?

The numbers are well known by now, and they remain embarrassing. Diverse founding teams still receive a tiny fraction of venture funding, despite repeated evidence that they can outperform on capital efficiency and revenue generation. The gap is not due to lack of capability. It is due to what we repeatedly decide to notice, trust, and reward.

That last part matters more than people admit. Because what gets framed as “the best person” is rarely an objective conclusion. It is often a social one.

No diversity strategy needed

When I started building my own team, I found myself thinking about all of this whilst we had to move super fast.

We did not sit down with a performative diversity strategy. There was no quota chart. No grand announcement about building the future of inclusive work. We hired using a far more scientific method: vibe check, actual skills, grit, and work ethic - the best candidate for the role. That’s it.

And somehow, by complete miracle, or perhaps by simply not being weirdly narrow in our definition of talent, we ended up with a team that is genuinely quite diverse. Different personalities, ages, cultures, work histories, ways of approaching problems. Some are parents. Some have cats. Some come from very different technical or commercial contexts. Some see structure first, others see possibilities, some want to mitigate disaster, which is also a useful trait in moderation.

What we have already seen from this is not a moral lesson. It is not an ESG talking point. It is not a nice story to tell at a panel discussion while everyone nods politely.

It is simply useful.

We are shipping fast. Solutions are coming from all angles. People catch what others miss. The conversations are richer because they are not all running on the same assumptions. There is less blind agreement and more constructive tension. It is for sure more productive than building an echo chamber and calling it alignment.

That word alignment gets abused a lot in startup land. Alignment is not the same as sameness. Sameness is easy, it feels smooth. Sameness also means everyone is likely to miss the same thing at the same time.

What makes this especially frustrating is that the evidence for the value of diversity is not exactly obscure. We are not dealing with some fringe theory cooked up by people who dislike code and protein shakes. There is a long body of research showing that teams with greater diversity, whether in background, cognitive style, experience, or leadership composition tend to perform better on complex problem-solving and, in many cases, financially as well.

McKinsey has been publishing on the link between diversity and business performance for years. BCG has found that women-founded startups can generate significantly more revenue per dollar invested. First Round reported that companies with at least one female founder in their portfolio outperformed all-male teams by a wide margin. Even if one wants to be skeptical of any single report, the broader pattern is hard to ignore unless one is deeply committed to not noticing things.

And yet, many people do exactly that.

The resistance

What fascinates me about the resistance is that it reminds me of something I’ve been reading recently: Meet the Neighbors by Brandon Keim. It is a book about animal minds and about the long, strange history of humans refusing to accept that other animals might have inner lives, feelings, intelligence, and forms of consciousness.

For centuries, a huge part of science was spent trying to prove that animals were basically objects. Descartes famously described them as automata: complex machines without real thought or feeling. This idea lingered in different forms for an absurdly long time, even when observation repeatedly suggested otherwise.

Animals solved problems, remembered things, formed bonds, grieved losses, played games, navigated social hierarchies, adapted, improvised, and showed signs of awareness that were impossible to dismiss if you actually looked. But rather than update the worldview, the worldview kept trying to force the evidence back into the old frame.

That, to me, is one of the most revealing things about human systems: we are astonishingly good at preserving a belief long after reality has started mocking it.

When the evidence didn’t fit, people did not always conclude that the theory was wrong. They often concluded that the evidence had been misunderstood.

There is something uncomfortably familiar in that.

The startup world often behaves in much the same way. We say we want the best people. We say we care about outcomes. We say we are rational and data-driven and obsessed with performance. Then we keep rewarding the same narrow founder profile, keep building the same kinds of early teams, keep acting surprised that talent from outside that mold is “hard to find,” and keep defending a culture that often excludes exactly the people who would make the system stronger.

It is not that the evidence is absent. It is that the frame is stubborn.

And once you notice that, the 996 conversation starts to look similarly absurd.

Expensive chaos

I believe in urgency and startup speed. I believe there are seasons where everyone stretches because the opportunity is real and the timing matters. I have no romantic attachment to a soft, slow, “let’s all close the laptop at four and water the herbs” version of startup life. Sometimes you do have to push. Sometimes the week is intense. The launch does not care that you wanted a balanced Thursday.

But there is a difference between intensity and ideology.

The cult of 996 treats exhaustion as a proxy for commitment. It assumes that if you are not visibly overworked, you must not be serious enough. This is one of those ideas that sounds hardcore and disciplined until you actually build things for long enough to realise how expensive fatigue becomes.

Tired people make mistakes. Not interesting, innovative mistakes. Not brave, ambitious mistakes. Usually boring, avoidable mistakes. They forget something obvious. They misread a requirement. They ship something fragile. They miss a signal in a customer conversation. They make a call they would not have made with a clear head. And then everyone spends three times as long fixing what should not have broken in the first place. That is not high performance, that is just expensive chaos with better branding.

This is also where diversity and work culture are not separate conversations at all. A culture built around constant overextension naturally filters for a very specific kind of person: usually someone with fewer outside obligations, more structural support, and a life stage that allows work to consume everything else. That does not make them better. It makes them more compatible with one narrow model of work.

If your company can only function for people whose life outside work can be suspended indefinitely, then your culture is not rigorous. It is brittle.

Leaking talent

Even if you ignore all of the moral or social arguments, it becomes a practical hiring problem very quickly. Founders often underestimate how visible an early team becomes. If everyone in the company looks the same, talks the same, and seems to come from the same lane, strong candidates notice. I have seen it happen in previous companies: qualified people come in, take one look around, and quietly conclude that this place was not built with them in mind. They do not storm out. They do not make speeches. They just leave.

That is not because they are delicate. It is because they can read a room.

The irony, of course, is that many founders who claim they are “just hiring the best” are unknowingly constraining themselves through their own networks. If it is narrow, your candidate pool will be narrow. If your warm intros all come from the same demographic and professional bubble, your team will eventually reflect it and you will convince yourself that the market simply contains no one else. It does. You just never built the bridges.

This is one of the reasons founders need to be more honest about what culture signals from a distance. What do your values look like to someone who doesn’t know you? What kind of people do you celebrate? Who gets airtime? What does your team photo communicate before anyone has spoken to you?

If the answer is “a very specific type of person keeps being rewarded here,” then you should not be surprised when the talent pool self-selects accordingly.

I saw the opposite of this at scale during my time at Deel. That company was not a theory. It was thousands of people from over a hundred countries, all bringing different assumptions, contexts, and ways of working into the same machine. Was it always simple? Of course not. Diverse teams are not easier. They are better. They force more explicit communication. They surface edge cases. They challenge lazy assumptions. They make you explain what you mean instead of nodding along because everyone already thinks the same way.

And in a company trying to do something genuinely difficult, that is invaluable.

This is also why I find the framing of diversity as somehow opposed to excellence so maddening. It suggests a false choice that simply does not exist. I did not hire people because of their gender, ethnicity, or life story. I hired the best people I could find. Somehow, rather shockingly, the best people were not all identical.

That should not be a radical statement. It should be obvious. But startup culture has spent so long overfitting to a single founder and team archetype that it now treats any deviation from that pattern as suspicious, political, or somehow unserious.

And no, before anyone starts frothing at the mouth, this is not an anti-white-man manifesto. I gave birth to a white man. One, unsurprisingly, is my father. I also live with one. All excellent men. The point is not that white men are the problem. The point is that they are not the only solution.

At some point, the conversation needs to mature beyond outrage and slogans. Diversity is not a luxury for later. It is not a checkbox. It is not a PR exercise. It is one of the most practical advantages an early-stage team can have when trying to build something ambitious, resilient, and original.

Imagine what could happen if startups are built by people who share values but not necessarily backgrounds. People who challenge each other without pulling in different directions. People who bring different lenses to the same mission. People who can move fast without making tired, stupid mistakes because they have mistaken self-neglect for excellence.

If that sounds less glamorous than the mythology of the all-night founder sprint, so be it. I am not trying to build a mythology. I am trying to build a company.

And from what I’ve seen so far, the fastest way to build blind is still to fill the room with people who all see the world exactly the same way.

The proposal, announced by CEO Kustas Kõiv, aims to acquire 100% of the company’s shares. This move would allow long-time investors — including those from the Funderbeam crowdfunding platform — to exit their positions as the company pivots away from the aggressive scaling typical of the venture-backed world.

A Pivot to Pragmatism

Founded with the ambition to build a scalable software and payment platform for vehicle-related services, Snabb raised capital across five funding rounds. However, the anticipated expansion did not materialise as planned.

In 2022, the leadership made a strategic decision to restructure. “Snabb has reached a stage of development where the business model and growth profile have significantly changed compared to the earlier startup phase,” Kõiv said in a statement.

“In 2022, we made the decision with management to rebuild the company into a parking operator.”

The shift stabilised the firm’s balance sheet. In 2025, Snabb OÜ reported revenues of around 10 million euros and operating profit (EBITDA) of 480,000 euros. This compares to more profitable larger rival Europark, whose annual revenues are at around 20 million.

Bridging the Valuation Gap

The buyout offer highlights a common friction point in the “new economy”: the disparity between peak startup valuations and the multiples used in traditional industries.

Kõiv noted that while a valuation of approximately 6x EBITDA is standard in the parking industry, it remains “significantly below” the valuation set at the company’s final funding round. Despite this, management decided to act in response to requests from shareholders seeking liquidity.

“Even taking into account optimistic growth assumptions for the coming years, reaching the price level of the last financing round would require years of successful operation,” Kõiv explained.

Terms of the Exit

Under the proposed terms, capital will be returned to investors in accordance with existing shareholder agreements. Specifically, the company intends to return the capital raised via Funderbeam in full.

If approved, Snabb will transition to full ownership by its founders and management. While it will cease to function as a venture-backed startup seeking hyper-growth, it remains the fastest-growing parking operator in the Baltics, maintaining its mobile application for parking, car washes, and EV charging.

In an interview on the sidelines of TechChill in Riga, Chris Cunningham — ClickUp’s third member — detailed the journey from a Silicon Valley-style incubator house to a global enterprise, while admitting that the Baltics remain a largely untapped market for the platform.

The “One Place” Philosophy

The core narrative of ClickUp has always been about consolidation. While competitors focused on niche functions, ClickUp launched with an aggressive strategy to be the “one app to replace them all.”

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“When you wake up in the morning, you have your email, you have your calendar, your tasks, your docs, your goals,” Cunningham explained. “ClickUp solves that problem by putting all your work in one place... rather than having to go log into Notion for your docs or Miro for your whiteboards.”

This horizontal approach was a calculated risk. By building a tool that is “completely customisable,” the company bet that users would prefer a platform that adapts to their specific workflows rather than being forced into a rigid structure.

Taking on the Giants

The transition from a newcomer to a market leader has placed ClickUp in direct competition with the oldest names in software.

“It feels like today we’re competing against everybody,” Cunningham noted, citing Microsoft, Monday.com, Jira, and Asana as primary rivals. Despite being the “new” player in a space where some competitors have existed for decades, ClickUp relies on speed and aggressive marketing to gain ground.

The rivalry is even reflected in the company’s internal culture. “I made a commercial called ‘Jira Sucks.’ I’m sure they probably don’t love me too much,” Cunningham quipped, adding that they also maintain a firm “No Windows” stance within parts of their creative team to stay aligned with modern SaaS workflows.

Baltic Expansion: A “Work to Do”

Despite ClickUp’s global footprint and offices in London and Dublin, the Baltics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—represent a unique challenge.

• Current Adoption: Cunningham admitted that usage in the region is “not a ton, not as much as I’d like.”

• The Competitor to Beat: In local conversations, Jira remains the dominant tool, particularly for engineering teams.
  

  There’s definitely work to do on my end,” Cunningham said. “I want to learn, I want to understand what people are looking for... I want to figure out how to win here.”

Scaling Without Losing the Soul

The company’s growth from three people to 1,300 has not been without growing pains. One of the most significant lessons Cunningham shared was the danger of hiring “big tech” veterans too early in the scale-up phase.

“When you get some funding, you’re going to want to think, ‘Oh, let’s go hire from Netflix and from Oracle.’ They’re not the best people in my opinion because they’ve already made a lot of money... I think you still need to find scrappy people.”

As ClickUp prepares for its next phase, the focus remains on finding “hungry” talent who can maintain the high-energy culture that started in that 2017 startup house.

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So when I was in Riga for TechChill, I knew I had to sit down with Rolands Mesters — whom I’ve known since trying to assist with some aspects of Nordigen’s successful exit to GoCardless — to chat about chatting and to find out how he got there and what is different the second time around.

As he’s one of the easiest people to talk to in the ecosystem (he says, “my superpower is not coding, it’s getting others to work with me”), we of course also detoured to topics as exotic as the Elixir programming language and how his mom coded a website on Lovable (and he himself a game for his kid’s first grade class). His mom is actually a big part of his journey – both his parents were entrepreneurs, and dinner table conversation was often about building things. He did start with an obligatory stint in the corporate world, but got his revenge when he founded a design agency and, knowing corporate budgets, charged more than he would have previously thought imaginable.

Rolands credits Anna Andersone with his first job in startups that set him on his current path. I also had the pleasure of meeting Anna at the Estonian embassy in Riga, and heard her being called ‘The Mother of Latvian Startup Ecosystem’, so it’s unsurprising that he’s managed to maintain the momentum to where he is now.

After that, Rolands started Nordigen together with Roberts Bernans, his classmate from the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. By the time it was acquired by GoCardless in 2022, in one of the biggest Fintech exits in Latvia, from which multiple Estonian VC funds also benefited, Nordigen’s API connected to 2,300+ banks across the UK and Europe and served fintech companies and developers in 31 countries. Rolands brought his Latvian team along, and by now, GoCardless has grown to 180 people in Riga, a legacy he’s rightfully very proud of. He is stubbornly patriotic – both Nordigen and BirdyChat are established in Latvia, despite the fundraising and administrative challenges the local jurisdiction poses, which he hopes to help fix in the long run.

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He says that is one of the downsides of repeat entrepreneurship, “I had forgotten how hard the hard days are and romanticised the good days.” That was partly what drove him to leave GoCardless to establish Birdy with his school friend Martins Spilners, with whom he had been building things since they were kids – Martins started coding at the age of nine.

And in a beautiful bit of startup serendipity, where the right things happen at the right time, if you’re ready for them, his favourite programming language, Elixir, which, while quite exotic among other programmers, is not only the most AI-agent-friendly, but also best suited for creating chat apps. This is also why their eight-person team now includes an Estonian – the pool of Elixir developers in Latvia is simply too small. But Rolands can find positives even in that – he says they’re not competing with other startups for developers, and the language affinity self-selects for truly passionate and dedicated developers.

I would argue that, in addition to Rolands’ sunny personality and infectious enthusiasm, the superpower that makes him eminently investable is also his ability to spot revolutions. Nordigen took advantage of the open banking revolution, and Birdy is similarly taking advantage of European laws that require the biggest messaging apps to be interoperable with one another – you can chat with Birdy users directly from WhatsApp.

Leaving GoCardless to start BirdyChat, of course, also sent a very strong signal to VCs about his dedication and belief in the new opportunity. So when he posted on LinkedIn that he was working on something new, he was inundated with VC approaches. Rolands says the benefit of repeat entrepreneurship is that he gets to choose people he already knows and has invested in his company before. But also that people know his name, and it opens doors that were closed before. As he puts it, he’s “milking the second-time founder aura for all that it’s worth.” He says fundraising still wasn’t easy, VCs think everything that is truly new is crazy (can’t argue with that), but he did end up with quite a dream cap table.

For BirdyChat, the next challenge is to reach the kind of network density that would keep them on the front screens of smartphones everywhere, and, as a first step on that journey, they are inviting the Estonians in soon. I would definitely recommend that other founders sign up for the waitlist for a chance to follow Rolands’ example and use Birdy to manage their own fundraising chats, find ways to use those chats to improve their product, and use it as part of their fundraising wherever possible.

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So let me tell you the whole story of ours. The insane rebuild, the chaos, the wins, and why organising a hackathon was the single best thing we did this year (I know it’s only March). And I hope that after reading this, you’ll stop whatever you’re currently doing and go participate in one. Or even better, organise it yourself and invite us to co-organise it with you.

Before our first hackathon, we rebuilt everything in just a few weeks. But that’s another story.

Hackathon day

We reached out directly to over 500 people. More than 150 registered, and we had to stop the waitlist because we could only fit about 50. We already had 75 registered, and another 75 on the waitlist. Out of those, about 43 people actually came for a full 24 hours of building, and the gender balance was roughly 50/50, which I was very happy about.

We were the opening act. We gathered all the people and said, “Hey, this is Elnora. Here is your API key. You can use the CLI or MCP, which I built, or the regular UI, go and knock yourself out.”

While I was registering people on the platform and sorting out everyone’s API keys, Risto was checking the agent responses and behaviour as the first builders started testing Elnora, and found several bugs, like the agent truncating responses so the user could only see the top half of the protocol. He literally had to fix and deploy on the production platform at the same time when people were already on it. I wasn’t sure if we were going to make it, really. My heart wanted to jump out of my chest.

But we did. Elnora started sending out full responses, and builders loved the agent. It was just incredible.

The tracks

We had three tracks. Track A was to onboard a new cell line and use Elnora to generate a media composition that would maximise the delta, meaning the difference between how many cells you started with and how many you ended up with. We were using a bacterial cell line that’s one of the fastest growing on Earth; it doubles every 10 minutes, so you see results very quickly. The job was to use Elnora to generate lab protocols, send them to Monomer’s robotic lab, receive the results, feed them back to Elnora, and optimise. As many rounds as they could to get the best media composition.

Track B was to get a single cell on a well, which sounds trivial, but it’s not at all. You have a 96-well plate, and in every well, you want just one single cell, so you can start growing a colony; you don’t want two different cells as the starters of colonies. For this track, they used beads instead of actual cells to simplify the process.

Track C got a robotic arm and needed to program it to perform actual bench work: grab cell flasks from the incubator, place them on the bench, image them, change the media, passage the cells, and return them. Basically, automate an entire day of manual lab work.

Officially, Elnora was only part of Track A. But in the end, we had 6 teams out of 7 incorporate Elnora in their workflow, which was not something we expected at all.

The winning team

The winning team was a robotic arm team, and they built a whole closed loop. The robot took out the cells, imaged them, and confluency was at 70%, and sent that information to Elnora. Elnora said, “Looks like cells are ready for splitting. Here is a lab protocol for you to do that.” The robot goes, does the work, and puts the cells back.

Then Elnora says, “Okay, let’s take another look at those cells.” The robot takes them out, images them, and sends back: 5% confluence. Then Elnora says, “No, we can’t split those cells, but something seems off because we went from 70% to 5%, so we need to change something in the media.”

When I saw that demo, I was just grasping air. I could not believe it. The way they connected Elnora as an agent to the robot performing those lab protocols was just genius. It was so so so beautiful. I loved it so much. They were everyone’s favorite team, and they won.

Both Track A teams managed to increase the growth delta compared to the baseline media, which was the whole point. One of them also won the best demo award for building an app that anyone could scan a QR code to see the experiment results in real time.

One of those teams also ran Elnora and Claude side by side on the same task, and Elnora kicked Claude’s ass. Claude is my favorite, don’t get me wrong, but because Elnora has so many specialised tools and skills that Claude doesn’t have, it performs way better on science tasks. That was really cool to see.

Most Scientists Don’t Code

Many biologists who had never coded before came to the hackathon. We have a UI, but my favorite way to use Elnora is via the CLI. When biologists arrived, and I said, “Let’s start working on lab protocols,” they asked how. I explained that Elnora is a CLI tool, so you’d need another coding agent, such as Claude, Codex, or Gemini, to orchestrate it.

And people said they didn’t have a coding agent. I was shocked. How do you do your everyday job without one? I genuinely cannot remember life before coding agents. I use Claude for everything, and Elnora for science work. I just assumed everyone had Cursor, Codex, Gemini, or Claude. Totally wrong assumption. 90% of scientists at our hackathon had never coded and had no tools, let alone subscriptions.

Before I could even get them started on Elnora, I had to teach them the fundamentals first. What a terminal is, what VS Code is, what an API key is, and why you treat it like a secret. I love doing this because I’m an ex-scientist myself, and I understand exactly where they were coming from. But it was a wake-up call.

Then there was the communication gap. Using agents isn’t natural to humans. When I talk to my best friend Maria, I say, “Yesterday I went to a store, and I...” and she understands me immediately because she’s known me for 15 years, she has context. An AI agent straight out of the box doesn’t know you; it has exchanged a couple of words with you, and that’s it, no experience, no context. So you have to be very clear and straightforward. That’s a skill most people haven’t developed yet.

The biggest learning from the whole hackathon was that I’m living in a bubble, and a lot of people aren’t in the same bubble. I assumed the whole world keeps up with every new AI tool. They don’t. Two and a half years ago, I was that person too, a regular scientist sitting behind the bench all day doing traditional science in academia. The initial learning curve is sharp, but after a month or two, I was already at a top level. It’s not that I’m the smartest person on earth, definitely not, but I had an amazing teacher in Risto, and I read a lot. Every day, I try to read at least one blog post about agents or AI tooling, and when I find something interesting, I try to implement it immediately. That’s the fastest way to learn.

And now it’s my personal mission to help scientists start coding.

What we’re changing

The biggest product takeaway was clear: we need to eliminate the need for another coding agent to orchestrate Elnora. That was just too hard for participants. If 90% of your users don’t have a coding agent and have never used a terminal, you can’t make that a prerequisite. So that’s our number one focus now — making Elnora something anyone can use without needing to set up Claude or Cursor first.

We also got feature requests I didn’t think of myself. One person said, “Elnora, draw me a graph.” Elnora can’t draw, but it said, “I can’t do it, but I’ll give you code instead. If you copy-paste that code on that website, you’ll see my drawing.” The person did it, and it worked. I guess we are now teaching Elnora how to draw graphs.

Why you should organise a hackathon

Well, after you heard my story, do you still think that hackathons are for children? Let me tell you who the people were in the room going through all this I just shared with you.

Working professionals from pharmaceutical companies with hundreds of thousands of employees, scientists who have been running labs for 20 years, AI engineers, robotics people, people who code every day, and people who have never coded before. I’m 34, and most people I see at hackathons are around my age or older. These are people with real jobs and real expertise who came because they want to experience what it feels like to have completely free hands and a free mind to create anything.

What makes a hackathon special is exactly the mix. You get a bunch of people who are similar to you but also completely different at the same time, and you combine all that expertise into one team that in a regular environment would probably collapse, but in a hackathon environment is magnetic. People just pull toward each other and tackle problems together. It doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO, an associate, or an intern; everyone is mixed, there’s no space for ego, and the only rule is that there are no rules.

So why should you, as a company, organise one?

We rolled out a brand new version of Elnora days before the hackathon and gave it to real people who are not our friends, and watching how they actually use your product is worth more than months of internal testing. The day after our hackathon, our website views were 5-6 times higher than usual, all organic, all from real people. We had pharmaceutical companies in the room, and the conversation immediately turned into “hey, you just used Elnora successfully, what about rolling this out at your company?” Even though we weren’t actively recruiting, people reached out saying they wanted to work for us. And by organising together with Monomer Bio, we proved we can collaborate on shared projects with shared clients going forward.

You don’t need a massive budget or to be a big company. You need a real challenge from your work, not something made up; a venue with tables and good wifi; food and coffee for people who will stay overnight; and a group of curious people who want to build something together. Find a partner company that complements what you do, set up a Luma event, and market it hard. People’s attention spans are short, so you need to cast a wide net.

And if you want to organise a bio-hackathon, an AI hackathon, or anything where agents, science, and building things come together, reach out to me. I want to help you do it. I want to be there when your participants have that moment where they see something they built actually work, and they can’t believe it.

My best friend Maria texted me the other day saying that coding gives her higher dopamine than scrolling TikTok. You get addicted to it. It’s so rewarding. Go do it. If you don’t know how, participate in a hackathon, find people who know how to build agents and can teach you, and then you can do it too.

So hackathons are definitely not for children. They’re for people who are ready to build something that 24 hours ago was someone’s wildest dream.

Carmen Kivisild is CEO and co-founder of Elnora AI, building AI agents for preclinical lab protocol generation in pharma and life sciences. If you want to co-organise a hackathon or talk about agents for science, reach out at carmen.kivisild@elnora.ai.

Ybil, the only Estonian team among the 20 semi-finalists, joined the long list of Estonian winners, which includes names like Salesforge, Fleetfox, and Vocal Image.

The main award of the pitching competition went to Deep Space Energy, which creates nuclear batteries for space missions. It won €10,000 in cash, €5,000 in legal and tax advice from Sorainen, a Draper University scholarship worth $12,000, and a €1,000 gift card from Carguru.

“It was a positively contrarian decision, just because of the size of the ambition that the founder is tackling,” jury member Kadi-Ingrid Lilles, Partner at Iron Wolf Capital, said in a statement.

Other investment awards went to:

• Spotwise, the Latvia-based AI co-pilot for radio sales and analytics teams, received €200k investment by Outlast Fund as well as €100k investment by BADideas.fund.

• Helm X, the AI-powered industrial safety helmet with automatic data capture, won a €150k investment from the Buildit 5G Fund.

TechChill brought to Riga some 2,000 participants, 300+ startups, and 250+ investors from more than 40 countries.

TechChill has most recently held satellite events in Ukraine and previously in Italy. For the first time, the Baltic Startup Policy Forum was held in parallel to the event, where policy leaders from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania came together to discuss startup-enabling public policies. The event was joined by European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation, Ekaterina Zaharieva.

KÄRT SIILATS: The biggest FOMO in the Baltics?

How many apps from the Baltics can say they have a 50,000-person waitlist? BirdyChat does.

It is a chat app built for professional conversations, where you can reach people by email, not by phone number. Designed for focused, meaningful exchanges between managers, builders, and collaborators. I’ve tried it myself, and it is definitely worth the wait.

So when I was in Riga for TechChill, I knew I had to sit down with Rolands Mesters — whom I’ve known since trying to assist with some aspects of Nordigen’s successful exit to GoCardless — to chat about chatting and to find out how he got there and what is different the second time around.

As he’s one of the easiest people to talk to in the ecosystem (he says, “my superpower is not coding, it’s getting others to work with me”), we of course also detoured to topics as exotic as the Elixir programming language and how his mom coded a website on Lovable (and he himself a game for his kid’s first grade class).

His mom is actually a big part of his journey – both his parents were entrepreneurs, and dinner table conversation was often about building things. He did start with an obligatory stint in the corporate world, but got his revenge when he founded a design agency and, knowing corporate budgets, charged more than he would have previously thought imaginable.

Rolands credits Anna Andersone with his first job in startups that set him on his current path. I also had the pleasure of meeting Anna at the Estonian embassy in Riga, and heard her being called ‘The Mother of Latvian Startup Ecosystem’, so it’s unsurprising that he’s managed to maintain the momentum to where he is now.

After that, Rolands started Nordigen together with Roberts Bernans, his classmate from the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. By the time it was acquired by GoCardless in 2022, in one of the biggest Fintech exits in Latvia, from which multiple Estonian VC funds also benefited, Nordigen’s API connected to 2,300+ banks across the UK and Europe and served fintech companies and developers in 31 countries. Rolands brought his Latvian team along, and by now, GoCardless has grown to 180 people in Riga, a legacy he’s rightfully very proud of. He is stubbornly patriotic – both Nordigen and BirdyChat are established in Latvia, despite the fundraising and administrative challenges the local jurisdiction poses, which he hopes to help fix in the long run.

He says that is one of the downsides of repeat entrepreneurship, “I had forgotten how hard the hard days are and romanticised the good days.” That was partly what drove him to leave GoCardless to establish Birdy with his school friend Martins Spilners, with whom he had been building things since they were kids – Martins started coding at the age of nine.

And in a beautiful bit of startup serendipity, where the right things happen at the right time, if you’re ready for them, his favourite programming language, Elixir, which, while quite exotic among other programmers, is not only the most AI-agent-friendly, but also best suited for creating chat apps. This is also why their eight-person team now includes an Estonian – the pool of Elixir developers in Latvia is simply too small. But Rolands can find positives even in that – he says they’re not competing with other startups for developers, and the language affinity self-selects for truly passionate and dedicated developers.

I would argue that in addition to Rolands’s sunny personality and infectious enthusiasm, the superpower that makes him eminently investable is also his ability to spot revolutions. Nordigen took advantage of the open banking revolution and Birdy is similarly taking advantage of the European laws that force the biggest messaging apps to have interoperability with others – you can chat with Birdy users directly from your WhatsApp.

Leaving GoCardless to start BirdyChat, of course, also sent a very strong signal to VCs about his dedication and belief in the new opportunity. So when he posted on LinkedIn that he was working on something new, he was inundated with VC approaches. Rolands says the benefit of repeat entrepreneurship is that he gets to choose people he already knows and has invested in his company before. But also that people know his name, and it opens doors that were closed before. As he puts it, he’s “milking the second time founder aura for all that it’s worth.” He says fundraising still wasn’t easy, VCs think everything that is truly new is crazy (can’t argue with that), but he did end up with quite a dream cap table.

For BirdyChat, the next challenge is to reach the kind of network density that would keep them on the front screens of smartphones everywhere, and, as a first step on that journey, they are inviting the Estonians in soon. I would definitely recommend that other founders sign up for the waitlist for a chance to follow Rolands’ example and use Birdy to manage their own fundraising chats, find ways to use those chats to improve their product, and use it as part of their fundraising wherever possible.

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MOVES

Skeleton named Kimmo Rauma as an Independent Member of its Board of Directors as it continues to ramp up its manufacturing and engineering capabilities in Finland.

“Dr Rauma brings hands-on experience in scaling industrial technology businesses, building international footprints, and commercialising advanced electrification solutions,” Skeleton said in a statement.

THE END OF THE ROAD

Tuul Mobility OÜ, the e-scooter fleet that once stood as a national symbol of the micromobility boom, has officially filed for bankruptcy. The move comes after the company admitted it cannot meet an interest payment on its 10% bonds due this Sunday, March 29, 2026.

In a somber statement to the stock exchange, founder Kristjan Maruste addressed the collapse of the venture:

“I sincerely regret and apologise to investors that, despite our team’s efforts, we were unable to successfully complete this ride.”

The downfall of Tuul is a textbook case of market timing and shifting economic tides:

• The bond trap: Tuul raised expansion capital through a bond issuance in early 2022, right as the e-scooter hype peaked. However, aggressive oversupply and a sharp rise in interest rates soon turned the tide against the local player.

• Failed salvage operations: Late last year, Tuul attempted to stem its losses by selling its remaining hardware and intellectual property to the Latvian firm Ride SIA. Unfortunately, the proceeds from the sale fell short of covering the €3.25 million outstanding bond obligation.

• The comodule crisis: The original rescue plan relied on a sales process for the parent company, Comodule OÜ, which serves as the bond’s guarantor. When that sale failed to materialise, Comodule informed Tuul it could no longer support the interest payments from its regular cash flow, forcing Comodule itself into restructuring.

The story began nearly 20 years ago. After moving into a newly renovated office in Tallinn, Remmelg noticed the air felt heavy and stale despite the modern ventilation system humming in the background. The system was “static” — it blew air at a fixed interval, regardless of whether the room was packed with people or completely empty. He figured out how to build a solution, but never really got to it.

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Fast forward to a chance meeting at the Tartu Science Park incubator, where Remmelg found a team of engineers obsessed with the same inefficiency. Together, they launched Aerefy.

The pivot to “Air as a Service”

Aerefy’s core tech is a smart, cloud-connected valve that can be retrofitted into existing building ducts in under five minutes. It uses edge intelligence to monitor CO2 and pollutants, opening only when the air actually needs refreshing.

But the real disruption isn’t just the hardware; it’s the business model. Remmelg is moving the company away from traditional sales toward Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS). As he put it in an interview on the sidelines of TechChill:

“In today’s world, all things in the world are demand-based—you turn the tap on, water comes; you turn it off, it doesn’t come anymore. But ventilation is static, and we make it demand-based.”

By treating air like a utility, Aerefy removes the massive upfront investment (Capex) that usually kills green-tech adoption in the hospitality sector.

“We have sold them until now, but we are going to the market through a Hardware-as-a-Service model, where we put the devices up for free... and the hotel starts saving from the first month.”

The context: A serial founder enters a crowded ring

Who is Ivo Remmelg?

Remmelg isn’t a rookie founder; he is a true OG of the Estonian tech ecosystem.

• The Exits: He was the longtime CEO of Telegrupp and a major force behind Ridango, leading saw both through significant exits.

• The Angel: As President Emeritus of EstBAN (Estonian Business Angel Network) and a partner at Superhero Capital, he has invested in over 40 startups.

• The Mentor: He is a foundational figure at ESA BIC and Tehnopol, helping the next generation of Baltic founders scale.

The market: David vs. the HVAC Goliaths

Aerefy has entered the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and Smart Ventilation market—a sector expected to be worth $12 billion by 2026.

• The dominant players: The space is traditionally ruled by massive industrial conglomerates like Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Daikin. These giants focus almost exclusively on multimillion-dollar installations for new construction.

• The Aerefy edge: Most existing buildings (the “brownfield” market) are stuck with “dumb” ventilation. While the giants try to sell entire new systems, Aerefy sells a smart “brain” for the system the hotel already owns.

By combining Remmelg’s deep scaling experience with a HaaS model that delivers immediate ROI, Aerefy is positioning itself as a lean disruptor in a market of heavyweights.

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Addressing concerns about investing in the Baltic region due to its proximity to the conflict in Ukraine, Zaharieva framed the region’s resilience as a significant attraction for global capital, rather than a liability.

Resilience Over Risk

Commissioner Zaharieva, who hails from Bulgaria, acknowledged the shared challenges faced by Eastern member states, noting her own country’s proximity to the conflict (Crimea is “like 400 kilometers across our sea”). She argued that the region’s response to the crisis has established a new standard for the continent.

“We are not going to return to what it was before the war in Ukraine,” Zaharieva stated. “But [the Baltics] show how they can adapt very fast. They are an example for all the rest of Europe.”

She highlighted the EU’s direct support for frontline innovation, noting that “many, very, very, very good Ukrainian innovators” are being supported to continue their work despite the conflict. This initiative, she argued, signals to global investors that Europe protects its innovators regardless of geographic pressure.

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The European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund

To bridge the gap between early-stage success and global dominance, Zaharieva detailed the progress of the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund. This fund is designed to prevent European unicorns from relocating to the United States for late-stage capital, leveraging resources from the European Innovation Council to spur private-sector engagement.

•Targeting deep tech: The fund specifically targets “Scale,” not “Seed,” focusing on companies that have already proven their technical viability.

•Private sector catalyst: The goal is to motivate big corporations, foundations, and institutional investors to co-invest, creating a “leverage effect.”

•Market confidence: “I really believe in the market,” Zaharieva said. “The fund will show the market that it is profitable and a good investment to support our innovators.”

A unified frontier

The Commissioner concluded by emphasising that Europe’s strength lies in its predictability. In a period where major global powers face internal and external instability, the EU’s focus on the “28th regime” and a unified capital market provides a “safe and predictable” haven.

“The rest of the world wants to deal, wants to trade, wants to make business with the European Union,” she noted, pointing to a record number of free trade agreements concluded in the past year as evidence of the bloc’s growing influence as a stable global partner.

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Presenting a “sneak peek” into the 2025 data, Kadi-Ingrid Lilles of Iron Wolf Capital revealed that while deep tech companies make up only 13.5% of the total startup population, they accounted for 49.5% of all funding raised in 2025.

A record year for growth

The report, a collaborative effort by Iron Wolf Capital, Startup Estonia, and Startup Lithuania, highlights a resilient ecosystem that defies broader market trends. The full report is due to be released on April 15 at a conference of Resilience Media, but Lilles represented the first details at a side-event of TechChill.

Total enterprise value for the Baltic tech sector has tripled over the last five years, and total funding reached €662 million in 2025 — a €44 million increase over the previous year.

“Truly, it feels that we are entering the execution phase, where category winners are being built,” Lilles said, noting a 79% surge in Series A rounds compared to 2024.

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The rise of “Sovereign” clusters

The data identifies a clear trend toward specialisation rather than generalist growth. The region is now defined by several high-value “clusters”:

• Energy and B2B software: Each contributing over €2 billion in enterprise value.

• Robotics: A close third with €1.1 billion.

• Health Tech: Showing a massive 800% growth over the past five years.

A significant portion of the narrative focused on the “Security and Resilience” vertical. Despite many startups operating in “stealth mode” due to the sensitive nature of their work, the report identified 271 startups in this space, contributing more than 15% of total regional funding.

“A clear dual-use flywheel is emerging with verticals like energy security and robotics showing rapid growth, enabling the development of a modern defence stack indirectly through commercial deep tech, similar to Israel or Ukraine,” Lilles said.

Capital regionalisation: The retreat of US and Asian investors

In a notable shift in the geopolitical investment landscape, the report found that capital sources are becoming increasingly localised. Investment from US and Asian sources has declined significantly, while domestic Baltic investment has jumped by 240% over the last three years.

“Capital is regionalising for the better or for the worse,” Lilles observed. “Domestic investments were up as much as 240%... everything that the local VCs have been doing in order to support local ones is having a significant impact”.

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There is a distinct tension between the “professional operator” and the “serendipitous founder.” While some preach a “Rule of 20” for targeted meetings or suggest to spend 3x event time on planning, I would point to the high-value outcomes of aimless wandering.

The most successful days at events like Tallinn’s Latitude59 haven’t always been spent in the meeting area, and definitely not in the front row of the main stage. Instead, it was the sun-drenched courtyard (not last year), where founders can simply sit at a table and wait. In these “unpolished” moments — free from the hype and gloss — the community’s collective experience becomes actionable knowledge because the guard is down.

The Riga countdown: The “Tuesday window”

As the Baltic ecosystem shifts its gaze toward TechChill in Riga, the timing is critical. With the main event kicking off on Wednesday, the real strategic maneuvering begins 24 hours earlier.

Tuesday has become the “key day” for those looking to hit the optimal 24–48 hour window for engagement. In a world where FOMO.Observer aims to provide action-oriented knowledge; the Tuesday pre-game is where the real community bonds are forged.

“We are the voice of the doers,” says the FOMO mandate, and for those heading to Riga, that “doing” starts on the Tuesday transit.

A pinch of salt for the planners

It is important to acknowledge that the startup life is rarely a straight line. While independent analysis helps accelerate growth, over-planning can kill the very “natural style” that makes the Baltic region unique.

My takeaway? Have your list of 20, but leave enough room in your schedule to be the person sitting at the table in the sun. The next big investment or partnership might not come from a LinkedIn intro, but from someone asking, “Is this seat taken?”

In reality, the opposite often happens – a good idea never takes off because there is no team behind it. Or there is a team, but it lacks the right people in the right roles who can actually bring the idea to life.

At first glance, nothing seems wrong: on the one hand, there are idea owners looking for people to execute their vision and strong team members to support them. On the other hand, there are people who may not yet have an idea of their own, but who do have the skills, experience, and desire to join a startup and contribute to building something meaningful. All the necessary puzzle pieces are on the table. But the picture still does not come together. This is especially clear in the early stages.

This is where the first uncomfortable truth comes in: a co-founder is not “recruited” like an employee – a co-founder is a partner in risk. A team is not just a collection of contacts. A team is an agreement in which two or three people take on risk together – in time, money, and tolerance for pressure. If this is not stated clearly from the outset, the classic disappointment follows: one side expects commitment, while the other hears, “Come work for free.”

And it is precisely this confusion of roles that becomes one of the biggest stumbling blocks. For example, the phrase “I’m looking for a CTO” can mean three entirely different things: a salaried developer, a technical leader, or a technical co-founder. If those expectations have not been discussed and are bundled into one vague sentence, trust is lost before the collaboration even has a chance to begin.

In the early stages, there is also often an unspoken assumption that the idea owner must automatically be the CEO. But does that always have to be the case? If a person’s strengths do not lie in company leadership, strategy, or fundraising, then the wrong distribution of roles can become the greatest obstacle to a company’s growth. A good idea does not automatically make someone a good chief executive – clarity around roles, responsibilities, expectations, and ownership is critical. Without it, strong and lasting partnerships do not emerge.

This brings us to another issue that startup founders often get wrong: equity distribution and the concept of “fairness” in the early stage. Too often, people try to keep the peace either by splitting equity “simply equally” or, conversely, by postponing the decision altogether with the idea that “we’ll deal with it later.” Both approaches can explode down the road. Common sense says that equity should reflect both contribution and risk, but the team must also leave room to grow and to bring in new key roles.

This leads to the second uncomfortable truth: the solution is not “more networking.” The solution is a better format. Random encounters tend to favor those who have the drive and confidence to sell themselves. Many highly capable people do not come to “just network” because it is an inefficient and risky use of time. If we genuinely want teams to form, then meetings need to be designed: role-based, pre-validated, and built around clear expectations. Not “come and see,” but “come because your profile matches a real need.”

In practical terms, this means three things. First, founders need to be honest about whether they are looking for an employee or a co-founder, and what the expected contribution and risk-sharing model actually is. Second, specialists need a clear entry point – what the co-founder role entails, what the realistic timeline is, and what the red flags are. Third, a team needs the opportunity to test itself through actual work, not just over coffee – a short shared sprint says more than ten meetings ever could.

In Estonia, we have incubators, accelerators, mentor networks, and funding. But team formation is still far too random. And in the early stage, randomness is the most expensive thing of all.

We are not only talking about the problem but also trying to build a solution to make finding a team more intentional and effective. We bring together early-stage founders and ideas with the people they truly need – whether that is a technical co-founder, a developer, or a business lead. With Startup Matchmaking, our goal is to reduce random networking and increase genuinely relevant meetings that can become the starting point for new teams.

Because if we want more startups that actually make it to market, we need to stop pretending that “people will find each other on their own.” They will not. We believe team formation is infrastructure, not a matter of luck. And that infrastructure must be built as intentionally as programs, funding, and support networks.

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Anne-Liisa Elbrecht is Head of Tehnopol Startup Incubator and Head of NATO DIANA Estonian Accelerator. She works at the intersection of entrepreneurship, innovation, and startup development, supporting emerging companies as they grow from early-stage ideas into scalable businesses.