BalticVC

Estonian basketball fan engagement platform Scorestars is shutting down after four years of operation. According to co-founder Marek Kesküll, after changing their line of business, they failed to attract their first paying customer fast enough, which made it impossible to continue operations.

The Defense Fund, managed by the national fund SmartCap , has invested  €10M in Darkstar , Estonia's first defense technology venture fund. SmartCap's investment of €10M in the Darkstar venture fund will act as an anchor investment, and private investments will bring the total size of the fund to €25M.

Four Estonian space technology startups, Babayte , Spiral Hydrogen , MS Forest and Energy Risk Service, will receive funding of €240K - €60K each. Half of the funding will come from the European Space Agency ( ESA BIC Estonia ) and the other half from the cities, depending on the location of the startup.

The Latvian Investment and Development Agency ( LIAA ) will allocate more than €18.5M to finance a new program to support the digitization of local companies.

In the first half of this year, Lithuanian startups attracted €167.7M in investments - 5 times more than in the same period last year. While the amount of investment has increased significantly compared to the first half of last year, when a total of €32M was raised, the number of startups that received it has dropped by 12% to 15 companies, according to data tracked by Unicorns Lithuania , a Lithuanian startup association.

Estonian startup CryptoSwift has raised €510K in a pre-seed round. The round was backed by early stage investors Startup Wise Guys , Tenity , DEPO Ventures and a group of business angels. CryptoSwift will use the funds raised to expand its team and accelerate the adoption of its platform in the EU.