Lithuanian Firstpick and Baltic Sandbox raised €18M from a state company to invest in Baltic startups

Fund management companies Firstpick and Baltic Sandbox signed contracts with the Lithuanian state-owned company Invega to run its capital for further investment in the early-aged Baltic startups. Invega with the help of its Innovation Promotion Fund has invested €18M into a new fund, and together with the capital of private investors total size of the investment will reach €20M. The duration of the fund will last eight years.

Firstpick and Baltic Sandbox will establish two venture capital funds. The first fund is a pre-stage fund to support pre-acceleration and acceleration programs and for initial venture capital investments. The second one is an early-stage fund for venture capital investments.

Startups can get up to €500K from the fund during the pre-acceleration program Accelerator2. The young companies would have to demonstrate the ability to comply with the market requirements. Ten teams and 27 participants are joining the program which will start in the upcoming days.

The State-financed Innovation Promotion Fund was launched in 2020 and is run by Invega, the Ministry of Economy, and the Ministry of Finance. 

Baltic Sandbox Ventures is a Lithuanian accelerator for SaaS and Fintech startups. It announced that it would invest in startups that work in the fields of deep technologies and life sciences. 

Venture capital firm Firstpick was launched by the ex-Lithuanian team of the Estonian accelerator StartupWiseGuys. The team has been recently separated from StartupWiseGuys. Firstpick had collected €15M, where €9M is from Invega, and the remaining €6M came from private investors. Firstpick aims to support 45 startups over the next three years. In its pre-accelerator, it offered to give €20K in grants per team.

To boost startup engagement, Firstpick also launched a token reward system program. It would give the companies tokens, which will account for 5% of the fund's revenue. It plans to distribute 20K tokens between mentors and other participants.