Lithuanian accelerator Firstpick invested in four startups
Lithuanian accelerator Firstpick invested in the New-York based marketplace for beauty products Ama care and in Lithuanian startups beesure_, Sotloans, and Stackflows. The amount of the deals is undisclosed. The startups passed the first acceleration program of Firstpick.
Ama Care was founded in 2022 by Vera Art and Andrei Palunosik. The startup is delivering a digital platform and application that relies on an algorithm and a large database of beauty products. Ama Care’s application helps to choose beauty products and allows take or upload pictures of skin care products and get complete information about them. A rating and detailed information helps understand the analysis of each product. A product might hurt the client’s skin, so Ama Care highlights potentially harmful ingredients and clean products. Besides, the platform offers free personal skincare and haircare matches.
Vilnius-based startup Beesure_ was founded in 2021 by Augustinas Zilinskas and Egidijus Kazlauskas. The startup created an insurance distribution infrastructure that could be easily integrated into any business like banks, retailers, and other companies for the distribution and administration of insurance products. The company’s solution consists of three parts: access to insurance products, a platform for distribution in different partners’ environments, and tools for digital sales. Beesure_ has partnered with eight Baltic insurance companies, and global insurance organizations, such as AXA Partners, VIG, and others.
Vilnius-based Sotloans was founded in 2022 by Audrius Griskevicius, Edmundas Kevisas, and Aleksandras Kunickas. Softloans offers embedded lending tools for electronic money institutions, e-commerce, and other digital service platforms. It provides tools to integrate with customers' data sources, perform client scoring, provide funding offers, issue funding, and perform loan monitoring and collection.
Stackflows was founded in Kaunas (Lithuania) in 2022 by Sarunas Strasevicius and Vytenis Sciukas. The platform allows companies (50-100 people) to transfer their processes and expertise to a digital visual format. Some basic process management knowledge is required to begin using StackFlows, but companies can begin their first production processes within an hour and receive analytical performance results within days.
An ex-Lithuanian team of Estonian accelerator StartupWiseGuys established venture capital firm Firstpick. Lithuanian fund aims to support 45 startups over the coming three years. The volume of the fund is €20M. The initial ticket starts at €50-€200K. The Partners of Firstpick are Jonė Vaitulevičiūtė, Marijus Andrijauskas, Andra Bagdonaite. In 2023, Firstpick invested in 14 startups with a total amount of fundraising of €1,73M.
UPD: Marketplace for beauty products Ama Care raised €500K from Firstpick, and some employees from US technology company Google and London-based platform for luxury fashion industry Farfetch. It was a pre-seed round of investments.
Ama Care will use the financing for developing and adding new features to the platform, such as detecting acne-trigger ingredients or finding budget-friendly products without sacrificing quality.
