Latvian logistics startup Swotzy has raised €500K
Latvian logistics startup Swotzy has raised €500K from Lithuanian accelerator and early-stage investor Firstpick VC and Polish investment firm Black Pearls VC. After the deal, the advisor at Black Pearls VC Jarosław Pilarczyk and Firstpick’s partner Andra Bagdonaitė will join the startup’s Supervisory Board.
Founded by Lauris Rutkis, Kristians Jenciuss, and Jekabs Hincenbergs in August 2022, Swotzy’s e-commerce shipping solution combines several delivery companies. The users can compare the couriers' services according to time/fees. Besides, Swotzy offers small businesses a user interface. With its help, they can manually purchase shipping labels and request courier pickups. The bigger companies have API connectivity to the platform, which allows them to work with several couriers, having one integration and one contract. Swotzy targets to streamline delivery operations for e-commerce companies, and reduce shipping costs while working with several courier services.
The idea for Swotzy came to Lauris Rutkim when he worked as the head of logistics development and partnerships at the Latvian e-commerce platform and producer of print-on-demand items Printful. He had to maintain relationships with more than 15 courier companies around the world and thought about how to optimize the delivery processes. Swotzy has participated in Firstpick accelerator program Batch-2 from February to June 2023. In March, the startup also received €90K from Firstpick.
Swotzy will use the investment to accelerate the company's development, strengthen its position in the Baltic market and start working on data analysis tools. Besides, it plans to include all the main courier services from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on the platform.
Lithuanian ex-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.
Black Pearls VC is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on tech companies from the Baltic region and Poland. It usually injects initial investment from €100K to €1M per startup. In 2023, Black Pearls invested in Lithuanian grocery store jobs platform Traxlo, Lithuanian fintech Heavy Finance, and others. The partners of the firm are Marcin Kowalik, Aleksander Dobrzyniecki, and Maciej Skórkiewicz.
