Food marketplace Saltz.app raises €3M in a seed round

Lithuanian food marketplace Saltz.app has raised €3M in a seed funding round. The lead investor was Helsinki-based VC and private equity firm Lifeline Ventures, with participation from Estonian Change Ventures, and Helsinki-based Illusian Family Office (founded by Ilkka Paananen, a co-founder and CEO of the mobile game developer Supercell). Angel investors including Vinted co-founder Mantas Mikuckas, a partner at London-based Dig Ventures Rytis Vitkauskas, Miki Kuusi, a co-founder of Wolt, and former Shopify executives also participated in the round. 

Launched in Vilnius in 2022 by the founders of dropshipping service Oberlo Tomas Slimas and Andrius Šlimas, as well as Reinis Strodahs, Saltz.app is a marketplace that connects farms, fishing operators, and regional suppliers with customers (restaurant chefs) in five European countries - Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, and Germany. Suppliers send one shipment for all buyers to the Saltz warehouse, where it is aggregated, sorted, and shipped to customers within a few hours. To date, the product list includes seafood, meat, poultry, vegetables, milk, and butter. Suppliers come from the Netherlands, Iceland, Italy, France, the Philippines, Indonesia, Spain, Brasil, Uruguay, the USA, Australia, etc.

Before receiving this investment, Tomas Slimas and Andrius Šlimas funded the pre-seed round of Salz.app by themselves.

Established in Tallinn in 2017 by Andris Berzins, Rait Ojasaar, and Yrjö Ojasaar, Change Ventures backs pre-seed and seed-stage Baltic startups and founders with Baltic origin. Change Ventures has invested in over 30 startups. In May 2023, it launched a €20M Fund III to double its pre-seed investments. The initial ticket size per startup is between €100K and €500K.