Freshly founded Lithuanian firm Baltic Sandbox Ventures has raised €10 million for its first deeptech fund. For its closure, the firm targets to raise a total of €13 million. The fund is the first in the Baltics focusing on early-stage deeptech and life science solutions, AIN.Capital was told.
- The firm was founded by regional investors Sandra Golbreich, Andrius Milinavičius, and Erik Bhullar, who ran an accelerator, also called Baltic Sandbox. Their current firm will split the raised funds in two parts of €6.5 million, the first is aimed at pre-seed and the second — at seed startups.
- In total, it wants to accelerate up to 60 teams, with an acceleration ticket of €25,500. The fund will also support 23 teams during pre-seed rounds, with tickets of up to €100,000. And complete 18 follow-on rounds at seed stage, with tickets ranging from €200,000 to €400,000.
- Baltic Sandbox Ventures will be active across different sectors in deeptech and life sciences in the Baltic region. It is especially interested in solutions that are patented or patentable.
“The way we look at deeptech investment in Europe is wrong. The talent is there, but potential deeptech entrepreneurs are not making it through to seed stages and often end up inside global corporations located outside the region. That’s because the people who come up with new deeptech innovation are initially more focused on engineering problem-solving. They remain invisible to VCs stuck in a game of popularity contests around pitching, charisma and the hype-cycle, rather than the substance of the founding team and the underlying business or technological advantages. Our edge is that we understand deeptech and know how to find and communicate with the right people,”
Sandra Golbreich, General Partner at Baltic Sandbox, said.
- INVEGA, a Lithuanian government agency, is the anchoring investor for the fund. The rest of the cash comes from private investors including Vytautas Kašėta, cofounder of SUPER HOW?, and Pijus Makarevičius, founder of Furniture1.
