At the beginning of September, a report came out that highlighted the steady increase in deep tech activity in the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania).
Put together by Dealroom.co, Iron Wolf Capital, Google Cloud, Walless and Startup Lithuania, the first edition of the ‘Baltic Deep Tech Report’ comes with a number of interesting data-driven insights into what is happening over in the Baltics.
The report, which you can download free of charge here, focuses primarily on the influx of capital invested in Baltic deep tech companies, the nature and make-up of the ecosystem, and its healthy startup pipeline.
We gave the report a good read over at EIC Scaling Club HQ, and these are our main take-aways:
Funding activity is blossoming
In the past 18 months, there have been over 400 funding rounds across the Baltic countries.
Looking back even further, the increase in capital has been clear in the last five years, with a significant uptick (evidently) in the boom years 2021 and 2022, as you can tell from the chart below.
This year, there’s been an expected slowdown compared to those two years when investment totalled €4 billion, but Baltic startups have nonetheless raised €516 million so far this year.
Glancing at the sectors that are commanding the biggest VC rounds, stand-outs in recent years are ‘Transportation’, ‘Food’ and ‘Fintech’. Rounding out the top 5 are ‘Security’ and ‘Energy’, the latter of which has so far brought in the most investment in 2023.
The Baltic deep tech ecosystem is growing, and maturing
The report authors took a deep dive into the Baltic deep tech ecosystem, and came up with this useful map of the most interesting early and late-stage startups, from a pool of 550+ in total.
The heaviest investments have been in capital-intensive businesses with a hardware component, such as Starship, Skeleton Technologies, Milrem Robotics and Aerones.
The report points out that, since last year, over half of the combined enterprise value of Baltics startups (54% so far in 2023) is derived from Deep Tech & AI-powered companies.
This is in part a result of the dense network of academic and scientific expertise across the Baltics, the report purports.
Growing fast(er)
Last but not least, an interesting observation from the report is that the Baltic nations are outpacing their European and US counterparts when it comes to deep tech VC funding (with the notable exception of Portugal).
You can download the full report free of charge here.
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About the EIC Scaling Club
The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 100 European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.
The top 100 European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.
The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.