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Lithuanian VC fund FIRSTPICK will invest €20 million to back early stage startups. The fund is targeting to feed pre-seed stage tech startups’ mission so that they can focus on development of their businesses without worrying about financial issues. The firm also launches a token reward program.
FIRSTPICK is a venture capital fund founded in 2022 by a group of Lithuanian investors; Jonė Vaitulevičiūtė, Andra Bagdonaitė, Dmitrij Sosunov, and Marijus Andrijauskas, backing the best tech startup founders in the Baltic States. FIRSTPICK runs acceleration programs for early-stage startups to help them achieve rapid growth and validate their ideas. FIRSTPICK’s capital consists of funds from private investors, the founding team, and an investment from the Lithuanian state-financed INVEGA fund, which is part of the Accelerator 2 program, funded by the Innovation Promotion Fund.
The fund’s LPs are the Lithuanian state-financed fund INVEGA, founding members of FIRSTPICK, and a number of private LPs—business angels, founders, and members of the region‘s tech community.
According to FIRSTPICK’S managing partner Jonė Vaitulevičiūtė, the fund aims to provide consistent funding during the pre-seed stage, enabling startup founders to dedicate themselves fully to business development instead of searching for new funding sources.
“While managing two funds during the period between 2019 and 2022, we’ve noticed there is a lack of consistent early-stage investment crucial for startups to develop from early-stage products to generating substantial revenue,” Jonė Vaitulevičiūtė said. “ It‘s why we’ve launched a pre-seed VC fund that will work with startups from their early stages to when they are ready for seed-stage funding. We tried out this strategy by investing in startups like kevin., Ondato, Watalook, and Heavy Finance with the previous fund. Also, this is why half of FIRSTPICK’s assets are dedicated to follow-on investments and co-investments.”
To further facilitate the startup community’s involvement, FIRSTPICK is also launching a token reward program.
“We will tokenize up to 5 percent of the team’s carry and disperse 20 000 tokens among the mentors and other community members as a reward for their help, knowledge sharing, and networking,” Dmitrij Sosunov said. “So the fund’s success will be the community’s success, too. This is an innovative way to reward the partners and turn them into owners.”
The first 16-week accelerator program organized by FIRSTPICK has already begun. In total, 218 startups applied, and 6 of them were selected.
“In our accelerator programs, we work together with founders to give them the exact knowledge, network, and capital they need to get to the next milestone, usually—the next round of funding,” Andra Bagdonaitė said. “This way, founders receive tailored support, which significantly increases their chances of success. Our unique model is really hard to replicate, as it requires a lot of individual approach and effort from the entire team. That is why we are eagerly waiting for the success stories that will originate in our accelerators.”
According to the FIRSTPICK team, the fund is being launched during a challenging time, but that shouldn’t be a concern.
“This year, startups from the Baltics have already attracted €1.5 billion in investments, meaning the region is on pace to match last year’s result,” Marijus Andrijauskas said. “However, 82% of this sum was invested in Estonian startups, while Lithuanian startups attracted only half of last year’s capital. We see an enormous demand for venture capital investments in Lithuania, especially for early-stage startups, and we are ready to fill this gap.”
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