Baltic Startup Mafia

Latvian startup neobank Zelf is building a platform on top of existing tech giant products - WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber. Are they not afraid of being shut down by those platforms someday? They are not! The Zelf founder and CEO Elliot Goykhman explain how his startup is helping those platforms to earn more. And neobanks have a bright future because they are able to offer innovations. Elliot says that relationships between traditional banks and innovations can be described as relationships between deer and headlight - deers freeze when they see a headlight. The same happens with banks when they meet innovations. Also, check out the Baltic Startup ecosystem update. Companies included - both new unicorn companies Zego and ID.me as well as startups Skeleton Technologies and Scoro from Estonia

Lauri Sokk and his team formed and started to work while returning from skiing holidays right before the Europe lockdown on March 2020. Lauri experienced the whole beauty of closing borders, staying in quarantine, and winning the hackathon. What else is interesting? He used to organize hackathons himself but never had time to participate in one. Lauri is also the organizer behind Startup Day Tartu – one of the biggest events on Baltic Startup Scene. And he has been a Head of the Smart City Tartu project.

Baltic Startup ecosystem update - January 2020. Startups included - Juro and Jeff App from Latvia, Katana and 99Math from Estonia, Eddy Travels and GoRamp from Lithuania. Interview with the startup Juro co-founder Pavel Povalevitch. Juro has just closed Series A funding round with 5 million dollars investment. The round was led by New York-based Union Square Ventures. Juro team also after Brexit will remain in two countries - Latvia and Great Britain. How they will organize work? And why they are still working in Baltics? Find out more in this episode. #balticstartupmafia

This is the episode where the data about the year 2019 in Baltic startups is reviewed. The data has been initially collected by local startup organizations. The biggest investments in December 2019 received Estonian startup Salv and Lithuanian startup Gosu.ai. The episode includes the interview with the CEO and Founder of Salv - Taavi Tamkivi. Taavi is the former employee of two Estonian startup success stories - Skype and Transferwise. He has built technologies to detect and fight financial crime for both of them. After leaving Transferwise he took a year off. Taavi used paternity leave - he stayed at home with his 4th kid. That was the moment when he came up with some good ideas and decided to create Salv. #balticstartupmafia

This is the first episode that will continue as a series of podcasts for people interested in the startup ecosystem of Baltic countries. In this episode, we congratulate Lithuanians with the first unicorn - company Vinted, Latvians with the Sage Group acquisition of the startup Cake HR and Estonians as still being leaders of the investments received #startupmafia