The Baltic startup ecosystem continues to grow rapidly across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, with Baltic startups gaining international attention in AI, fintech, SaaS, climate tech, and deep tech. Alongside this growth, more women founders, investors, and startup executives are taking leadership roles across the region’s tech ecosystem.
Data across Europe still shows a significant gender gap in venture funding. Fewer than 20% of venture-backed startups have at least one female founder, while all-female founding teams continue to receive a much smaller share of total investment capital. At the same time, the Baltics are seeing a steady increase in women founders, operators, and investors helping shape the future of the region’s startup scene.
This article highlights 30 women shaping the Baltic startup ecosystem in 2026, including founders, investors, operators, and ecosystem builders across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The list was curated through community nominations and research by the FIRSTPICK team, focusing on women actively building, backing, and supporting startups across the Baltics.
Women in Baltic Startups: Quick Facts
- The Baltic startup ecosystem continues expanding internationally across AI, fintech, SaaS, deep tech, and climate tech.
- More women are stepping into leadership positions across Baltic startups and venture capital firms.
- Estonia remains one of Europe’s strongest startup hubs by startup density and unicorn creation.
- Lithuania continues growing as a fintech and AI hub in Central and Eastern Europe.
- Latvia is strengthening its position in deep tech, climate tech, and ecosystem development.
🇱🇻 Women Shaping Latvia’s Startup Ecosystem
Agnese Veckalne-Lescinska | Longenesis / Startin.LV
Agnese’s career path is unexpectedly eclectic. She interned at the Latvian Ministry of Health’s Department of European Affairs in 2013, then moved through the Latvian Chamber of Commerce (Vice Chairwoman of the Startup Council) and the education analytics startup Edurio, before becoming COO at Longenesis, a health data startup that has supported over 1 million patients worldwide (100,000+ in Latvia) and won Startup of the Year in Riga 2025. Her public speaking background comes from Toastmasters International. She holds a Mini-MBA in Innovation and Leadership from Riga Business School (2018–19) and is Chairperson of the Board of the Latvian Startup Association (Startin.LV).
Anna Andersone | Riga TechGirls
Anna is one of the most prolific serial founders in the Latvian tech ecosystem: she co-founded FROONT (design-responsive web building), berta.me (personal branding), and THE MILL, one of Riga’s earliest co-working spaces for programmers and designers. Riga TechGirls, which she leads as CEO and Chief Empowerment Officer, trained 4,000 women in 2020, 6,000 in 2021, and over 12,000 people have taken its ‘Discover Tech’ programme since 2021. Alongside the nonprofit work, she runs bewithclothing.com — a clothing brand built around human connection, featuring garments with ‘secret pockets for hugs.’ She was also a panelist at the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Her background is in design and communication, not engineering, which informs her philosophy of making tech accessible rather than intimidating.
Annija Mezgaile | TechChill
Annija’s path to TechChill runs entirely through the creative advertising industry — she was Account Director at Not Perfect Riga and then Managing Director of the Latvian Art Directors Club, spending over a decade in the creative and advertising industries before joining TechChill. Her career pivot was driven by a personal conviction that startups and creative agencies are structurally similar: both operate in dynamic, uncertain environments that reward risk-taking. As CEO she has overseen TechChill’s expansion beyond Riga into Italy (TechChill Milano). The 2025 Fifty Founders Battle offered over €600,000 in prizes and syndicate investment for Baltic startups.
Alise Gurenko | Riga TechGirls
Alise’s route into the startup world began not from tech but from cultural management, she holds a Master of Arts in Culture Management and Creative Industries from the Latvian Academy of Culture. Her entry point into the ecosystem was precise and accidental: on February 14, 2019, two days into a new job at the Latvian Startup Association, a colleague mentioned TechChill, she attended, stumbled into a JavaScript workshop organised by Riga TechGirls, and was immediately drawn in. She is now co-creator and Startup Program Director at Riga TechGirls and leads the Female Founders Lunch initiative for early-stage women entrepreneurs. She co-developed CyberStart, a cybersecurity retraining programme for unemployed women funded through the EU’s Interreg Central Baltic programme (partnered with ProxyLab, Finland and Visas Iespējas, Latvia).
Arta Abasina | BADideas.fund
Arta describes her own arc as “investor turned operator turned investor again”: she started at Overkill VC as Investment and Operations Director, then deliberately left to join fintech startup Nordigen as Head of Operations to understand startup life from the inside, and has now returned to investing as COO at BADideas.fund. BADideas.fund was launched in April 2022 by serial entrepreneur Raimonds Kulbergs and reached €1M in investments within its first nine months. It has since announced a €22M fund targeting pre-seed/seed Baltics and CEE, with co-investment access from as little as €1,000, deliberately democratising angel participation. She is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper (Riga Hub) and co-founded FinLit, a financial literacy project improving Latvians’ personal finance knowledge. She studied at the University of Stirling (2013–17).
Egija Gailuma | ENGYcell / OX Drive
OX Drive, Latvia’s first Tesla-only car-sharing platform, genuinely began as a joke. While chatting about Teslas, a co-founder texted her suggesting it might not be a joke. She replied “Let’s do it. Who cares?” within 20 seconds, and they began building from an Excel spreadsheet, the heavy-asset model made a traditional MVP impossible. Banks initially refused to finance the venture; an early investor eventually unlocked funding for the first fleet. She was named to Forbes Latvia 30 Under 30 and had previously been Country Manager for CityBee Latvia, giving her direct competitive intelligence. OX Drive was sold in 2024, and she co-founded ENGYcell, a commercial and industrial battery storage startup targeting the Baltics and CEE.
Egita Polanska | Outlast Fund
Egita Polanska may be the most institutionally connected figure in the Latvian startup ecosystem: CEO of TechHub Riga, Executive Director of LVCA, Chair of the Latvian Startup Association Board, Program Manager at Techstars Seattle, and Cyber Program Partner and Managing Director at Startup Wise Guys. In 2025 she co-founded Outlast Fund — a €21M debut fund with offices in Riga and Stockholm, focused on pre-seed and seed startups in the Baltics and Nordics — alongside Marija Rucevska, Mikaela Pedersen, and Kristaps Prusis. The fund’s thesis is deliberately contrarian: backing founders building for long-term resilience, not hype cycles. She studied at Stockholm School of Economics in Riga.
Jekaterina Romanova | PrintyMed
Jekaterina started her first startup, Correcty, at age 18 with no prior startup experience, learning everything as she went. By 25 she had founded three deeptech companies (Correcty, SmartClast, PrintyMed). PrintyMed (co-founded 2023) is spun out from the Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis and is developing 3D-bioprinted organs from artificial spider silk produced by bacteria engineered to replicate spider silk proteins, far more biocompatible than conventional synthetic alternatives. Most competing companies produce spider silk only for textiles; PrintyMed targets medical applications: heart valves, skin reconstruction, bladder repair, and organ-on-chip systems. The company has secured €800K in grant funding and won multiple awards at Deep Tech Atelier 2025.
Marija Rucevska | Outlast Fund
Marija was featured in the Nordic Business Forum’s ’25 and Under in Northern Europe’ ranking in 2018, at 25 she had already co-founded TechChill and driven it to 2,000 attendees that year. Her academic background is in International Communication Management (Turiba University), not tech, which she credits with giving her ecosystem-building instincts rather than a founder’s technical bias. She came up through TechHub Riga, which gave her early access to the region’s first generation of founders. She also co-founded Helve, a corporate innovation company in the Baltics. She joined Practica Capital as Venture Partner in 2023 (Fund III, Latvia, pre-seed/seed). In 2025 she co-founded the €21M Outlast Fund with Egita Polanska, Mikaela Pedersen, and Kristaps Prusis, completing a full transition from conference organiser to fund manager.
🇱🇹 Women Shaping Lithuania’s Startup Ecosystem
Eglė Eidimtaite | Tesonet
Eidimtaite’s path before Tesonet is rarely mentioned: she started her career at the European Parliament, then moved into business development in the e-gaming industry for over three years. During the 2017–18 crypto boom, she served as VP of Business Development at Bankera (a blockchain-based bank) and as a board member at SpectroCoin, a cryptocurrency exchange. Her degree is from ISM University of Management and Economics in Vilnius (2010–2014). In December 2024, she became the first Lithuanian ever appointed to PayPal’s Customer Advisory Board, sitting alongside executives from Booking.com, LVMH, Spotify, Adidas, and HelloFresh. She is also an advisory board member at Practica Capital.
Emilė Radytė | Samphire Neuroscience
Radytė graduated from Harvard with a joint degree in both neuroscience and anthropology. Alongside her studies she worked as an emergency medic, repeatedly responding to psychiatric emergencies — which she says showed her that “mental health and the ways we care for our brains are really broken.” Her Oxford PhD focused specifically on non-invasive brain stimulation as a psychiatric treatment for depression. During COVID lockdowns in Lithuania she co-founded the Integrative Neuroscience Association (INA), which created Lithuania’s first memory cafe for Alzheimer’s patients — there was no neuroscience as a university discipline in Lithuania at the time. INA reached 400+ practitioners and ran art-based mental health programmes in schools. Samphire’s device Nettle works by stimulating the motor cortex to raise pain sensitivity thresholds before menstruation.
Gintarė Verbickaitė | Invest Lithuania / Unicorns Lithuania
Verbickaite spent significant time in Australia before returning to the Baltics, where she founded the Australian-Lithuanian Business Council, connecting two diaspora business communities. She worked across private, public, and non-profit sectors in Australia, Estonia, and Lithuania over 15+ years. At Invest Lithuania she rose to VP of Global Growth and won the Lithuanian Fintech Leader award for her work developing the fintech sector. She is also an active business advisor to Global Lithuanian Leaders, the global professional networking organisation for the Lithuanian diaspora.
Indrė Viltrakytė | Tingit
Before Tingit, Viltrakytė spent three years co-building a social media startup for teenagers with Vinted co-founder Justas Janauskas. The idea for Tingit in 2023 came from a personal experience: it took her six weeks to organise a repair for a Dyson hair dryer, and she decided there had to be a better way. Early data is striking: 70% of Tingit’s orders are shoe repairs, and the platform accepted a high-value Hermès handbag for restoration. The €500K pre-seed closed in August 2024; a further €1.5M followed in early 2026 to scale across Europe.
Lina Žemaitytė-Kirkman | Rockit
The ‘Kirkman’ in her name reflects eight years spent in London before she returned to Lithuania. Her London career covered digital banking, IT, business consultancy, and team leadership, experience she brought directly to Rockit. She is also a Digital Wellbeing advocate and speaker at the intersection of technology, productivity, and human psychology. Under her leadership, Rockit has helped position Vilnius as the largest fintech hub in Europe by number of licences.
Milda Jasaitė | Venture Ecosystem / Vinted
Jasaite did not grow up playing ice hockey. She picked up the sport at a tech conference in Helsinki (Slush) where founders played against investors; she played on the investors’ team, got hooked, and eventually joined the Lithuanian Women’s National Ice Hockey Team and the Hockey Stars club in the Lithuanian Women’s League. Before Vinted, she spent over three years at Earlybird Venture Capital in Berlin and Munich investing at Seed and Series A in Germany and France. She is also a member of ‘Lyderė’, an association working toward stereotype-free society and increased female representation in leadership.
Milda Mitkutė | Vinted
She was 21, at a house party at 2am, when she told old friend Justas Janauskas her flat was too small for her clothes. Two weeks later they had a website. For the first 2–3 years, both founders volunteered without salary while working full-time elsewhere, spending the minimal revenue only on servers. She left Vinted in 2016, the first co-founder to depart, while pregnant. She has since had four children (all boys). During eight years of maternity leave she earned three additional master’s degrees. She is now building an EdTech startup to help Lithuanian teachers engage students with mathematics, deliberately self-funding it to preserve her independence.
Toma Sabaliauskienė | Nord Security
Toma Sabaliauskienė holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Vilnius University, a technical background almost never mentioned in coverage of her marketing career. She has been a board member at Tesonet since October 2015, meaning she was in the governance structure during the years NordVPN was still building its brand globally. She is a certified sailing captain, her personal site lists sailing as a core personal passion. She built a team of 200+ marketing specialists at Nord Security and is also a Forbes Communications Council member and an active angel investor through Baltic Sandbox since December 2020.
Viktorija Cijunskytė | Profitus
Viktorija Cijunskytė’s entrepreneurial journey began with a real estate brokerage around 2010, where she put flyers on apartment doors. Everyone told her it wouldn’t work; it did, and other agents copied her. Her full decade of ventures: TOGNU startup (2008–09), real estate brokerage (2010), her own agency CITUS (2011, sold 2016), Victory Funds in 2018, and Profitus launching in August 2018, her MIPIM Cannes 2015 eureka moment where she first encountered real estate crowdfunding. Profitus has since financed 1,655 property projects totalling over €252 million, with an active loan portfolio of ~€76.7 million across Lithuania, Latvia, Spain, and Estonia. In 2020, Sifted (backed by the Financial Times) named her one of Europe’s 15 most influential women in fintech.
Vlada Musvydaitė-Vilčiauskė | Walk15
Before Walk15, Musvydaitė-Vilčiauskė was a sports news anchor for TV3, Lithuania’s major commercial television channel. She holds a bachelor’s in journalism from Vilnius University and a master’s in international communication. She is a Lithuanian national champion in 400m hurdles, which gives her pivot to a walking/mobility app a biographical logic. The concept for Walk15 emerged from a personal problem: she felt like “a bad mother” for not knowing where to take her children for a walk, so she designed a 15,000-step walking route with help from a regional park official. The company was formally founded in 2019 and pivoted to B2B (corporate step challenges) during COVID. As of 2025, Walk15 hit a €30M valuation in its Series A, has over 1,000,000 users worldwide, and over 1,600 corporate clients, including EuroLeague and the European Association of People Management.
🇪🇪 Women Shaping Estonia’s Startup Ecosystem
Anna-Liisa Palatu | Woola
Anna-Liisa Palatu is the co-founder and CEO of Woola, an Estonian startup that replaces plastic bubble wrap with leftover sheep’s wool. Up to 90% of coarse sheep wool, roughly 200,000 tons per year in the EU, goes to waste. She grew up in a small Estonian village, founded an e-commerce company while still in college, and later spent time in consulting at PwC before trying (and failing at) several startup ideas. Woola raised a €2.5M seed round led by Steve Jurvetson’s Future Ventures. She won the Fifty Founders Battle at TechChill 2020 and the ‘Big Bang of the Year’ at the Estonian Startup Awards 2020, and was included in Sifted’s top 100 most influential women in European tech.
Hedi Mardisoo | Cachet
Hedi Mardisoo studied Information Sciences, and data, what it reveals about people, and how it can be used ethically in their favour, has been her career thread across roles that span banking (Swedbank, Head of Corporate Affairs), telecoms (Starman, CMO), and civic tech. In 2014 her first startup run explored connecting satellite data with personal IoT data; the experiment failed commercially but crystallised a conviction about behavioural data making financial products fairer. She is an active member of the MyData movement, an international push for human-centric data management, and was among its founding voices in Estonia. On top of that, she was one of the original driving members of Koigi Eesti, a grassroots civic initiative that mobilised against far-right political reach in Estonia. Colleagues who have known her for 20 years say her middle name is “execution.” Cachet, her current company, is the commercial expression of all of the above: insurance that prices risk on how you actually behave, not who you are.
Heidi Kakko | BaltCap Growth Fund
Heidi Kakko is one of the longest-serving figures in Estonian venture and angel investing, active since 2008, and one of the architects of the country’s early-stage funding infrastructure. She initiated and ran EstBAN (Estonian Business Angels Network) and co-founded EstVCA (Estonian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association), then became a Partner at BaltCap Growth Fund. She spent over 10 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers in corporate advisory and finance before transitioning to full-time investing. Today she chairs the Council of UniTartu Ventures, sits on the European Innovation Council, and mentors the Põhjanael (North Star) deep-tech accelerator, all focused on her stated mission of producing Estonia’s first deep-tech unicorn within a decade.
Helery Pops | Honey Badger Capital
Helery Pops built her career from the ground up at Pipedrive starting in 2016, moving from inside sales to Product Manager. In 2021 she co-founded Honey Badger Capital, a seed fund alongside Pipedrive co-founders Ragnar Sass, Martin Tajur, and Martin Henk, targeting mission-driven founders from Eastern Europe and Ukraine, with €50K–€150K tickets focused on Greentech and future-of-work. Portfolio includes Paul-Tech, Cuploop, and Reverse Resources. She also co-founded ‘ruum,’ a hacker-space community for young founders, and currently leads innovation at Eesti Energia (Enefit), scouting energy startups. She has also been a scout for Danish fund byFounders and spent time at Arbonics researching forest-based carbon credits.
Kadi-Ingrid Lilles | Iron Wolf Capital
Kadi-Ingrid Lilles is a Partner at Iron Wolf Capital, a deeptech VC that in 2025 announced the largest-ever deeptech Baltic VC fund at €100M, targeting AI, robotics, photonics, and space companies across the Baltic states. Before joining Iron Wolf Capital in summer 2023 she accumulated experience at three very different institutions: Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play Ventures, Estonia’s Startup Estonia programme, and Germany’s Fraunhofer HHI research institute, giving her an unusually broad view across deal sourcing, policy, and deep tech R&D. Her 2025 promotion to Partner made her one of the first female VC partners in the Estonian ecosystem.
Kaari Kink | NATO DIANA
Kaari Kink’s background before investing included competitive dancing and health sciences, plus four years studying and working in the UK. She came into venture through hands-on startup work at Triumf Health, then spent several years at Superangel as Head of Investments, where she also served as Chair of EstVCA (2023–2025) and built the startup community programmes Base Camp and Science Base Camp (supporting 100+ startups). She now works full-time at NATO DIANA as Phase 2 Project Manager, working with dual-use deep tech innovators, including as part of NATO DIANA’s 2026 cohort programme, the largest in the initiative’s history with 150 companies across 34 nations. She continues to lecture on venture capital at Estonian Business School and TalTech.
Kart Siilats | mojo.capital
Kart Siilats has one of the most unusual dual careers in European tech: she was a multiple-time Estonian national high jump champion, named Best Female Athletics Competitor of Estonia in 1999, and won the NCAA indoor title at Harvard (psychology, class of 2003) with a jump of 1.85m. She then moved into finance, Citigroup, then Barclays Wealth managing private equity and VC fund investments, then the European Investment Fund implementing the €100M Baltic Innovation Fund. She co-founded mojo.capital in 2014: a fund-of-funds that has invested in 30 European VC funds and made 12 direct investments, 7 of which became unicorns, including TransferWise and Auto1. The iZettle bet produced a successful exit to PayPal.
Liisi Org | Latitude59
Liisi Org is the CEO of Latitude59, Estonia’s flagship annual startup conference (3,500+ attendees). Before leading Latitude59 she worked at the StartEd accelerator at NYU in New York, where she organised the largest EdTech Festival, managing 300+ speakers with an opening show featuring the NYC Mayor and Broadway artists. She also served at Startup Estonia, where she built a database now covering over 1,400 Estonian startups. She is a Venture Associate at The Better Fund, the only CEE fund focused on female-led teams, and represents Estonia as National Expert at the World Summit Awards (WSA).
Linda Võeras | Karma Ventures
Linda Võeras is an Investment Manager at Karma Ventures, a Tallinn-based deeptech VC that closed its second fund at €100M. Her career path is genuinely non-linear: she began as a creative editor, then moved into executive search at Gillamor Stephens in London, specialising in C-suite and board-level hires for deep-tech and B2B enterprise scale-ups across Europe, which gave her an intimate understanding of what strong founding teams look like before she ever wrote a check. She has a notable interest in space tech and has initiated a vibe-coding events series aimed at bringing more women into technology.
Triin Hertmann | Grünfin
Grünfin raised €2M with backing from Norrsken VC, the impact fund of Klarna co-founder Niklas Adalberth, alongside Specialist VC and Lemonade Stand. It was co-founded by two mothers motivated by the personal difficulty of building a values-based investment portfolio without expert knowledge or large capital. Before Grünfin, Hertmann was Wise’s second employee (joining in 2011) and its first Head of Operations, where she spent years building the Finance and Payment Operations teams from near zero. She also spent six years in Skype’s finance team. In 2022 she was named Investor of the Year at the Estonian Startup Awards. In early 2026 she co-launched Fomo.observer with journalist Tarmo Virki, a long-form publication focused on in-depth storytelling from the Estonian startup ecosystem.
Why Women in Baltic Tech Matter
The Baltic startup ecosystem has built a global reputation far beyond the region’s size. Companies like Vinted, Wise, Bolt, Nord Security, and Veriff helped place Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia firmly on the international startup map.
At the same time, women across the Baltics are increasingly contributing not only as founders, but also as investors, operators, researchers, ecosystem builders, and venture capital leaders helping shape the next generation of startups.
From AI and fintech to deep tech, climate innovation, cybersecurity, and venture capital, these women are helping define the future of Baltic tech in 2026 and beyond.