I like to call TechChill a tiny Slush with a loyal community: over two thousand people, no corporate theater, decision makers, investors, and founders, squeezing into one sauna. You sit down for lunch, and across the table, you have a GP of a €200M fund or a founder creating spider silk from bacteria. Going to the Baltics always gives me a bit of optimism, being among people who actually see what is happening around them.
But this year the vibe was different. The small talk was gone. People were building things that matter: defense systems, deep tech, space exploration, biotech, hard infrastructure, and they had no patience for anything else. The pressure to execute and perform is rising. AI is here, and the community sees that.
AI, Hardware, or “Nobody Cares”
I don’t know how to say this without sounding dramatic, so I’ll just say it – the pure SaaS era is dead. Not dying. Dead.
Every startup that pulled a crowd, where investors actually lingered, every pitch that made people put their phones down – were all doing one of three things. Building AI. Building hardware. Or Building software that enables hardware to function.
The mid-tier B2B SaaS play, where you slapped “platform” onto your pitch deck and raised a seed round in 2021, is gone. SaaS is a commodity now. I talked to maybe a dozen investors over the three days, and the signal was consistent. They want founders who show extreme domain knowledge and pick a side. AI and hardware were the loudest draws, but the space between them wasn’t empty; it was filled by deep tech, biotech, medtech, and founders solving hard vertical problems that require years of expertise to even understand. What’s dead is the horizontal SaaS tool with no moat. If you’re building in CEE right now and your startup doesn’t sit in one of these camps, you should probably spend a weekend figuring out why.
Two Species of Founder
Something kept bugging me throughout the event, and I only managed to articulate it on the flight home. There are two types of founders now, and the gap between them is getting uncomfortable.
The first type has a great product. Real technology, real users, a real moat. But they get on stage, and it’s painful. Monotone voice, slides full of text, no narrative arc. You can feel the audience reaching for their phones by the ninety-second mark. These founders have built something worth funding. They just can’t communicate it.
The second type has a mediocre product, sometimes a genuinely weird one, but they pitch it as if their life depends on it. Eye contact, dramatic pauses, and a story about their grandmother having the same problem. You’re nodding along, emotionally invested, ready to wire money. Then you look at the actual product, and it’s… questionable.
This isn’t new, obviously. We always had good pitchers and bad pitchers. But the split starts to feel extreme. If you’re an investor reading this: you already know this, but dig past the charisma. The companies still standing in 2030 are probably the ones with the awkward CEO who couldn’t remember their slide transitions.
If you’re a founder who built something real and can’t pitch it: that’s a solvable problem. Fix it. Your technology deserves a better spokesperson than a mumbled walkthrough of your architecture diagram.
Three Startups Worth Knowing
Out of all startups, the three that stuck with me weren’t the AI plays or the hardware bets. They were the weird ones, and maybe that says something about what actually stands out when everyone else is chasing the same thesis.
BirdyChat is a Latvian team building what they call the WhatsApp of Europe, and for once, the comparison isn’t delusional. They’re already the first EU messaging app to achieve interoperability with WhatsApp under the Digital Markets Act, with tens of thousands of people on the waitlist. The angle isn’t “we’ll kill WhatsApp.” It’s smarter than that. The DMA now requires WhatsApp to open up, and BirdyChat is positioning itself as the European-values alternative that sits right next to it. Work-focused, corporate email-based (no phone number needed), and built for a regulatory environment that finally favors challengers. Whether they pull it off depends on execution, but the timing and the strategy are as good as I’ve seen from a messaging startup.
PrintyMed is producing synthetic spider silk from bacteria. I had to hear the pitch twice because the first time I assumed I’d misunderstood something. They engineer silk proteins in bacteria, without solvents or animal products, and the resulting material has properties that border on absurd: biocompatible, extraordinarily strong, and versatile enough for artificial organs, heart valve prostheses, and cosmetics. The whole thing came out of a collaboration with the Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis. This is the kind of startup that either becomes a generational company or a very interesting footnote, and I genuinely don’t know which yet.
Heatify is a Riga-based outfit that built a Bitcoin mining boiler. Yes, a boiler. It replaces your existing home heating unit, mines Bitcoin while heating your water and radiators, runs at 99.9% thermal efficiency, operates at 20 decibels (basically silent), and requires no installation modifications beyond swapping it in. Your heating cost becomes a revenue stream. The founders looked like crypto bros, and it’s the kind of idea that sounds like a bar bet, but the engineering is real, the unit economics work(?), and that’s more than I can say for most things adjacent to crypto bros.
From Drones to Long-Term Infrastructure
The startups were interesting, but what hit me this year was the defense track. And it told a very different story than it did twelve months ago.
In 2024 and 2025, the dominant theme was drones. FPV drones, jammer drones, counter-drone systems, drones that send more drones. You get the point.
The tone has shifted, for example: fixed-wing UAVs built for long-range reconnaissance rather than kamikaze strikes. Ground-based vehicles for scouting and logistics, both wheeled and tracked, like ruggedized off-road electric scooters designed to move people and supplies between rear echelons and front lines. The hardware got more specialized, more varied, and more oriented toward sustaining operations rather than winning a single engagement.
The pattern tells you something. The ecosystem has moved past the initial panic of “we need more drones yesterday” and into a harder, more strategic question: what does it take to sustain a defense posture over years, not months? What infrastructure, what compliance systems, what logistics chains need to exist? The startups answering those questions were the ones drawing the most serious investor attention.
But the most important part is the approach, the Baltics don’t see defense as a “hot vertical” or an “emerging market opportunity” over a cup of latte. The framing feels more personal. What can we build right now to make sure what happened in Ukraine doesn’t happen here?
That urgency is what makes this part of Europe different. The startups are sharper because the problems are closer. The investors are more deliberate because the stakes aren’t theoretical.
Riga in March is cold and grey. Come anyway, the flat whites are great!
