Cyber City in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, was built on the site of a textile factory, which in its day turned out millions of socks a year. Today, you can see reminders of the textile design in the decoration of buildings that house more than 3,000 technology professionals and high-tech businesses.
Since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, Lithuania, a country of 2.8 million people, has reinvented itself as a home for tech startups. Since 2020, the value of Lithuania’s tech sector has grown by a factor of six to reach €16.4bn. Many of its companies are household names, such as Vinted, the online second-hand fashion market, and cyber security and privacy company Nord Security.
Lithuania’s technology sector has grown through a mixture of inward investment and homegrown companies. More than 70,000 people work for companies in the ICT sector. It has strengths in fintech, robotics, cyber security, health and climate technology, lasers and enterprise software. Six of the country’s startup companies have reached unicorn status, securing valuations of over $1bn.
For much of its history, venture capital funding has been in short supply for companies growing out of Lithuania. This has bred a culture of self-sufficiency among the country’s entrepreneurs, creating businesses that are careful with their cash and plough their profits back into growth – bootstrapping, in other words.
Many entrepreneurs look to Israel, the original startup nation, for inspiration for growing their own startup culture. Like Israel, Lithuania is a small country with difficult borders, and startup founders have learned from its approach.
Lithuania’s first unicorn
Vinted was one of Lithuania’s early success stories and became the first Lithuanian company to reach unicorn status in 2019.
The company started in 2008 as a website built to help a 21-year-old who wanted to downsize her wardrobe before moving house.
Today, Vinted is well known across the world as an online marketplace for second-hand clothes and fashion items. It employs over 2,000 people.
At least 25 staff from Vinted have gone on to build their own startups, according to Gintarė Verbickaitė, CEO of Unicorns Lithuania, a membership organisation for Lithuanian startups. “We call it the Vinted effect,” she said.
Other online markets have followed Vinted. One is Tingit, an online market that connects people who want to repair clothes, shoes or handbags with expert repairers. Another, Ovoko, helps people find used car parts from scrap yards, and another online market connects pet owners and pet sitters.
The rise of fintech
Fintech is the crown jewel in Lithuania’s startup ecosystem. The fintech sector as a whole grew from 44 companies in 2014 to 250 in 2025 and now serves 40 million people across the European Union (EU), according to figures from Invest Lithuania, a government agency that promotes direct foreign investment in the country.
After the UK’s split from the EU, Lithuania’s Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Lithuania saw an opportunity to build the country’s own financial services sector, which until that point had been dominated by a few Scandinavian banks.
The government responded by introducing a fast-track programme to allow financial services companies to obtain a licence in just six months. That compares to two years for the next fastest EU country, said Verbickaitė.
“We needed more competition in our local financial services market, and we needed better access to financing for our small and medium-sized companies, so it made sense from a government perspective to drive the growth of that sector,” she added.
A turning point came when the challenger bank Revolut established a branch in Vilnius in 2017. The city went on to become the hub of Revolut’s European business following Brexit. Revolut was able to apply for a digital banking licence, which allowed it to operate as a bank without issuing loans before it gained a full licence in 2021.
Other international financial brands followed Revolut – from the UK, the US, Southeast Asia and South Korea. They include companies such as payment service Sumup, which won a licence in 2019, and smart wallet company Curve in 2020. Payment processing company Robinhood received a licence to open a crypto centre in Vilnius in 2025, and Checkout opened a technology centre in Vilnius in 2026.
Fintechs have, in turn, attracted cyber security and IT infrastructure companies to provide support services. Tech services companies with a presence in Lithuania include Cognizant, the Israeli enterprise cloud company TeraSky, and Santa Monica Networks.
One sign of Lithuania’s confidence in the fintech sector is that last year the country bid against Frankfurt and Paris to host Europe’s new Anti Money Laundering Authority (AMLA), although AMLA ultimately went to Frankfurt.
The bootstrapping nation
Lithuania’s business community had to learn from scratch when the country broke away from the Soviet Union in 1990.
“Thirty-five years ago, you could go to prison if you started your own business,” said Verbickaitė. “So this whole entrepreneurship mentality is actually quite fresh.”
“Thirty-five years ago, you could go to prison if you started your own business, so this whole entrepreneurship mentality is actually quite fresh”
Gintarė Verbickaitė, Unicorns Lithuania
The country had to rebuild its market economy, and there was little access to venture capital to set up new companies.
That has led to a disciplined focus on generating revenue and growing by ploughing profits back into the business. “That has really helped shape the mentality to be focused on operational efficiency, and on financial discipline,” she said.
The importance of Lithuania’s business to the country is reflected in both government policy and popular culture. The government, for example, has invested in a national reskilling programme, which has trained more than 20,000 people in digital skills since 2022.
Young people can legally register an educational company, attract funding, appoint shareholders and a CEO to make revenues while they learn how to run a business, said Verbickaitė. They can also take part in a Lithuanian equivalent of Dragon’s Den for young people, known as Shark Tank.
Nord Security
Laurynas Zabulis is the group chief financial officer (CFO) at Nord Security, a privacy and cyber security company based in Cyber City that provides services to consumers and small businesses – and another of Lithuania’s success stories.
“I think the mentality that was sort of instilled from our bootstrapping days is very much intact and is still evident right now,” he said.
“I think the mentality that was sort of instilled from our bootstrapping days is very much intact and is still evident right now”
Laurynas Zabulis, Nord Security
These days, the company has predictable revenue from subscribers who renew their subscriptions, and can be more aggressive about using that to fund new ventures.
But he said the company is still “prudent” in how it allocates capital and measures the return on investment for every transaction. “We still have that ethos ingrained within the company.”
When Nord raised its first external investment in 2022, valuing the company at $1.6bn, it was not because the company lacked cash flow or needed to fill gaps in its budget.
“It gives you more credibility if you have raised external capital, particularly at a high valuation,” he said. “It also provided us with more flexibility and more open doors, particularly when it came to hiring talent from overseas.”
The company has been able to open offices in Germany and Poland, put money back into research and development, and has invested funds as a financial buffer.
For Zabulis, making money is part of the national character. Even during the Soviet times, Lithuanians looked for ways they could make money on the side, he said, describing them as having a kind of “entrepreneurial grit”.
Nord Security was one of the first companies to raise capital funding from tier one investors. The company had to work out for itself how to approach investment banks, how to negotiate legal contracts, and which legal firms to hire.
Nord has shared its knowledge with other startups and support organisations such as Unicorns Lithuania, and Nord’s experience has become “institutional knowledge”.
Zabulis is a member of chat groups with other CFOs from large tech companies who help each other out when problems arise. “We have a market that kind of cultivates this knowledge sharing,” he said.
Freedom to take risks
Hostinger, a web hosting and cloud infrastructure company, was founded in 2004 and remained a small IT company based in Lithuania with a staff of 20 or 30 people until it started growing rapidly during Covid-19.
The company has resisted venture capital funding, preferring instead to fund growth through its own revenues. This has given the company greater freedom to move quickly and take risks that institutional investors may not approve of.
“External investors mean more voices at the board table, and slower processes sometimes, so while we can do it, we like financing our own business,” said spokesperson Eiviltas Paraščiakas.
For example, the company took a bet on opening in India, going up against intense competition. The bet paid off, and now India is a big market for Hostinger.
Would the company have won backing from venture capital companies to make such a move? Paraščiakas has his doubts. “It could look like a risky move back then,” he said.
Lithuania’s sixth unicorn
Another company on the Cyber City campus, Oxylabs, became Lithuania’s sixth unicorn this month after securing £130m investment from Warburg Pincus, valuing the company at $3.6bn.
Oxylabs began life in 2015 as a web scraping service, initially collecting real-time data on flight ticket pricing from multiple websites, using proxy IP addresses to avoid having its traffic blocked, its CEO Vytautas Savickas told Computer Weekly.
Like other companies in Cyber City, Oxylabs benefited from support from Tesonet, the startup accelerator that developed Cyber City. Its founders are still active in the company. “They are still in the operational parts, helping us, pushing us,” said Savickas.
“Lithuanians are used to rejection, we are used to people saying no, and we are good at working through it. We have this small nation, and we need to be loud to be heard”
Vytautas Savickas, Oxylabs
The company works with Fortune 500 companies to monitor cyber security threats, counterfeit websites and pricing information. Savickas said he is prevented by confidentiality agreements from disclosing names, but they include big e-commerce sites, large tech companies and artificial intelligence (AI) labs.
The company’s infrastructure allows its customers to collect real-time data from public websites and feed that data into their own IT systems to make decisions, improve their products, or gather intelligence.
“There are a lot of new chatbots popping up in websites. If the customer connects their chatbots to our infrastructure, they can retrieve information …and get the most accurate answer for the customer,” he said.
The company works with Honeygain, a service that allows people to earn a passive income by making a proportion of their bandwidth available to Oxylabs to use, allowing Oxylabs to scrape data from multiple IP addresses, without being blocked.
CEO Vytautas Savickas said that because Lithuania is a small market, startup companies like Oxylabs have to think about selling to bigger markets, such as the US, from day one.
They also have to be very persistent, he said, joking that if a Lithuanian sees a locked door, they will bang their head against it until it opens. “We are used to rejection, we are used to people saying no, and we are good at working through it. We have this small nation, and we need to be loud to be heard,” he added.
Following its injection of cash from Warburg Pincus, Nord Security is gearing up to expand overseas and invest in new products.
“It’s a signal for us that we are going in the right direction, going with an external investor and going through rigorous due diligence,” he said. “It really shows that we have good internal operations, that our books and risk compliance work is of a high standard.”
Nevertheless, he said there are a lot of successful companies in Lithuania that are doing well without external investment. “We don’t create hype, we create results,” he said.
More unicorns on the way
As the country expands its technology infrastructure, it is confident of spinning out more high-tech startups.
Verbickaitė is confident that the country will claim 10 unicorn-sized startups by 2029. There are already companies waiting in the wings that are approaching the right scale.
And AI is making it possible for companies to grow much faster than before. Small teams can design and build products using AI in a much shorter time, she said.
“We have already seen globally, and even in Europe, startups that could become unicorns in less than a year or less than two years,” she added.
