For the tenth year in a row, Latitude59 is partnering with Practica Capital – one of the leading early-stage VC funds in the Baltics. Find out more about Practica in this post and meet their investment team at Latitude59!
“Practica Capital is an early-stage VC firm with the sole purpose of backing Baltic Tech entrepreneurs. Since 2011, we have committed to the tech ecosystem in the Baltics to produce intrinsic outlier outcomes, and the time is now,“ says Donatas Keras, co-founder & partner at Practica Capital.
Practica Capital has invested exclusively in tech potential in the Baltic States for the last 10 years. They back great founders in their ambition in seed and selected pre-seed and A stages partnering with them as company builders.
Practica Capital manages three funds with €52M in AUM. To date, they have made more than 65 investments, including great companies like TransferGo, PVcase, Interactio, Montonio, Eneba, Ovoko, Trafi, CGtrader, and others.
Their investment portfolio companies have raised more than €100 million in additional funding from other funds and created over 1000 jobs in startups.
Practica Capital aims to be the first choice for startups from the Baltics who have the ambition to become leaders in their category. The goal is to partner with them to turn ideas or projects into successful businesses that create disproportionately positive value in a short time – 5-7 years.
“Our investment philosophy is centred around founders – winning teams that build organizations from an early stage to become leaders in big enough categories on top of proprietary (software) technology, founders’ domain expertise, and an agile mindset,” says Arvydas Bloze, partner at Practica Capital.
Playbook to achieve Series A
Series A signals a tipping point for any company. A great Series A outcome is a result of the everyday focus on a relevant set of core KPIs to provide an unbiased view and enough proof points towards a working model.
Our playbook is aimed at achieving a great Series A, starting from the day one:
- Recognize opportunity, understand the market forces behind it and why it exists, demand and supply robustness and motivation;
- Clearly define the category to start with, understand the size of the “prize” at the end of the road;
- Deconstruct the business model to find a set of core KPIs that are cause for commercial success;
- Set the “true north” direction together with the founders and take a role in corporate governance to monitor the roadmap;
- Focus on organizational workflow and scaling, HR and recruitment function;
- Facilitate fundraising process by warm intros and curated narrative for Series A.
ESG acceleration
Driven by the team’s strong belief, Practica Capital has always prioritized investment opportunities that are based on the essential ESG principles.
Using the resources available to PRI signees, internal resources, and external consultants we are in a process of building the Practica Capital Responsible Investment Policy. This new policy will become the essential pillar in our due diligence, investment, management, and reporting processes.
“I think that in a couple of coming years everyone will be expected to take action – startups not excluded. I think it means that given the current geopolitical and climate situation the startups that are not considering their business ESG metrics and are choosing investors that can’t help them succeed on their ESG journey will become obsolete in three to five years. If now we still see startups that are not putting much thought into ESG raising Series A or even B rounds – in the future will have problems raising even the Seed rounds,” says Gintas Daniusevicius, partner at Practica Capital.
Seeing the strong impact we can make in early-stage companies, Practica Capital will continue decisive and measurable actions to accelerate a change in the Baltic region.
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Arvydas Bloze, a Partner at Practica Capital, will be speaking at the “Deep tech science commercialization and capitalisation” panel during the Investor Day event. You’ll also have chance to see him on the Founder Stage on Friday at 11:40 for the VC’s Reverse Pitch Competition.
