2022 ended with a total investment of EUR 90.9 million in Latvian startups. The latest news came as a New Years’ gift to the ecosystem – Aerones announced a $38.9 million round. What makes this story even more appealing is that the company announced their previous $9M seed round during the TechChill event in April 2022.
You can find information about other rounds during 2022 in the Latvian Startup Ecosystem Recap here. But the TechChill team also decided to contribute by putting together data that is collected from the conference attendees. This time, we took a look at investors and startups that showed the biggest interest in Latvia. So here are some interesting insights.
Overall, 362 startups from 32 countries attended TechChill 2022. This is a very significant number, because only two months before the event Russia started its war in Ukraine. As Latvia is located close to both countries, some startups as well as investors and conference speakers cancelled their participation in the event. As a result, overall 70% of all startups represented Baltic countries, 12% came from Nordic countries, 16% were from other European countries and 2% came from even further afield.
69% of startups who attended TechChill 2022 were seeking capital. The biggest proportion of them had their product ready for the market. 38% said that they are ready to grow and scale at the current stage. The majority of attendees were representing startups working on a software product at seed or pre-seed stage in the software-as-a-service (SaaS), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and e-commerce industries. A significant proportion indicated that they are developing enterprise software. What is interesting is that just over half of all attendees focused on B2B rather than B2C.
260 investors from more than 147 funds attended TechChill 2022. 70% of them were from Europe. The majority were ready to invest in either the Seed, Pre-Seed or Series-A stage. Investors were mostly seeking software startups so TechChill was the perfect matchmaking event, because 79% of startups were developing software products and looking at the AI, ML, SaaS and enterprise software industries.
