From its humble beginnings as a startup incubator 20 years ago, Lithuania’s Sunrise Tech Park has evolved into the region’s premier hub for tech startup experience sharing and networking. Over the next few years, park aims to transform into a European-level cleantech competence center.
Over two decades, the park has provided innovation support services to more than 350 Lithuanian companies, contributed to the emergence and growth of nearly 150 startups, and executed 44 projects accelerating innovation culture, collaboration between science and business, and integrating sustainability and digitization.
In the last six years alone, investments attracted for the development of startups and park projects exceeded 18 million Euros.
“Today we witness the organization’s transformation into a new quality competence center, employing current resources further expanding high-tech infrastructure for startup incubation, nurturing innovation culture and the startup ecosystem,” says Laima Balčiūnė, Sunrise Tech Park CEO.
The cleantech business promotion initiatives created by the park became the first projects of this type, the example of which was later followed by many businesses that are expanding globally today.
Initiatives like the “Climate Launchpad” or the pre-accelerator “Futurepreneurs” were the first of their kind in Lithuania, dedicated to addressing sustainability and climate change challenges.
Over two decades, the park has seen the growth of globally recognized and successful companies such as “Oxipit,” “Deeper,” “Bored Panda,” “Eskimi,” and “Integrated Optics.”
In the last couple of years, a new biotech startup cluster has naturally emerged in the park, featuring prominent names in Lithuania’s life sciences startup ecosystem, including “CasZyme,” “Delta Biosciences,” “Vital 3D Technologies” and others.
The close partnership with Vilnius TECH and Vilnius University’s academic community significantly contributed to the growth of these technological startups.
Embarking on Cleantech leadership
Lithuania’s cleantech sector currently leads in size and scope among Baltic countries. Notable startups in this sector, such as “Vinted”, “PVcase”, “Inbalance Grid” and “Ovoko” have successfully attracted multimillion-dollar investments from international VC funds, demonstrating Lithuania’s maturity in the cleantech sector.
However, the rapidly growing sector still faces challenges in attracting more investments, with a need for increased government attention to create favorable conditions for the development of companies in this field, including tailored regulatory environments.
Therefore, one of the park’s major tasks this year was the foundation of the “Cleantech for Baltics” coalition and the formulation of a climate change mitigation agenda for local governments. Alongside partners from Latvia and Estonia, the park took the lead in advocating for the importance of the clean technology sector to regions economies and positioning Lithuania in the global economic context.
“In renewable energy, new mobility and other cleantech sectors, significant global investments are coming, and we should use this trend to our advantage. Several years ago we established Lithuania’s cleantech cluster and since then we actively participate in the national mission “Smart and Climate Neutral Lithuania”. We are ready for a breakthrough,” says Laima Balčiūnė of Sunrise Tech Park.
Today, Sunrise Tech Park is considered the major technology park in the Baltic countries, accumulating knowledge in the cleantech sector and facilitating startups in this field. The park’s new generation Sustainable business incubator-accelerator is under way, injecting even more energy into this dynamic ecosystem.
Recently, the park became a partner in the European Commission’s pan-European network who will implement a €20 million European Innovation Council (EIC) action supporting Ukraine’s innovation community. The initiative will support at least 200 Ukrainian deep tech start-ups with up to €60 000 each to further develop their innovation and business activities.
