Lithuania’s Newest Unicorn: “Bootstrapping Wasn’t Exactly the Plan”

Bootstrapping runs deep in CEE’s tech ecosystem (even if the Baltic countries increasingly position themselves as the New Nordics rather than CEE). Lithuanian Oxylabs took it further than most, spending more than a decade building without a single outside investment.

Founded in Vilnius in 2015, the web intelligence company scaled into a global data infrastructure business while remaining entirely bootstrapped. In July 2026, however, it took a significant turn: Oxylabs secured its first external investment, raising €113.6 million ($130 million) from Warburg Pincus in a deal that valued the company at €3.1 billion ($3.6 billion), well beyond the unicorn threshold.

A month after the announcement, The Recursive sat down with Julius Černiauskas, Oxylabs’ Chairman of the Board, who previously spent 7 years as CEO, and Chief Governance and Strategy Officer Dennis Grybauskas to discuss why a company that had managed to grow without investors decided it was finally time to bring one in.

“We realized that it’s not just for money,” Černiauskas tells me. “We wanted to get a good partner, especially in these times where you have to partner a lot with the AI companies. And we wanted someone who has a really good name in the US to show that our company could be trusted by anyone.”