Vilnius is a fintech capital and a laser capital, at once

How Vilnius’s tech scene grew

Two industries that sell almost nothing domestically, both headquartered in the same half-million-person city.

The fintech story

Lithuania decided to become a financial licensing jurisdiction and largely succeeded. It sits in the top ten of the Global Fintech Index and leads continental Europe on the number of licensed e-money and payment institutions, with roughly 250 fintech firms in a country of under three million people. The best-known consequence is Revolut, which opened in Vilnius in 2017 ahead of Brexit and upgraded to a full banking licence in 2021.

The story nobody outside the sector knows

Vilnius is also one of the world’s centres of laser manufacturing. Light Conversion, spun out of Vilnius University’s Laser Research Center in 1994, holds around eighty per cent of the global market for tunable femtosecond lasers — more than ten thousand systems installed, over eight hundred staff. Ekspla, founded in 1992, traces its people back to a 1983 effort to build the world’s most advanced picosecond laser. Between ninety and ninety-five per cent of Lithuanian laser output is exported, and the sector earns more than twice the national average profit per employee.

How Vilnius businesses buy digital work

Neither industry serves the domestic market. Both sell licences or instruments to the rest of the world from a city of half a million people, which tells you what the local commercial culture optimises for: export, precision and regulatory credibility. Vilnius buyers in these sectors procure like international companies, in English, with compliance requirements attached. The domestic Lithuanian business market underneath is entirely separate — Lithuanian-language, price-aware, and conventional. Selling to one while sounding like a supplier to the other is the common mistake.

The full piece

Vilnius: a fintech capital and a laser capital, in the same small city

How well do you know Vilnius’s digital economy?

Why FastSites works here

For the domestic Lithuanian business underneath the fintech and laser headlines, a clear published price in Lithuanian fits this market far better than borrowed export-sector credibility.

Built mobile-first. Decide which Vilnius you’re selling to before you write a word — sounding like an international compliance-grade supplier when you’re not is the common mistake here.