The Baltic M&A and Private Equity Forum: Bigger than the Baltics – ambition, execution, and the deals that prove it

This year’s Baltic M&A and Private Equity Forum in Riga brought together the region’s deal‑making community to reflect on where the market is heading next. The discussions made one thing clear: conditions have changed. Deals take longer, buyers are more selective, preparation matters more than ever before, and geopolitical uncertainty remains part of the backdrop. At the same time, activity continues, and the focus has shifted to what can actually be executed.

This year’s theme, “Bigger than the Baltics”, captured that shift well. It reflects a growing ambition across the region to look beyond local markets. More companies are building for scale from the start, more investors are thinking in terms of cross‑border growth rather than regional limits, and outbound M&A is steadily gaining momentum.

The real question is whether companies, investors and institutions can move fast enough to capture a narrow set of openings: succession‑driven deal flow, defence‑driven capability-building, and a new wave of outbound growth.

The forum, hosted by Sorainen managing partner Eva Berlaus and Mārtiņš Bičevskis, brought together investors, founders, advisors and business-owners from across the Baltics and beyond. The most notable transactions of the year were recognised at the Baltic Deals of the Year awards, including deals led by Salling Group, Tele2/Manulife, nexos.ai, BaltCap and Piletilevi PLG.

Thinking bigger: how the Baltics position themselves for global capital

Opening the forum, Ieva Jāgere, director general of the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (LIAA), set the tone by reframing the Baltics’ position in the global investment landscape. “Being bigger than the Baltics does not begin with geography. It begins with mindset,” she said, pointing to a shift from local ambition to international relevance.

She reinforced that this shift is not only about scale or strategy, but also about how investors perceive the region. “Attracting investment is not only about numbers or deal structures – it is about trust, about the ability to make decisions under uncertainty, and about how convincingly we position ourselves as a region in the global market,” she said.

The message reflected the reality many participants see in practice: strong financials and solid strategies are not enough on their own. Execution credibility, positioning clarity, and the ability to communicate a coherent story increasingly determine whether a deal moves forward.

Resilience reimagined: dealmaking in CEE

Stanislav Sawczyn, head of Central and South-Eastern Europe at Rothschild & Co, followed her with a keynote that both reinforced and tested the opening optimism. During his opening, he asked the room a question: how many attendees had checked the news on their way over, and whether what they saw had changed anything about that day’s meetings. His point, which was later borne out in the discussion, was that headlines and deal mechanics do not always move in sync.

Sawczyn began by addressing geopolitical spillovers. Based on what his company are seeing in active transactions, recent developments around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz have not materially disrupted deal execution in the region. Processes that were already underway are continuing, and the immediate impact on deal flow remains limited. In this context, he noted that developments in artificial intelligence are currently having a more tangible impact on deal activity than geopolitics.

He then made a broader, structural argument about Central and Eastern Europe: the catch-up model is coming to an end. “The diagnosis is very clear that the catch-up growth model is actually over,” he said, citing rising wages and AI-driven commoditisation of routine work. The next model, in his view, must be R&D- and IP-led. CEE’s advantage cannot stay rooted in cost arbitrage.

Two themes from his keynote resurfaced repeatedly later on. One was resilience. He described how Gulf states are building international portfolios “explicitly as a resilience strategy” and investing in redundancy, rather than just efficiency. The second was sovereignty, in two forms: resource nationalism and “power and data sovereignty”. AI is not only about software, he argued; it is also about energy and infrastructure.

He also flagged the flipside of the Baltics’ progress: reduced competitiveness. Ukraine’s post-war workforce, he said, may resemble the Baltics and Poland in the early 2000s, becoming both a reconstruction partner and a competitor for investment flows. The response is to move up the value chain faster.

The deal flow continues, but the bar is higher

From a macro perspective, the panel on market outlook brought the discussion closer to day to day dealmaking. The message from across the panel was consistent: activity continues, but conditions are more demanding.

Valērija Lieģe, partner at Oaklins Baltics and Oaklins Cyprus, noted that while the firm had just had its “most successful year” with eight transactions and a strong start to the current year, the dynamic has shifted. “Maybe it’s not that bad,” she said, but the difference lies in how selective the market has become. The clear trend she identified was a flight to quality. “People want very good companies,” she said, adding that assets that might have been marketable a few years ago now struggle to attract interest. Buyers are looking for scale, strategic fit, and owners they can work with. The panel’s consensus was that transactions are still ongoing, but only for businesses that meet a much higher bar.

Henrik Igasta, managing partner at Superia, reinforced this point. “Despite all the headlines and all the doom and gloom, deals are happening,” he said, but “it is taking much longer to get deals across the line.” Buyers are more selective, including local private equity players who no longer feel the same urgency to deploy capital. As a result, processes take longer and negotiations are tighter.

Julijus Grigaliūnas, managing partner at Porta Finance, extended the discussion beyond deal flow to competitiveness. “What got us here is not going to get us there,” he said. The traditional catch up drivers are fading. “We’re no longer cheap,” he added, arguing that future growth depends on innovation, IP, talent and stronger institutions. He also warned that institutional quality will play a decisive role, noting that “our institutions are what would take us there in the future.”

What clearly emerged from the panel was a dual reality. On one hand, markets remain active, and transactions continue. On the other hand, the threshold for things to get done has risen significantly. The environment rewards preparation, clarity and scale, leaving less room for anything that falls short.

Defence M&A: a hot sector with a closing window

The defence panel took the “Bigger than the Baltics” theme into a sector where urgency is crucial and timing matters. Moderator Laimonas Skibarka, partner and member of the Defence group at Sorainen, framed the key question: should founders and investors sell now, or scale further to create more value?

Defence investment across Europe is increasing, driving stronger order visibility and renewed investor interest in the sector. What was difficult to finance only a few years ago is now attracting both private capital and strategic attention.

Wolff van Sintern, partner and co-founder of ETNA, noted that Europe, unlike the US, has historically lacked private capital in the defence sector, but this is starting to change. He framed the market as not local, but regional in scope: “Although Brolis Defence Group happens to be in Vilnius, we look at the market as NATO Europe from Vilnius.”

The clearest “act now” view came from Juris Viktors Ozols, founder and former CEO of Ammunity, and now CEO at VDS Manufacturing. He emphasised that defence manufacturing is highly capital-intensive and heavily dependent on access to the supply chain. “You have to either sell, find a partner, or find an investment company… because you need capital, and you need it quickly,” he said, indicating that there is a limited window: “three to five years.”

Donatas Sirgedas, CEO at Quantum Systems Lithuania, highlighted another structural constraint: fragmentation. Already established Baltic companies are growing constantly, but newcomers who cannot access NATO or European markets will likely need to join established supply chains, not necessarily through full exits but through integration. He also highlighted procurement cycles of roughly 2.5 to 3.5 years, a rhythm that determines whether a company can survive long enough to win the next round.

Ukraine featured as a practical benchmark. Companies that can demonstrate real-world deployments gain credibility, with “battle-tested” solutions seen as a strong signal of product readiness.

Dr Michaela Stessl, head of the CEE Defence Working Group at DLA Piper, framed the decision more conditionally. Assets that are ready to integrate or depend on regulatory approvals may be better positioned for an earlier exit, while others may benefit from scaling with the market.

The panel converged on one conclusion: growth is possible, but not without capital, access, and speed. The choice is not whether to scale, but how – independently or through partnership – while the opportunity window remains open.

The Rimi deal: strategy, trust and the hidden cost of IT

Mārtiņš Ķezberis, strategy director at Rimi Baltic Group, opened with a line that captured an insider experience: “I was sold, and I was bought last year.” He explained the deal through a simple strategic mismatch. Rimi was a “plum”, the deal’s code name, chosen because it was “tasty and juicy.” Why sell it? “Simple answer: it didn’t fit in ICA’s strategy.” The seller’s new ecosystem strategy focused on Sweden, and the Baltics did not fit.

Why buy it? “Actually, the same answer,” he said. It fitted the buyer’s, Salling Group’s, strategy, “Aspire 28”, which included growth in adjacent markets. Ownership structures mattered on both sides. He described the seller’s complex model of independent store owners and the buyer’s foundation model that required reinvesting or donating, not extracting profits. “So they have to invest,” he said, turning governance into deal logic.

The turning point was human, not financial. Trust played a central role in the process, with both sides aligning quickly despite the size of the transaction. “They trusted the seller,” Ķezberis said, describing how the Scandinavian buyer found common ground early in acquiring from an owner that was also Scandinavian, which helped the deal move forward. He also addressed a common question in the region: whether the sale was driven by the war in Ukraine. The answer was no, though it reflected differing levels of risk tolerance among investors.

Operationally, he said, customers and suppliers saw little change, and the same was true for employees, due to the former and incoming owner both being from similar Scandinavian cultures. Management felt more trust than they had expected; the CEO was not replaced, “which is not that usual.”

Then came a warning, which many M&A veterans will recognise: “The biggest challenge was IT.” His advice was practical and pointed: build IT infrastructure to be separable long before a transaction. In his words, that factor will only “grow bigger” in future deals.

Succession: the wave is coming, but readiness is lagging

Mārtiņš Mellēns, from the Private Equity and Principal Investing practice at McKinsey & Company, provided a structured explanation of why mid-market deal flow will increasingly be driven by founders exiting. He framed family-owned businesses as central to the economy and argued that succession is a societal process as much as a financial one.

In Europe, he cited 75,000 to 80,000 companies with more than EUR 100 million in revenue expected to undergo generational change over the next two years. He challenged some of the folklore around family business survival rates, then offered a practical lever: introducing professional capital during succession can increase survivorship by a factor of four.

His diagnosis of the Baltics was more analytical but led to a similar conclusion. The wave is “here, but not yet fully there,” since many founders are still operationally involved. The region shows “high intent but low action.” He cited a statistic: 85% of Baltic family-owned businesses say they want to manage succession, but far fewer have concrete plans in place. Second-generation involvement in meaningful decision roles is limited.

The bottleneck is not opportunity but lack of readiness. Investors pass on opportunities not because businesses are unattractive, but because “you’re not ready to transact.” Problems include balance sheet cleanup, founder-dependent know-how, and low cash flow predictability due to weak budgeting processes. His call to action was directed at advisors: legal, M&A, and financial specialists have a role in building the infrastructure that turns intent into executable transactions.

From partnership to exit: the MBL case in practice

The Danish MBL case study, presented by Nerijus Drobavičius, partner at INVL Baltic Sea Growth Fund and INVL Private Equity Fund II, offered a view of value creation from entry to exit. INVL invested in 2020 and exited in 2025, making “more than three times cash on cash.”

The story began with misalignment: the family wanted to replace a mezzanine investor, but INVL wanted control. The deal only became possible when both sides adjusted. INVL accepted a 48% stake, and the family offered a preferred return that paid INVL before the family received its capital back. That structure signalled belief in the business case and aligned incentives.

His most provocative point was about contracts. The shareholders’ agreement, he said, “is not needed in peacetime. It will only work in wartime.” So the real foundation was trust. “Keeping our word… was much more important compared to what we had in the contract,” he said.

Value creation came through adaptation as COVID hit demand, raw materials spiked, and energy costs rose. The response was to prioritise volumes and protect customers, even when margins suffered. When markets rebounded, EBITDA doubled and then tripled. Another major value lever was repositioning: the company moved from a contract manufacturing organisation to a contract manufacturing and development organisation. That “D” added “two times the EBITDA on valuation immediately,” he said, because the market rewarded capability, not just capacity.

Where does the next return come from? A market with capital, but limited scale

The institutional investors panel, moderated by Ernests Bordāns, partner at Livonia Partners, returned to a familiar friction point: the Baltics offer opportunities for growth, but public markets remain thin, and alternatives are still maturing.

Edmunds Antufjevs, head of Investment Banking at Signet Bank, described a strong bond market and a weak equity market. Corporate bond issuance was active, while IPO activity was minimal. He noted that international investor interest becomes visible primarily at larger deal sizes, typically from around €100 million. In debt markets, he also highlighted a clear progression in investor participation, with smaller issuances taken up by local investors, and larger deals attracting institutional and, increasingly, international capital.

Rokas Žemaitis, partner at the Baltic Capital Markets Acceleration Fund, pointed to the region’s strong growth relative to the rest of Europe and its private equity track record, noting that the Baltics remain underexplored by international investors.

Oskars Briedis, funds manager at Swedbank Investment Management, translated that into allocation constraints. Excluding government bonds, Swedbank has invested roughly EUR 300 million in Baltic stocks, corporate debt, and alternatives, around 7% of its total assets, split roughly equally between public and alternatives. For equities, the investable universe is limited and depends on free float and liquidity. In alternatives, late-stage private equity and real estate dominate.

Ieva Jansone-Buka, chairwoman of the Supervisory Board at Altum, raised a systemic concern: pension reforms in Lithuania and Estonia are creating uncertainty and could weaken the fundraising base. She warned that development institutions like Altum, ILTE and SmartCap risk becoming “the last pillars standing and willing to invest in the market”, a situation that should be strictly avoided, as risks need to be shared across the market and not carried by governments alone.

The final exchange returned to buy-and-build. Jansone-Buka said she would pitch the Baltics to an investor willing to “dig into the market” and build consolidation strategies in fragmented industries, particularly in Latvia. The discussion closed with consolidation in fragmented sectors seen as a longer-term opportunity requiring patience but offering potential for strong returns.

Outbound growth in action: scaling and acquiring beyond the Baltics

Jason Uslan, chief commercial officer of Wildix, described a company born in Italy and moved to Estonia in 2015, now with more than one million active users, over USD 50 million in revenues, and operating in more than 130 markets, and the only European UCaaS vendor on the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Wildix’s story is a sequence of reinventions: from IP telephony to a WebRTC platform to unified communications to verticalisation, and now to AI.

His AI message was anti-hype. “Our AI is built to be outcome-based,” he said, focused on tangible ROI. “Many AI projects fail because you’re not able to show the results,” he warned. Remote work was positioned as a scaling advantage that enabled global hiring. The partner-led go-to-market model was another lever: over 1,000 active partners enable global scale while acting locally.

The investor relationship, he said, was about filling gaps, not controlling the business. “I don’t pretend to know everything,” he said, mentioning he referred to Livonia Partners for strategy and advice. It was a practical example of the day’s repeated point: trust and alignment make the machinery work.

Then came the outbound growth panel, moderated by Mike Southon, Chief Editor at StartupMafia, featuring Artūrs Čirjevskis, CEO of the Food Union Group in Europe, and Sven Nuutmann, founder and CEO of PLG Group. Both described growth through acquisitions, but with a shared integration philosophy: keep local brands and local management, and standardise tools and back-office.

Čirjevskis said Food Union operates in six countries and expanded because the category was unconsolidated. The exported asset was not the brand but the operating model. “We were not pursuing expansion of particular brands,” he said, focusing instead on how the group analyses, communicates, and wins shelf space. He emphasised that food remains a deeply local category, where consumer preferences are closely tied to identity: “Food… is a new form of nationalism.” Local identity is not something you break; it is something you work with.

Nuutmann described an even more explicit playbook: enter markets where PLG can become the dominant player, avoid markets dominated by the largest global platforms, maintain local domains and management, and improve performance through KPIs. He framed ticketing as inherently local and defined marketplace strength in terms of direct user traffic. “The biggest asset is our users, because they just automatically come to us,” he said.

Outbound growth works when you respect local realities, bring disciplined execution, and keep leadership stable long enough to compound improvements.

Beyond the deal: why culture decides what the spreadsheet cannot

The fireside chat on leadership and culture, with Terje Eichelmann, associate partner at Amrop, and Jürgo Preden, founder of Airi BMS and former founder of Defendec, brought to the fore a theme that had been present throughout the day but was rarely stated directly.

Preden was clear: advisors tend to focus on the financial and legal aspects, yet “figures are actually created by people.” Deals can be structured correctly and still fail after closing if leadership teams cannot work together. In one case he described, within months of a transaction two CEOs became an obstacle, leaving the integration unresolved.

Both speakers argued that a company’s culture should be assessed well before signing, not only after. They pointed to common risks: employee uncertainty, information withheld during due diligence, and the difficulty of evaluating leadership teams without triggering defensive behaviour. They also highlighted differences between ownership models. Family businesses often prioritise loyalty and long-term relationships, while private equity emphasises performance, speed and accountability, creating an inherent tension that needs to be managed early.

In that context, the discussion narrowed down to a simple but revealing test: understanding ambition and motivation on both sides of the transaction is critical. If the underlying motivation is purely financial, it is unlikely to sustain alignment through the demands of integration and growth.

Flow: a closing reminder about ambition and sustainability

The final session deliberately stepped outside deal-making but still landed on a message relevant to it. Rihards Zaļupe, a Latvian composer, producer and percussionist, and co-author of the Academy-Award-winning film Flow, spoke about flow as a state of mind and a method for doing big things from a small place.

He described imagination as the start of his journey and said he could always clearly imagine being at the Oscars. Then he described the cost of constant output: overwork, loss of creativity, and severe anxiety. The shift came when he realised that happiness is not waiting at the top. “These things aren’t waiting for us at the top of the mountain. They are found on the way up, in the process, during the climb.”

He offered three lines to take away: “The summit isn’t the goal… the goal is learning to love the climb.” “Flow doesn’t come from pressure. It comes from peace and knowledge.” “You don’t need to be extraordinary to start. Just start, learn, and flow.”

In a forum devoted to capital, ambition and execution, it was a reminder that scaling is not only a technical question. It is also about sustaining the human energy that enables execution.

The Baltic M&A and Private Equity Forum 2026 was organised by Sorainen on 23 April in Riga, in cooperation with the leading Latvian business media outlet Dienas Bizness. As in previous years, the event gathered together 250 participants representing private equity, venture capital funds and investment banking, including advisors, lawyers, business executives and owners from the Baltics and beyond.