From 100 Layoffs to €404M: How Lithuania's Kilo Rebuilt Itself as an AI-Powered Venture Studio

In 2023, one of Europe's fastest-growing companies stopped expanding. After years of rapid growth, this Lithuanian health and wellness venture laid off more than 100 employees, brought in a new CEO, and faced the challenges of growing too quickly without a clear path forward. The company had risen fast, but now it had to decide what came next. That company was Kilo, and its decision to rebuild itself from the ground up is now one of Europe's most remarkable turnaround stories. Today, Kilo is Europe's largest venture studio, valued at €404 million, with a portfolio of 36 companies and a bold bet on AI as the engine for its future.

The "100 layoffs" that shaped this story came at the start of 2023. It wasn't a failure, but an overcorrection. The company had grown so fast that it couldn't sustain its own momentum. Markets were tightening, funding was drying up, and the strategy that had worked for years was suddenly obsolete. According to Žygimantas Šurintas, who took over as CEO of Kilo's parent company, Kilo Health, during this period, the company was trying to do too much. It had become bloated and needed to find focus. The restructuring was brutal. Over 100 employees were let go, and the company had to reconfigure its entire operation. But Šurintas and his team realized that the company's real value wasn't in any single product it was in its ability to build and scale digital health solutions rapidly. So they pivoted from being a single-health-app company to becoming a venture studio, a company that builds, launches, and scales multiple startups at once.

The venture studio model is different from a traditional startup. Instead of focusing on one product, a venture studio creates an ecosystem of startups, sharing resources, expertise, and infrastructure across the portfolio. In Kilo's case, the shift meant moving away from building just its own health apps toward acquiring, launching, and accelerating a wide range of digital companies. The first major sign of success came in 2024, when Kilo secured significant funding from a major European venture capital firm. By 2025, its portfolio had grown to 36 companies, with several already generating significant revenue.

But the real game-changer has been the integration of AI into Kilo's internal operations. According to Šurintas, AI is the backbone of their new model. He explains that they use AI to analyze market trends, validate product ideas, and even automate parts of the development process. This allows them to launch new companies faster, reduce costs, and test ideas without over-investing. What makes Kilo's model unique is how it uses AI not just in its products, but in its internal operations. The company has built its own proprietary AI tools to validate product concepts before development begins, analyze user behavior across its portfolio to identify cross-selling opportunities, automate customer support and retention workflows, predict churn and proactively intervene, and identify acquisition targets that fit the portfolio.

One of Kilo's most successful AI-powered products is a mental health app that uses generative AI to deliver personalized therapy sessions. The app was developed in less than four months, a fraction of the time it would have taken using traditional development methods. Today, Kilo's portfolio of 36 companies spans health, wellness, productivity, and AI-driven consumer apps. Its valuation of €404 million makes it one of the most valuable tech companies in Lithuania. The company has rebuilt its workforce to over 500 employees, operating across Europe and North America, with proprietary AI tools driving concept validation, customer retention, and acquisition.

Šurintas expects the venture studio model to accelerate as AI becomes more powerful. He describes their vision as building a factory for startups, where AI allows them to reduce the risk of launching new companies and to scale them faster than ever before. Kilo is also expanding beyond health and wellness into other categories where AI can create value, including fintech, education, and enterprise software. The company plans to launch an additional ten new companies in the next twelve months. The turnaround story isn't just about the technology, though. It's about resilience. Šurintas admits that there were moments when the company could have failed, but they had a clear vision of what they wanted to build and refused to give up.

Kilo's journey from mass layoffs to a €404 million valuation is a testament to the power of reinvention. By pivoting from a single-product health company to an AI-driven venture studio, the company turned a moment of crisis into an opportunity for transformation. Today, it stands as one of Europe's most innovative tech companies, and a reminder that sometimes, the hardest decisions lead to the greatest successes. The company's story demonstrates that in the rapidly evolving tech landscape, the ability to adapt and restructure around emerging technologies can be the difference between failure and becoming a market leader. As Kilo continues to expand its portfolio and refine its AI capabilities, it serves as a model for other companies facing similar crossroads, proving that even in the face of significant setbacks, a clear vision and a willingness to embrace change can lead to extraordinary outcomes.