It’s not TooEarly to start a new galaxy

Fomo visited TooEarly Ventures at their home in the EBS building in Tallinn. Admittedly, I’m not new to the venture studio; I first met founders Triinu Lukas and Aneth Tinnus when they invited me to cover one of their defence tech hackathons, the DefHack Resilience edition, for another publication during the winter. 

Back then, their involvement was with Beamline Accelerator, but TooEarly was mentioned - it became a bit of a joke that every time I saw them afterwards, I didn’t know if it was too early to visit the venture studio or if they were just reminding me what it was called. 

Anyway, it’s summer in Tallinn and what better way to spend a glorious sunny day than going to visit the hive of activity they have been building to ‘help bold ideas become high-growth companies in six months’?

The climb

Nestled in a fifth floor wing of the EBS building on Lauteri tänav in Tallinn's city center, there are plenty of steps to climb before you get there, but once inside the venture studio and co-working space the steps become easier. You begin reading the post-it notes as you climb to words like ‘innovation’, ‘growth’ and ’creativity’.  Not sure if it’s intentional but the reading distracts from the increasing heart rate of the climb and you almost forget the effort you took on a hot day to scale them.

We settle into the chat as I’m keen to know how the pair met. Lukas confesses that she never saw herself ending up ‘in business’: “definitely not in a capitalist world,” she says, as she tells me her background was in the humanities and social sciences. To be fair, the remit for TooEarly Ventures does contain some directions of the moral compass that she set out using early in her career, so she has hardly sold her soul to the devil. 

Tinnus’ background is in psychology and organisational behaviour, and she's worked in marketing with different brands in Estonia and across Europe. It was a relative of Lukas' who introduced the pair - Lukas declares Tinnus the ‘sharpest pencil in Tallinn’. At that time, Lukas was CEO of Beamline Accelerator and brought Tinnus in, and after four years of working together and agreeing that the best part of the job is dealing with the very early stages of the startup journey, they decided to set up a sector-agnostic venture studio together. 

Venture studio

Venture studios have been slowly cropping up around the European ecosystem for the past few years. I’m keen to know the exact difference between it and VC, or even between incubators and accelerators. 

Lukas uses a Tinder analogy to clarify the VC part. “You meet up sometimes when you want to get lucky at shareholder meetings, right?! But Venture Studio is more, let's say, bringing up your kid together - it's a very committed relationship, at least the first year - this is our approach to it,” she says. 

“This is basically like the co-building model in some sense. We see the good idea of a good founder and then validate this idea together with them - we have the validation sprint mechanism and then later on some of the founders go on to the next phase, the builders programme,” says Tinnus. 

The validation programme is two months during which they work with founders to see if their idea will lead to clients. Sales is the primary goal, and if, in the two-month period, there is not a clear path to it, it will result in a pivot or they will leave. Lukas and Tinnus make it clear that the period is also about getting to know the teams, how they gel, and how founders handle themselves. So far, seventeen ideas have passed the programme, but not all of those seventeen have survived. 

Fast sales are what they are looking for, really; they are looking for founders who are less ‘focused on the investment loop and more focused on customers.’ They should be in D&D, says Tinnus; she means Digital and Deeptech, not the fantasy tabletop role-playing game! 

We are chatting in the lower kitchen area when one of the founders drops in to grab himself coffee. It’s Alonso Solis, CTO and co-founder of Guardian, smart tech for elderly care. He tells me Guardian will be featured in the Fomo’s Estonia's TOP10 healthtech startups in 2026. It’s a nice moment to hear someone talk about Fomo.Observer without initiating the conversation.

Investment

For now, any investments in the hopefuls that excel at TooEarly come from the EBS side. We discuss whether TooEarly will be raising a fund, and it's a clear yes; it's on the cards. They say they have some interest from Estonian funds, as well as from the huge pool of EBS alumni talent who have gone on to do well for themselves. But for now, it's not worth more than a mention. I just hope I get the exclusive news when it is! 

The new space

Surprisingly, on a sunny summer day in Tallinn, the office has some activity. Aside from the validation programme, TooEarly also has a co-working space, so there are plenty of builders around at different stages of the startup journey. 

Events are also held in the space, and once a month you can learn and network at the TooEarly Wednesdays meet-up. The next one #7: Psychology of Investing is held in August, on a Thursday, so you can tell these guys are adaptable to the needs of their audience!! The Guest speaker will be Alexandra Balkova talking about the decision process, cognitive biases and the emotional part in investing.

The exciting news is that the venture studio will move to the building currently being built at the back of the EBS building sometime around spring next year. The Eedu building is being purpose-built as an education and business campus.  

“Bigger premises, bigger event venues, more startups, more idea owners, and even better rooms for them to build what they have to build,” they tell me.

For now, they are 'perfecting their secret sauce, fine-tuning their methodology', and finding the most impactful founders to work with. They want to build a galaxy, with the startups as the stars. Personally, I think they are looking at it all wrong; they are the stars, illuminating the Estonian ecosystem cosmos, just with terrible analogies and bad jokes!