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Last updated on October 30, 2025
Tomas Okmanas built Nord Security from a two-person team to a $3b+ company, all while bootstrapping for over a decade. Here’s how he did it – and what he learned along the way.
When Tomas was six years old, his dad brought home a Pentium computer to their small flat in Vilnius, Lithuania.
“It was love at first sight,” Tomas says. “I loved seeing how it worked, and the creativity it brought.”
Fast forward to today, he’s the founder of Nord Security, the company behind NordVPN and other leading tech businesses. He also co-founded Lithuanian accelerator, Tesonet, in 2008, and announced the launch of his newest venture at the beginning of this year, nexos.ai, an all-in-one AI platform for enterprises.
All the while, he’s a father of four, part owns Lithuanian basketball team, BC Žalgiris, and acquired BC London Lions last year, and still manages to go to every game.
He’s built one of the world’s biggest cybersecurity brands, but his path to a $3b mega valuation wasn’t typical Silicon Valley fare – Tomas and his team bootstrapped for over a decade, growing from two people to 2,000 employees.
From Tech-Obsessed Teen to Cybersecurity Founder
At school, Tomas learned to code and how networks work, and he started working at an internet service provider at 17 installing broadband in people’s homes. Nine years later, he became CTO. It was there that he spotted an emerging trend.
“I saw that privacy and security was becoming a thing, but back in 2012, no one cared about it,” Tomas explains. “I believed that floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and USBs were going to die, and the network and internet were going to become king.”
When Tomas pitched building a VPN product to his boss, the answer was no. So he left to do it himself, founding NordVPN in 2012 with his co-founder, Eimantas Sabaliauskas. Password manager NordPass, encrypted cloud storage NordLocker, and network access security NordLayer all came along in 2019, followed by a threat exposure management platform, NordStellar, in May 2024.
Back in 2012, Lithuania’s biggest VC fund had just €7m in assets, and international investors weren’t looking at the region. Tomas and his co-founders had no choice but to bootstrap.
Building NordVPN
“The first day we earned $1,000, I remember it until today,” Tomas says. “That was the most product-market fit moment of them all. We couldn’t believe it.”
With just four people on the team, that milestone validated everything. From there, NordVPN scaled from a handful of people to thousands.
“Going from a technical engineer to having to learn everything from HR to legal was huge,” Tomas reflects. “The biggest challenge was letting go of attention to detail, trusting others, and moving to processes. I knew what everyone was doing when we were small. Now I’m just one employee of this huge spaceship.”
Tomas is candid about mistakes along the way. Network infrastructure issues that stopped payments for a day. Marketing campaigns that didn’t work. Not firing fast enough. Projects that should have been ditched sooner.
“Good lessons cost a lot,” he says. “We made mistakes and spent money on them, but they were valuable lessons.”
His advice for founders facing similar growth? Don’t go into areas outside your core competence. Stay curious. And act fast when something isn’t working.
“If you’re not curious anymore, I think it’s time for a change,” he adds.
AI and Work-Life Harmony
Today, Nord Security operates under Tomas’ leadership, employing thousands of people across the seven businesses. Through Tesonet, he’s developed a portfolio of companies including web intelligence platform, Oxylabs, hosting provider, Hostinger, and cybersecurity firm, Surfshark.
But Tomas isn’t resting. “I don’t believe in work-life balance, but I believe in work-life harmony,” Tomas says. “You can’t go on holiday for seven days and turn off your phone. You won’t catch up,” he says. “The velocity of how technology is shifting is insane.”
At the same time, his kids will be five, six, seven, and eight this year, and he won’t miss a recital, or taking them to see BC Žalgiris play, a Lithuanian basketball team and his self-proclaimed “second religion”.
Now, with AI transforming the startup landscape, he’s excited to see where technology goes next. “A small startup can make technology that’s better than Google’s. Amazon can be disrupted because of agentic ecommerce,” Tomas explains. “It’s a big change of the status quo.”
What’s Next?
Tomas has just closed a €30m Series A for his new enterprise AI startup, nexos.ai just six months after launch. Its goal is to help enterprises streamline the adoption and management of LLMs.
Compared to when he started NordVPN, Tomas says the startup landscape in Lithuania has completely changed. It’s now one of the fastest-growing tech economies in Europe, with over 10 bootstrapped billion-dollar companies.
“At least six companies are generating €200-300 million in annual revenue, making €20-50 million in profit, and they’re not even talking about it publicly,” Tomas notes, “they’re just very humble, hard-working, exceptionally talented hustlers.”
“We have amazing founders here,” he says. And the dark winters help, he jokes: “What else do you do? You sit at your computer and build startups!”
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