When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the conclusion of the India-EU Free Trade Agreement on January 27, 2026, she called it the "mother of all deals."
Nearly two decades in the making, the agreement, the largest trade deal ever concluded by either side, covering €120 billion in goods trade and €59.7 billion in services, was framed as the moment European companies would finally get serious about India's 1.45 billion consumers.
Also read: When Digital India meets a dead end
But the more immediate story is less about what the FTA unlocks and more about what it finds already waiting. India has over 57 million registered MSMEs, per the Ministry of MSME's 2024-25 Annual Report.
Government programmes from Digital India to Jan Dhan have pushed connectivity, payments infrastructure, and smartphones deep into the economy. What they have not done, at scale, is give India's small business owners a functional online presence.
For one company in Vilnius, that moment had arrived twelve years earlier.
The market nobody was watching
Hostinger, a web hosting and online presence platform bootstrapped by young Lithuanian entrepreneurs in 2004, entered India in 2014 with fewer than 1,700 customers. It did not wait for a trade corridor, a bilateral framework, or a government push. It built a data centre in Mumbai, integrated UPI and RuPay payments, added Hindi-language support, and priced its services in Indian rupees.
