Silicon Vikings on a Nordic Tour: Next stop Tallinn/Estonia

I want to start with a big thank you to Andrus Viirg and Tõnis Mäe at Enterprise Estonia, Heidi Kakko and Andrus Oks at Estonian Development Fund, Yrjö Ojasaar at basically everything related to the Estonian ecosystem for startups and to Raido Pikkar at Tehnopol!

My day was filled with great meetings in a country that only recently (1991) was declared independent from the Soviet Union. Today Estonia with a population of only 1.34 million people has the highest GDP per person among former Soviet republics, listed as a high-income economy by the World Bank and as an advanced economy by the International Monetary Fund. Estonia is also ranked highly for press freedom, economic freedom, democracy and political freedom and education. It’s only a matter of time before Estonia also gets a top ranking in the European innovation indexes for its absolutely flourishing innovation, startup and investment scene.

This country surely has a lot of great startups and one of the main tech company role models that was mentioned numerous times was Skype, a true Nordic company, now owned by Microsoft, founded by Niklas Zennström, (Estonian/Swedish) and Janus Friis (Danish). Skype has even after the Microsoft acquisition most of the development team and 44% of the overall employees in Tallinn and Tartu in Estonia.

Thanks to the incubators, accelerators, startup funding and programs provided by organizations
like Enterprise Estonia, Estonian Development Fund, the Business Angel groups, Tehnopol,
Garage48, the Startup Wise Guys and the universities in Tallinn and Tartu several startups are going from idea to growth on a global market. Most of the hot tech growth companies coming out of Estonia are software companies. To name a few check out www.erply.com (retail point of
sale and inventory management), www.pipedrive.com (a sales pipeline management software),www.grabcad.com (a CAD model library and community for CAD engineers), www.fortumo.com(enables app and game developers to monetize their users through mobile operator billing) andwww.playtech.com (the world’s largest publicly-traded online gaming software supplier).

Keep a close eye on Estonia’s startup scene, with a dealflow of about 120 startups per year only
to Tehnopol and investment funds that can invest up to 3 MEUR in early stage companies we are bound to see many more successful Estonian startups take on the world. Thank you Estonia!

Now off to the country that brought us the very Angry but cute and successful Birds, Helsinki/Finland is my next stop on the tour…stay tuned.