Estonia has perfectly leveraged the population and tools available in the country. It ranks number one in Europe for total number of startups, Unicorns and VC investments per capita. It also ranks 1st in Europe for the quality of public education - clear proof that Estonians are given the tools to innovate and develop high-growth tech startups. As a result, it should come as no surprise that Estonia is also ranked as the 14th global startup ecosystem, despite only having a population of just over 1.3 Million people.
The government of Estonia is well aware that it has to reduce barriers to entry and proactively enhance innovation in its startup ecosystem in order to give Estonian startups the best chance of success and to grow the country's economy further. Some examples of the way the government is supporting the ecosystem include the Startup Estonia initiative which is a digital platform where investors, startup founders and more can connect, test products and offer cross-service exchanges. Additionally, it has developed a Startup Visa which easily allows you to immigrate to create a startup as a non-EU citizen and also helps you to hire non-EU talent for your native startup.
Relative to its size, Estonia has a great number of startup incubators and accelerators, 25 in Tallinn, alone that Estonian startups can utilise for vital funding to create a concept product, or mentorship to help them patch knowledge gaps. Furthermore, to allow a startup to expand internationally, greater funding is usually needed and this can be provided to startups in Estonia from one of 93 Venture Capital funds operating in the country.
1. Hi
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 11-50
Founders: Sean Rach, Stefan Rust
Hi is an Estonian startup that was founded in 2020 and currently operates within the FinTech market. It provides a neo-bank solution that allows you to get a personalised FIAT-currency debit card, in addition to getting access to a range of free subscriptions, spending rewards and boosters from using your card. It's also helpful if you travel a lot, as you can make use of its multi-currency accounts, allowing you to easily switch your money between currencies when you're using it abroad.
Putting the regulatory compliance in place to launch a bank, integrate multiple currencies and internationally expand with an NFT-related feature, which is planned, requires a lot of funding. To this end, in July 2023, Hi successfully raised $30 Million to facilitate its international expansion and integration of blockchain technology into its products.
2. Cino
Year Founded: 2022
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 1-10
Founders: Elena Churilova, Edward Poot
Cino is a FinTech startup in Estonia that was founded in 2022 and helps you to say goodbye to people owing you money. Its virtual card through its mobile app allows you to pay for things together, all in one tap. This means no more manually splitting the bill and chasing people for money after they say they'll just pay you back. You can use it either online or in person and it can be used for either, one off payments or recurring monthly bills, which is useful if you have roommates.
Developing the underlying software was the biggest expense for Cino and as it targets expansion following great initial success, it raised 1.4 Million Euros in October 2023. This investment will allow Cino to expand its hiring plans, as well as facilitate additional product development and customer acquisition.
3. Montonio
Year Founded: 2018
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 51-100
Founders: Markus Lember, Karl Kristjan Kalluste, Karel Nappus, Rasmus Õisma; Henrik Rank, Kristofer Turmen
Montonio is an Estonian startup that was founded in 2018 and is currently operating from the Estonian capital, Tallinn. It provides a platform for your e-commerce business, allowing you to easily manage your online payments and shipping. Removing two of the biggest headaches in e-commerce. For example, you can easily integrate a payment gateway with BNPL functionality. In addition, you can process refunds with the click of a button. This has led to a 97% success rate with Montonio.
Montonio has been very strategic with its investments, last raising funding in April 2022. This investment totalled $12 Million in a Series A round and has been used to begin the process of expanding across Europe and developing more products to become a one-stop shop for the post-checkout experience.
4. Yummy
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 101-250
Founders: Karl Paadam, Martin Salo
Yummy is a startup in Estonia that is creating the full meal preparation experience, supported with AI. It has a platform where it uses artificial intelligence to adapt any recipes you give it based on your own unique tastes. It even shows you what your completed dish may look like. On top of this, you still get the meal kit experience, meaning you don't have to go out shopping for ingredients and planning your to-do list, you can just focus on cooking your pre-portioned food.
The biggest expenses for Yummy have been within its hiring and the development of the AI used as a part of the platform. To help further the development of the artificial intelligence components and expand into Czechia, having already expanded to Poland, it raised 1.9 Million Euros in Pre-Seed funding.
5. Formaloo
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 11-50
Founders: Noosh Baratpour, Hasan Noori, Amir Hashemi, Farokh Shahabi
Formaloo is an Estonian startup that allows you to develop attractive and easy-to-use forms and surveys for a range of different uses. The best part is that you can do all of this for free. You can integrate these forms with more than 3000 different applications, allowing you to actually easily make use of the data that comes out of your forms and surveys. It is already used by a range of global organisations such as Hugo Boss, The University of Michigan and Ricoh and more.
Formaloo has already achieved good levels of success in its domestic market, however, it has been targeting more aggressive customer acquisition in the UK and Canada, two of its emerging markets. It raised 2 Million Euros in July 2023 in order to facilitate customer acquisition in these territories, as well as improving its position in existing markets.
6. Sunly
Year Founded: 2019
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 101-250
Founders: Priit Lepasepp
Sunly is an Estonian startup that aims to make the green future more viable by acting as an independent energy producer and developing a range of renewable energy projects in the Baltics and Poland. Some of these projects include the development of Solar Farms and offshore Wind Farms. It is one of the fastest growing independent energy providers in Eastern Europe and also targets other CleanTech startups for either acquisition or investment.
Creating and developing the infrastructure for energy generation projects is obscenely expensive, which is why Sunly makes use of external investment to fund its projects. For example, in February 2024, it raised 66 Million Euros to fund the creation of a large-scale array of solar farms across Poland.
7. Clevon
Year Founded: 2022
HQ: Viljandi, Estonia
Size: 51-100
Founders: Sander Agur
Clevon is an Estonian startup that was founded in 2022 and is one of the rare startups, based outside of Tallinn. It operates in the robotics market and is developing the next generation of on-demand delivery, through the use of larger-scale autonomous vehicles that can deliver your weekly groceries to your doorstep with ease. It also ensures that your costs on deliveries can be reduced by between 80-90 percent, making delivery more economically feasible.
In order to develop its autonomous vehicles and ensure they can be delivered safely- it requires a lot of expensive R&D and trials. It has raised a total of $16 Million to date and is further currently seeking $20 Million in investment so that it can continue the research and development of its vehicles.
8. Cognitiwe
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 11-50
Founders: Attila Algan, Mete Bayrak
Cognitiwe is a startup in Estonia that creates artificial intelligence solutions for your retail and manufacturing businesses. Utilising predictive vision technology, it allows you to reduce the risks your employees and customers face, prevent losses and ensure that you always have adequate stock levels of every product, with each product easily being quality checked. This ensures you're always able to serve your customers and identify the financial impacts of stock loss, safety beaches and more.
Developing its underlying technology suite for manufacturers and retail businesses will have required significant talent and expense. Now, it is aiming to expand into new markets such as the Americas, further into Europe and more. To facilitate this, Cognitiwe raised 1 Million Euros in a funding round that took place in February 2024.
9. Choise.com
Year Founded: 2022
HQ: Harju, Estonia
Size: 101-250
Founders: Vladimir Gorbunov
Choise.com is an Estonian startup that was founded in 2022 and gives you one of the safest ways to earn and buy cryptocurrencies. It currently has more than one million users and allows you to seamlessly swap, buy and sell cryptocurrencies in addition to earning passive income on the tokens you hold. You also get access to liquidity pools and a range of other income-generation tools. Effectively, you can get money just for holding and using crypto on the platform.
In order to make sure that its platform can securely hold its customers' funds and build in anti-fraud protections, significant expertise and expense were required. This is why, shortly after being founded, in November 2022 Choise.com successfully raised $33 Million to rapidly improve its platform and allow for rapid customer acquisition.
10. Primex Finance
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 11-50
Founders: Vlad Kostanda
Primex Finance is an Estonian Startup that works in the Blockchain market. It allows you to engage in spot margin trading through the use of a non-custodial protocol. This makes Primex the most accessible trading and lending platform, which allows you to go straight to the source, and eliminate most of the expense that is generated through intermediaries when trading and lending. You can lend your digital assets in return for yield farming fees, which presents a great passive income opportunity.
Primex Finance has only raised a single round of startup funding since being founded, with this investment taking place in February 2022. The total raised was $5.7 Million and this income has been widely used to improve the underlying technology of Primex and to drive new users to its trading and lending platform.
11. Ecodation Technology
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 51-100
Founders: Gökhan Alpaslan, Hüseyin Gürhan Temiz
Ecodation Technology is an Estonian startup that was founded in 2021 and is currently headquartered in Tallinn. They are experts in developing and building software solutions for education, finance, and mobile technology. Edocation is able to reduce your development costs, as well as getting your development timeline significantly shortened with expert support. Some of the projects they can help with are the creation of neo bank infrastructure, gamification on travel apps and more.
Despite the rapid growth experienced by Ecodation Technology, it has not received any external funding to reach this point. This makes its development even more impressive and puts in a great position to receive investment in the future if it intends to develop new product lines, or further expand into new markets.
12. Arbonics
Year Founded: 2022
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 11-50
Founders: Kristjan Lepik, Lisett Luik
Arbonics is a startup in Estonia that exists to help you to create and manage planet-friendly forests as a landowner. This allows landowners to generate income in return for this through selling their generated carbon credits to a range of organisations. This ultimately means we will see more forests, a healthier world and create a more sustainable method of conducting business. If you aren't able to immediately create your own forest as a landowner, you can also get loans from Arbonics for this.
Arbonics has recently announced in December 2023, that it raised 5.5 Million Euros in funding and intends to use these funds to expand the types of forests that it can help to create, hire more staff and grow to cover more than half of Europe's forests by the end of 2024.
13. Certific
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 1-10
Founders: Liis Narusk, Taavet Hinriku, Dr Jack Kreindler
Certific is a startup in Estonia that provides innovative medical technology, allowing you to streamline the way you communicate with your patients. This supports your digital-first clinic with convenient and effective communication channels with patients and allows you to adequately capture and retrieve their information for rapid retrieval later, reducing your admin. This contributes to the creation of a more efficient medical practice and also leads to improved patient outcomes in the long term.
Certific has already developed a brilliant platform and has seen good success, but it has ambitions to improve its clinic-side product suite and expand into foreign markets. As a result of this, Certific raised 7.4 Million Euros in investment during July 2022, with this funding fueling these ambitions for the previous two years.
14. Infludesk
Year Founded: 2022
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 51-100
Founders: Petro Kroshchuk
Infludesk is an Estonian startup that was founded in 2022 and supports you with all of your influencer marketing needs. It supports you by identifying the types of influencers that would be ideal for your campaign based on previous data and then uses its analytics capability to craft a campaign that will maximise your engagement. By consulting with you on your brand values and message, you can craft a campaign that feels authentic, rather than another churn from a content agency.
Infludesk has developed a good platform for influencer marketing and has sought smaller-scale funding so it can continue with product development and eventually go through intense international scaling. Its most recent funding round took place in November 2023, when it raised $320,000.
15. iGaming Master
Year Founded: 2022
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 51-100
Founders: Akhilesh Dabral, Barkha Dabral
iGaming Master is an Estonian startup that was founded in 2022 and is currently based in Tallinn. It helps to drive the growth of your B2C company through inbound, programmatic advertising. They're particularly adept at supporting businesses in the crypto and iGaming sectors, as their name suggests. They will support you with ensuring your rank highly on Google using expert SEO techniques, as well as employing other lead generation techniques to bring you more business.
In order to grow its internal team rapidly so that it can provide market-leading support for iGaming and crypto startups, iGaming Master ran a funding round in August 2022, shortly after being founded which raised 150,000 Euros to support its hiring and growth efforts.
16. Tuum
Year Founded: 2019
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 101-250
Founders: Ove Kreison, Vilve Vene, Sumit Batra
Tuum is an Estonian FinTech startup that supports banks by allowing you to unify multiple business units under one system solution. This means that bank accounts, lending, payment facilitation and card management can be handled under one roof, which will improve your efficiency and reduce your overall costs of relying on legacy systems. Make sure that you can offer seamless financial services to your customers by using Tuum.
Tuum has achieved rapid growth since being founded and is currently looking for avenues for developing new financial products and growing internationally. Specifically, expanding into Southern Europe and the Middle East. To this end, Tuum raised 25 Million Euros to fuel these ambitions in February 2024.
17. Cookie3
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 11-50
Founders: Filip Wielanier, Wojtek Piechocinski
Cookie3 is an Estonian startup that operates in the Blockchain marketing niche, providing you with on and off-chain analytics that will identify users who will bring high value to your blockchain. Then, it will reward them for their contributions to your blockchain with random airdrops for top performers that are isolated from bots. It will also support you with the creation and deployment of your ad campaigns to ensure that you get the most bang for your buck.
Cookie3 made strategic use of startup funding in order to support its early stages of growth and development for its products. For instance, in August 2022, it raised $2.5 Million to further develop its technology and B2B solutions.
18. EyeVi Technologies
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Tartu, Estonia
Size: 51-100
Founders: Gaspar Anton
EyeVi Technologies is an Estonian startup operating in the mapping market, providing road mapping technology and support for a range of safety auditors, road consultants, engineers and more. Its technology allows you to capture and process incredibly accurate geodata in a rapid and cost-effective way, on demand. This saves you up to 50% in labour costs and gives you twice the speed through vehicle-mounted cameras, AI data processing and an API connected web app.
EyeVi Technologies has successfully developed a platform that provides real value to its customers and it has shown a willingness to raise investment to achieve its growth goals. This is evidenced by the use of its February 2022 Seed Round, where it raised $2 Million to fuel expansion into the United States and grow its market share in existing European markets.
19. Hacken
Year Founded: 2017
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 101-250
Founders: Andrew Matiukhin, Dyma Budorin, Yegor Aushev
Hacken is an Estonian startup that provides cybersecurity services for the Blockchain ecosystem and Web 3. By acting as a blockchain auditor that has worked with Binance, NEAR, Radix and more to audit the security of their projects, Hacken has pedigree. When you're running your project, your customers need to know that your smart contract is actually secure, so they know their money is safe. Having your smart contract audited by Hacken is an easy way to show reliability and authenticity.
Hacken has experienced steady but sustained growth since being founded and it has utilised startup funding in order to accelerate its plans to hire top talent and acquire new clients in the blockchain market. It has raised an undisclosed amount, with investors including Fenbushi Capital, Krypton Capital and Yasar Corporation.
20. AIO
Year Founded: 2022
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 1-10
Founders: Nemailla Bonturi, Petri-Jaan Lahtvee
AIO is a startup in Estonia that is on a mission to eliminate the issues caused by palm oil, animal fats and coconut oil. It achieves this by giving you the opportunity to replace these products with more sustainable and healthy alternatives that it has developed. It utilises sustainable methods and sourcing for its materials and ensures a quality fermentation and harvesting biomass from its sources to provide healthy antioxidants, fatty acids and pigments.
The process of developing its manufacturing process and supply chain for AIO to create its alternatives would represent a significant expense. In order to increase its production capability, test new products and get the needed European certification for food for industrial-scale production in 2026, AIO raised 1 Million Euros in February 2023.
21. IQ Labs
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Tallinn, Estonia
Size: 11-50
Founders: Tom Tirman
IQ Labs is an Estonian startup that was founded in 2021 and helps to support you with the growth and development of your frameworks and protocols for your DeFi project. For example, it has created a marketplace where you can rent Web 3 game assets as opposed to buying them, giving you the chance to do exceedingly well in these games, without breaking the bank. Even if you have no assets, you can do a reward split agreement, making it easier to build your portfolio.
In order to accelerate its customer acquisition and go-to-market strategy, IQ Labs pursued startup funding in March 2022, successfully raising $12 Million. This funding round was led by Crypto.com Capital and it has recently been successfully listed as one of 17 elite projects by Polygon Village Startup Support.
FAQs
What Are The Strongest Startup Industries In Estonia?
The strongest startup industries in Estonia are FinTech, Blockchain and Web3, and Marketing and Sales.
What Is The Average Investment In The Startup Industry In Estonia?
Estonian startups received 400 Million Euros of funding in 2023, meaning between 1400 startups, the average raise in 2023 for startups in Estonia was over 285,000 Euros.
How Many Startups Are There In Estonia?
It is currently estimated that there are more than 1400 tech startups operating in Estonia.
