From successful first year to supercharging Estonian-bred startups

Startup Estonia just finished its first successful year as the support unit for Estonian-bred startups, uniting together the members of the Estonian startup mafia family. What an interesting start it was! 

We got so many valuable lessons to learn from and many great ideas to what should be done more in order to  reach the full potential of Estonian startup ecosystem.

What did we achieve during the pilot year?

We launched a number of successful local programs, projects and accelerators that help startups to grow, either through validating business ideas or attracting seed funding, such as Founder Institute, Student VC, Engage Estonia, Startup Wise Guys, Buildit, CleanTech initiative etc.

Within a year we managed to put the Estonian cleantech startups on the international map  – Estonian startup ReLaDe came 3rd in ClimateLaunchpad, the biggest competition for cleantech startups. Another local startup Reverse Resources landed in Top15.

The most satisfying result from the pilot year for us, however, was the big number of participants in various programs and the positive impact the programs had on the them. In total, 98 startups participated in eight programs out of which 71 graduated successfully and 27 got an otherwise valuable experience.

An impressive 1.9 million euros of growth capital was raised and 4 startups from the local programs moved on to international accelerators: Sorry As A Service, Deltabid, Results on Air and Deekit.

Pretty awesome year, we would say!

So what’s next?

Our goal is to improve the local startup environment to make Estonia the best place to start up a business. We see the massive potential, now we need to overcome some remaining weaknesses to turn the potential into a reality.

So this is what’s next – we plan to unclog these bottlenecks and it will be a rough ride, but it can be done – with a little bit of magic and help from you, our strong startup family!

*As we just got #started, we are constantly improving and updating our website  to provide you with a clear and high quality overview of the Estonian startup ecosystem and answer any questions you might have.  We are strongest as a community so your feedback is extremely valuable to us. Do let us know about any thoughts you might have on how to make our website even better –  drop us a note at startupestonia@arengufond.ee