The Hype is Real

You’ll be picked up at the airport and taken to your hotel.

Located in the UNESCO protected medieval old town , you will be staying at a hotel only a step away from the picturesque sceneries

A short bus ride will take you to the first meeting of the day.

Estonia is probably the only country in the world where cabinet meetings have no paper trail. Ministers can sign a decision from their smart phone, even in the back seat of their car using digital signatures and Mobile-ID. Estonia might be the only country in the world with a national start-up – the e-Residency programme. Citizens? We do not need to go to the bank to make payments. This can be done at home. In fact, very few daily dealings require us to leave our homes: submitting tax claims, arranging a doctor’s appointment, checking what homework our children have, signing contracts, even electing Members of Parliament and much more can be done at home in minutes. The weather does not affect the election results in Estonia! Every Estonian saves an average of 5 working days a year, thanks to signing documents digitally. It’s like getting an extra week’s vacation every year! E-services are out of bounds only for divorces. You still have to get out of the house for that.

Tiit Paananen has been active in  IT field in 1995, he has contributed to some of the most successful IT ventures in Estonia and globally, among which is Skype and Pipedrive. Now in Veriff Tiit oversees feature teams doing product development, Internal IT, Tech Support and Business Intelligence. If this is not enough, Tiit has done over 1000 skydiving jumps!

Computer scientist, professor, specialist in information security and infrastructure, developing projects using open source since 1995.

He became an e-Resident and opened his company in 2018 in Estonia with the status. Months later, he applied and became one of the first startups on the then-new Startup Visa managed by Startup Estonia. Thus, he physically settled in the country.

OriginalMy was the first Brazilian company to use blockchain technology as a protocol to cryptographically record, authenticate and certify identities, contracts and other digital documents directly on various public and private blockchains.

Estonia is the first country to offer e-residency, a transnational digital identity that allows digital signatures and the creation and operation of location-independent businesses online. Since 2014, people from 167 different countries have applied for e-residency.

The Estonian Startup Visa helps non-EU founders grow their startup in Estonia, one of the world’s best places to start and run a company. It also eases the process for Estonian startups to hire non-EU talent. More than 6000 people have used the Estonian Startup Visa in the past 7 years.

Bürokratt is not just an IT project to create an Estonian state virtual assistant, i.e. a user interface – although this may be necessary as an intermediate step. Instead, Bürokratt will allow a person to get everything they need from one device with a virtual assistant in one communication session. Bürokratt is thus an interoperable network of public and private sector AI solutions, which from the point of view of the user acts as a single channel for public services and information.

Visiting the sauna in Estonia is the most “like a local” experience you can have.

The sauna is Estonia’s original social network. When the stones heat up, Estonians open up. Sauna is a place for sharing and connection, cleansing, and relaxing. It is the one social interaction in Estonia that is always better in real life than online. Meet with some of the key people from the Estonian tech ecosystem and experience the local sauna culture.

Call it a day!

You will meet EstVCA and Karma Ventures. EstVCA is the representative body of Estonia’s Private Equity & Venture Capital Industry.

Karma Ventures is an A-round-focused VC fund for Europe, domiciled in Luxembourg. Backed by Skype engineering co-founders, EIF and other institutional investors, Karma Ventures is focusing on technology creators across many verticals.

Wise is a global technology company, one of 10 Estonian unicorn companies. With a Wise account people and businesses can hold 55 currencies, move money between countries and spend money abroad. As huge companies and banks use Wise technology, the company is trying to build an entirely new cross-border payments network that they hope will one day power money without borders for everyone, everywhere.

Bolt, another Estonian flagship unicorn company,is the European super-app that has over 100 million customers in over 45 countries and over 500 cities across Europe and Africa. The company seeks to accelerate the transition from owned cars to shared mobility, offering better alternatives for every use case, including ride-hailing, shared cars and scooters, and food and grocery delivery.

Estonian-founded robotic delivery company Starship Technologies offers last-mile and on-demand delivery.  The robots, which can be found in 80 locations around the world, including the US, UK, Germany, Denmark, Estonia and Finland, use less energy than humans to deliver takeaway food, grocery orders, tools and company documents to customers’ doors.

Introducing Estonia’s ambitious personalized medicine programme.
You’ll meet Priit Palta, the Vice Director of the Institute of Genomics and Associate Professor of Genome informatics and Steven Smit, Head of the Biobank Lab.

You will meet Jaak Vilo who heads the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Tartu, the university’s largest institute, and arguably its most intermeshed with the private sector. By Vilo’s account, it is also its most international institute as roughly half of the institute’s researchers are not Estonians. The institute collaborates with the local IT industry as well as international organizations.

How UniTartu Ventures makes intellectual property profitable for both businesses and universities?

Starting 2022, Startup Estonia has focused heavily on providing activities and programs to Estonian DeepTech startups to create a diverse, resilient, and vibrant community that will eventually shape the future.

As Tartu, together with Southern Estonia, is the European Capital of Culture in 2024, you will get to hear straight from the source what the city has to offer as a true centre of culture, education, and community.

Call it a day!

Pipedrive’s story began in an Estonian garage in 2010. Pipedrive’s co-founders were salespeople who needed more from a CRM tool than the software on the market could offer. So, they built an easy-to-use, visual sales platform to help users streamline their processes and get more done.

Since then, they’ve grown into a global unicorn. Pipedrive’s team consists of 850+ people across eight countries and works tirelessly toward one goal: empowering small businesses everywhere to succeed.