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Successful women for a successful country
The contribution of female entrepreneurs has been important to the growth of the start-up environment in Estonia: soon, Estonian women would make up to 40% of the companies’ CEOs.
Kaidi Ruusalepp, the founder of Funderbeam, a fundraising platform for growing companies, is a good example of success. After a job at the Prime Minister’s office, she starts negotiations with the Nasdaq in order to obtain funds and launches her company during the maternity leave, which in Estonia lasts one year and a half.
On the same wave is Kristel Kruustük, 28 years old, participant of the governmental program Tiigrihüpe to facilitate the access to the internet for the young students. Nowadays she is the founder of Testlio, an Estonian company which allows clients to improve their customer experience.
This article was originally published in Le Figaro. Read the full piece here.
“The joint data exchange platform should expand to all Baltic and Nordic countries”, PM Ratas said
On January the 15th, the Estonian Prime Minister Juri Ratas met his Danish counterpart Lars Lokke Rasmussen. The discussion was focused also on digitization and how the two countries could start to cooperate in data exchange. Ratas, during the press conference held after the meeting, added the possibility to extend the collaboration to the other Scandinavian and Baltic countries.
In Estonia already almost 1,000 institutions exchange their data using the X-Road technology. The same happens also between the Baltic state and its neighbor Finland: together they have established a nonprofit association titled Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS) to develop the X-Road data exchange layer in information systems, which allows databases and registers to communicate securely.
This article was originally published in The Baltic Course. Read the full piece here.
How Tallinn’s tech talents transformed its startup ecosystem
Tallinn has become a startup hub: 400 startups out of 1.3 million inhabitants is a quite impressive number. Back in 1991 when the country regained its independence from the Soviet Union it had to rebuild all the state’s infrastructure: “Initially it was very painful: the Soviets left and everything fell apart,” Norris Koppel, co-founder of Monese, says. “There were no police, no banking system as such, so we had to quickly rebuild everything.”
The World Wide Web was also born in 1991, the digital ground was already fertile and building the infrastructure from scratch was much easier: “If you start to build a new house today then you use the latest materials and technology available,” says Karoli Hindriks, CEO and founder of Jobbattical, the talent-matching platform for international tech jobs, “Whereas renovating a very old castle will be much harder”.
This article was originally published in Elite Business. Read the full piece here.