Recap of 2019 in the Estonian Startup Sector

In 2019, Estonian startups generated 395,4M EUR in turnover, which is 9% more than in 2018 (363,8M EUR). The biggest turnover belonged to Business software, services & HR sector (106,7M EUR) followed by AdTech & Creative Tech sector (65M EUR) and FinTech sector (46,8M EUR).

The clearest impact of Estonian startups on Estonian economy is the increasing sums of employment taxes paid. While in 2017 startups employment tax contribution was 36M EUR, it increased to 53M EUR in 2018 (+48%) and to 77M EUR in 2019 (+46%).

By now there are 1000 startups registered in Estonia while half a year ago, there were counted around 650 startups in Estonia. It seems like a crazy growth but truth is, that in addition to the fast growth of the sector, means of collecting data have improved. After a year of development StartupEstonia launched the new version of Estonian Startup Database.

At the end of 2019 Estonian startups employed 5944 people locally. At the end of 2018, this figure was 4529, meaning that the yearly growth has been 31%. However, if we look at the total number of employees who have worked in startups during last year for at least one day, the number is even more significant.

The top 20 startups in Estonia account for an astonishing 57% of the new jobs created in the sector in 2019. Top employers in Estonian startups are Transferwise (893 employees), Bolt (499 employees), Pipedrive (391 employees), Veriff (305 employees) and Starship Technologies (186 employees).

The top recruiters list of 2019 is quite similar. Veriff is at the top with 240 new hires in 2019, growing their team +370%, followed by Bolt (+233), Transferwise (+141), Pipedrive (+71) and Paxful (+67).

A closer look at the demographics of startup employees in Estonia shows that 36% of startup workers are women and 64% are men. The staff of our startups is relatively young: 52% of people are in the age between 21-30 and 36% are in the age between 31-40. The rest of the age groups have significantly fewer people - there are 2% up to 20-year-olds, 8% are in the age of 41-50 and 3% are aged over 51.

Approximately 22% of the startup employees have foreign citizenship (6% of them have EU citizenship and 16% non-EU citizenship), 68% have Estonian citizenship and there is also 10% whose citizenship we couldn’t confirm.

Dig deeper into statistics, demographics of the founders, employees and occupations in Estonian startups on StartupEstonia blog.

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