Estonian startups show 10% growth in turnover to €2.7Bln in the first nine months of 2024

According to the government organization Startup Estonia, Estonian startups reached a turnover of €2.7Bln in the first nine months of 2024. This is 10% more than in the same period of 2023 when their turnover reached about €2.4Bln.

The largest turnovers were generated by mobility unicorn Bolt (€984M), sales management CRM company Pipedrive (€203M), online identity verification unicorn Veriff (€76.7M),  IT and technology company Yolo (€49M), and gaming technology company Playtech (€42M ).

In the first three quarters of 2024, 1608 companies were active in the Estonian start-up sector. They raised €302.7M in funding, compared to €199,2M last year. In the first nine months of 2024, 49 deals were closed with an average size of €6.2M and 25 startups received investments of at least €1M. Autonomous delivery vehicle developer Starship Technologies received the largest amount of investment (€90M), followed by renewable energy equipment maker Stargate Hydrogen (€42M), hydrogen technology developer Elcogen (€30M), banking platform Tuum (€25M), startup for negotiations Pactum (€18.4M) and cybersecurity startup Bot Guard (€12M).

In the first nine months of 2024, deep tech companies raised €198.7M (66% of total sector investments) across 18 deals. Ten deals were valued at €1M or more.

There were eight sales or exits of startups and several acquisitions in Q3. In July, German digital tax filing platform Taxfix bought TaxScouts, founded by Estonian entrepreneurs. In August, Estonian fintech Paywerk was acquired by Swedish banking group Swedbank. It was an exit for Estonian Inbank Ventures, a subsidiary structure of Inbank AS, which sold its stake to Swedbank. It was also an exit for former Estonian government CIO Taavi Kotka, a business angel from Estonia Sergei Anikin, and founder of Estonian Superangel VC Rain Rannu. In September, the Estonian AI-powered HR platform Wisnio was acquired by the Swedish company Assessio Group. It was an exit for Wisnio's early investors from Estonia: Siena Secondary Fund, Spring Capital, Startup Wise Guys, and Metaplanet. In October, fintech Monese merged with UK-based company Pockit. The deal saw Monese's minority shareholder, Estonian Tera Ventures, took a stake in Pockit.

As of the end of the third quarter of 2024, Estonian startups employed 14 267 people locally. Last year, this number was higher - 14 687. The biggest employers were Wise (2K employees) and Bolt (1,3K), Playtech (653), Yolo (553), and Swappie (435). In 2023, the startups paid nearly €273M in employment taxes, 4% more than last year. 

Startup Estonia is a governmental initiative, that helps develop a startup ecosystem, co-organizing events, educating local investors attracting foreign investors to Estonia, etc. The Startup Estonia program gets financing from the resources of the European Regional Development Fund. This year, the organization included in its survey not only young technology companies, but also startup sector growth companies: mature startups, scale-ups, and companies that made successful exits and still operated within Estonia. It also transferred its database to the Dealroom platform and recalculated the data from previous years to include these growth companies in the survey.