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Friday, 26.04.2024, 02:31
Employment taxes paid by Estonian startups rose by 30% in 2017
The amount
of capital raised by the 500 or so startups during the year was 270 million
euros.
Where in 2016 approximately 3,500 people worked for
Estonian startups all over the world, three quarters of them in Estonia, in
2017 the total number of employees was 4,300 and 3,000 of them worked in
Estonia, it appears from data made available by Startup Estonia.
The sum total of employment taxes paid by startups in
2016 was 28 million euros.
Startup Estonia said that for the first time ever,
they were able to offer an estimate of the annual revenue of Estonian startups,
which amounted to 275 million euros in 2017.
"Although we see a lot of new early-stage
startups popping up, the startup scene is also maturing, displaying good
turnovers and creating well-paid jobs. To illustrate that: the top 10 employers
account for about 50% of the startup employment," Startup Estonia said.
The biggest employers on the Estonian stratup scene are Transferwise with 486 employees, Pipedrive with 267, Taxify with 174, Starship Technologies with 110 and Cleveron with 104 employees.
The list of
fastest-growing startups is pretty similar. On their way to becoming a unicorn,
Taxify tops that list with an increase from 38 employees in the first quarter
of 2017 to 174 in the final quarter of the year, meaning an increase by 136
employees, followed by Transferwise with an increase by 89 employees, Pipedrive
by 61, Starship Technologies by 29 and Cleveron by 28.
In total, Estonian startups raised 270 million euros
in 2017. By far the biggest investment was made in Transferwise, which closed a
staggering 240 million euro Series E round. The fintech unicorn was followed by
Skeleton Technologies with 15 million euros and ZeroTurnaround and Jobbatical
with 3.5 million euros each. The number of investments made was 39, four fewer
than in 2016.
"Although the total amount of investments, not counting
Transferwise, was smaller than in the previous year, 30 million euros versus 80
million euros, in terms of deal count the difference is not so significant, 43
deals in 2016 versus 39 deals in 2017. This indicates that there's a lot of
early-stage investment on the market and now with new VC funds starting up,
2018 seems to offer a very good outlook also when it comes to follow-up
rounds," Startup Estonia manager Maarika Truu said.
Martin Villig, co-founder of Taxify, said that he is
happy with the trends of startup investment in Estonia. "The number of
deals has remained relatively unchanged throughout the past five years, but the
investment sizes have gone up a lot," he said.
The biggest exits of 2017, in chronological order,
were the acquisition of Teleport by the mobility management platform
MoveGuides, the acquisition of the big data platform PlanetOS by Silicon
Valley-based Intertrust Technologies, and the acquisition of the Estonian
Java developer tool ZeroTurnaround by Rogue Wave Software. While the deal sizes
have not been disclosed, all of them have been considered successful and at
least one of them is said to have brought in an amount in the region of 50
million euros.
The Startup Estonia program is powered by Kredex and
financed from the European Regional Development Fund.