Although not as well known as its more digitally advanced neighbor Estonia, the small Baltic country of Latvia, located in northeastern Europe, is home to a booming start-up ecosystem. boom.
With a population of less than two million, Latvia has a handful of successful tech companies and, through initiatives with the country’s technical universities, several dynamic cooperation programs between start-ups and the academic sector.
Latvia also has a history of inventing and producing groundbreaking innovations, from the subminiature Minox “spy camera” used by intelligence operatives during World War II and the Cold War, to the world’s first multi-engine aircraft, created by the famous aviator Igor Sikorsky.
Helping farmers increase their efficiency
It was while growing up in the Latvian countryside that Alfiya Kayumova, 31, decided to get into agricultural technology – or “agritech”, as it is known in the industry.
After spending years working in business and investment banking, Alfiya Kayumova – now CEO of start-up GreenGrowth – was drawn to agritech by the prospect of being able to tackle a global problem that affects millions of people. “Agriculture is one of the fastest growing industries,” she told ZDNet. “It is a global challenge, which consists of feeding a growing population with scarce resources that are always limited. »
In recent years, problems such as soil degradation and erosion, as well as climate change have affected Latvia and the rest of the Baltic region, where agriculture and animal husbandry are among the main economic activities.
GreenGrowth develops real-time yield mapping technology. It is designed to help farmers increase their efficiency. “We provide farmers with heat maps, analyzes of their fields, and we show how the actual yield is distributed across those fields,” says the CEO.
GreenGrowth is developing real-time yield mapping technology for farmers. Image: Bojan Stojkovski/ZDNet.
“There is a lot of potential here, in the Baltic countries and in Latvia, because there are a lot of small, medium and large agribusinesses that need this technology. »
A motivated and multilingual workforce
According to ecosystem experts, Latvia’s competitive IT workforce is what makes the country’s start-up ecosystem work.
Alina Silina of the Latvian Startups Association attributes this competitiveness to a combination of a strong work ethic, high motivation and openness to new challenges, as well as the fact that the hand Latvian workforce “has one of the highest university attendance rates in the world”.
Multilingualism is another distinct feature of the local labor market in this EU member country – besides Latvian as an official language, 87% of Latvians under 35 speak Russian, and 61% of those in the same bracket of age speak English, while German and Scandinavian languages are also widespread.
Promoting collaboration between scientists
The Latvian government is currently running programs aimed at accelerating the growth of “deep tech” start-ups – organizations created to address significant technical or scientific challenges – and promoting collaboration between scientists.
ENOT is one of the most promising deep tech start-ups in the country. It is developing technology that compresses huge neural networks so they can be used on smartphones, IoT (internet of things) devices and more.
As Sergey Alyamkin, CEO and co-founder of ENOT explains, his technology is designed to help AI developers with limited resources save on computational costs by making neural networks smaller, faster and more economical. in energy.
“Our goal is to reduce the computational power requirements of neural networks without sacrificing performance and accuracy,” says the latter, who has more than 10 years of experience as a data scientist for global companies and start-ups. up from Silicon Valley.
Difficult to find developers in Latvia
Still, finding tech talent in Latvia is one of the biggest challenges facing those interested in developing the country’s IT industry.
ENOT currently has a team of seven developers – which is relatively large for an early-stage startup, notes its CEO – but since it is difficult to find developers in Latvia, the company has also had to invest more. in the formation.
That said, the tech labor available in Latvia is much more affordable than that of the rest of the region, such as start-up-rich Estonia.
Replace the night shift with a robot
Acure is another Latvian start-up specializing in deep tech. Founded in 2019, it develops an automated data monitoring and observability tool to facilitate the management of large volumes of incidents, alerts and requests by IT teams.
Acure CEO Nikolay Ganyushkin came up with the idea when he worked as an IT operations manager at a large online service that had more than 20 million users and 10,000 support requests a day.
“We wanted to get rid of the engineering night shift and replace it with a robot,” he told ZDNet. “That’s how the product was born. »
Start-up friendly
Although the labor market in Latvia is quite tight, making it difficult to hire technicians, Nikolay Ganyushkin says the country offers a friendly environment for tech start-ups, which benefits companies and their employees. The legislation provides in particular for a low flat-rate social tax and the absence of individual tax for employees of start-ups.
Yet attracting tech start-ups to Latvia remains a challenge. Although the country may lag behind Estonia in terms of the maturity of its tech ecosystem, it is getting close. Venture capital funds such as New Nordic Ventures seek to support promising Latvian and Baltic start-ups in different sectors, including AI, agritech, deep tech and fintech.
“In general, the Baltic region itself is viewed very well by international VCs, mainly thanks to our neighbor Estonia,” explains Dmitry Saikovsky, partner and co-founder of New Nordic Ventures. “In terms of ecosystem and investments, we cover all levels for companies to obtain financing, from their start-ups to reaching international venture capital funds. »
All of these efforts hold long-term promise for the country and for the development of its start-up ecosystem, as well as its information technology industry, he believes. “We’re a small population, but there’s definitely a lot of IT talent in the country – and a lot of potential. »
Source: ZDNet.com