You’ve heard of hygge. If you’re a Scandinavia enthusiast, you may even have heard of friluftsliv. But are you ready for the lifestyle trend that’s so quintessentially Northern that the people who invented it don’t even have a catchy term for it, much like fish presumably don’t have a word for water? It’s the Estonian phenomenon of “just sort of getting on …

Statistics show we have collectively stigmatized randomly phoning someone up and as a result, over the past decade, the number of texts sent monthly have increased with 7,700% and US smartphones users allegedly receive and respond to 5x more texts than phone calls. We have built handheld walls against direct interactions at the same time as social platforms have moved …

Garden Eight is a multi-award-winning digital production team from Japan specialising in visual design, web design and web development. Founded in Asakusabashi, Tokyo in 2011, the studio has just opened their European headquarters in Copenhagen. The Nordics are known as the world’s “unicorn factory” per capita outside of Silicon Valley and have enjoyed a spotlight on their technologies from one …

Finnish startup Flowrite, building an AI-powered writing tool on OpenAI’s GPT-3, has closed a pre-seed funding round of €550,000 from Europe’s leading early-stage investors Lifeline Ventures and Seedcamp, joined by angel investors including Unity founder David Helgason. Flowrite is among the first companies globally to launch and raise funding for a product built on top of OpenAI’s language model GPT-3. …

As in many countries during the pandemic, contactless payments have been on the rise in Lithuana.   The country has chosen to make Fintech a national priority and has updated the process for business licensing for Fintech companies. By Lukas Pereckas “The whole Fintech ecosystem here is so developed – business support networks, clear efficient regulation, lawyers who know the field …

A small nation of fewer than 2 million people, Latvia is one of Europe’s entrepreneurial hotspots. There are several advantages that ensure that Latvia is a great place for startups starting from a multilingual workforce, affordable costs for operations, a high standard of living, and government support. Latvia has a booming startup ecosystem and a high number of ingenious up-and-comers …

Linear, a company focusing on the digitalization of real estate brokerage, has closed €1.1 million in seed funding.  The company, founded in 2018, offers an AI-driven  digital ecosystem to facilitate the housing trade. They will use the latest funding round on future growth and expansion to new markets. Linear offers realtors a comprehensive SaaS (Software as a Service) automation tool for …

Danish Industrial biotech startup Kaffe Bueno received EUR 1.1 million from, PINC (Paulig Group venture capital, FI), Vækstfonden (DK), The Yield Lab (IE), and a Danish business angel. The money will be spent on scaling up production, growing the team, IPR, and further process and product development. Kaffe Bueno is an ingredients company using green chemistry and biotechnology to upcycle …

On the 23rd to 25th of October Garage48, Startup Estonia, the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Tartu with several cyber security-related startups and organizations came together and poured their heart and soul into organizing and supporting the birth of a 4th Cyber Security Hackathon. The aim of the event was to grow, nourish and expand the cybersecurity …

There was a bullish attitude among attendees at this year’s online version of the Arctic15 startup event that investment in Northern European startups was picking up despite a second wave of COVID19 across the region. With one of the main themes of the event being cross-border angel investing, several new angel investment syndicates were established to boost funding opportunities for …

All male founding teams still get 92.9% of external capital in the Nordics, to build and expand their startups. However, a new report from Unconventional Ventures shows us how a shift towards a more equal distribution of capital can be accelerated.  Unconventional Ventures is a Nordic early-stage investment firm that invest in scaleable tech startups at the pre-seed and seed …

#HacktheCrisis was a hackathon initiated by Garage48 in Estonia in March 2019, where teams built solutions for the Covid-19 crisis over a long weekend.  The event went global, with hacks held in over 68 countries.  In some cases, the hacks were record breaking – in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the #HacktheCrisis became the biggest hack ever recorded.  A record-breaking global …

More than ever we need strong role models and entrepreneurs who can inspire others and actively help put focus on growth and innovation. For 25 years, EY has paid tribute to Denmark’s best growth creators, and this year they want to engage the business community and the participating companies in the fight to defy the crisis we are in and to see opportunities in adversity. …

Sigma Software has become an official partner of SSE Business Lab, startup incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics, which provides a platform for growth to exceptional entrepreneurs. The Stockholm School of Economics is a world-known business school with a rich history and is internationally recognized in The Financial Times Business Education Rankings. Their incubator, SSE Business Lab, is open …

Danish startups AddiFab and Nordbo Robotics, were selected among more than 570 applications from all over the world to develop solutions in collaboration with companies in the health and manufacturing fields, such as BTI and ITP, as part of the BIND 4.0 accelerator. Each year, BIND 4.0, developed by the Department of Economic Development and Infrastructure through the SPRI Group, …