Latitude59 casts Estonia as a testbed for the New Nordics

At Latitude59, Estonia is pitching itself not as Europe’s digital nostalgia act, but as a small-state laboratory for defence tech, AI, deep tech and smarter regulation.

Tallinn’s Kultuurikatel – the former power plant turned cultural furnace – is once again doing what it does best: making Estonia look larger than its geography. This week, Latitude59, the country’s flagship startup and technology conference, opened its 14th edition, bringing 3,000 participants from 70 countries to the Estonian capital, including more than 800 startup representatives, over 600 investors and 20 national and startup delegations.

For years, Estonia’s international pitch has rested on e-government, digital identity and a remarkable density of unicorns. That story is still true – but increasingly incomplete. The new version is harder-edged: defence technology, AI infrastructure, climate adaptation, regulatory experimentation and a stronger connection between the Baltic and Nordic startup ecosystems.

The global village gets practical

This year’s theme, The Global Village Experiment, is Latitude59’s attempt to give that shift a language. Its premise is that startup ecosystems are more connected than ever, but also more fragmented by geopolitics, capital flows and regulation. The conference wants to be a meeting point where those tensions are not smoothed over with slogans, but turned into working conversations.

Estonian president Alar Karis used his opening speech to put artificial intelligence in human terms. AI has already changed many jobs, he said, but the larger transformation is still ahead. “If we want society to benefit fully from artificial intelligence, we need to talk more about the skills people must develop so that AI makes us smarter rather than simply replacing us,” Karis said.

Latitude59 CEO Liisi Org struck a similar note, warning against the temptation to mistake technological acceleration for progress. “Computers can code, but only people can care,” she said. Her message was partly existential, partly practical: in a difficult economic climate for startups, the region still needs to think internationally and build deliberately. Estonia, she argued, is part of the “New Nordics” – a loose, outward-looking idea that places the Baltics and Nordics in the same operating room rather than in separate waiting rooms.

The most urgent sectors on the programme – defence, climate, AI and deep tech – do not fit neatly inside national borders. Latitude59 is explicitly trying to build bridges between the New Nordics, Africa, Canada and Asia. Delegations from Italy, Spain, Austria, the UK, Ukraine, South Korea and Canada are among those arriving in Tallinn. Google Cloud, Meta, Mastercard and Amazon Web Services are also present, while Finland’s Aalto University is bringing a sharper deep-tech focus through workshops and stage discussions.

Regulation, risk and the next startup frontier

The policy conversation is equally central. At Latitude59’s opening event, Thinking in Billions, politicians, founders and investors discussed how governments can allow new technologies to be tested without waiting for legislation to catch up years too late. Canada’s foreign minister Anita Anand framed the issue in geopolitical terms, arguing that countries need to adapt together rather than assume they already hold the answers.

Estonia’s deputy secretary general for economy and innovation, Sigrid Rajalo, was more direct: the real obstacle to innovation is often not a shortage of ideas, but fear of mistakes. A small state can move quickly – provided its officials are rewarded for trying, not punished for failing.

The startup side of Latitude59 has the same flavour of practical ambition. This year’s pitch competition attracted a record 465 applicants from 53 countries and five continents. Seven finalists from Estonia, Finland, Lithuania and Ukraine will compete for an investment prize of up to half a million euros, backed by venture capital funds. The finalists range from AI workforce agents and fleet-management software to renewable supercapacitors, working-dog training technology and a Ukrainian tactical first-person-view simulator for military drone pilots.

The old shorthand for the region – software as a service, fintech, digital public services – no longer captures the full field. Estonia’s startup economy is moving into heavier terrain: unmanned systems, energy storage, autonomous platforms, AI-era infrastructure and dual-use technologies. The conference material points to Threod Systems, Milrem Robotics and Skeleton Technologies as examples of a broader shift in the investment landscape.

Estonia’s digital-state story is not over. But at Latitude59, it feels less like the headline and more like the infrastructure beneath a new one. The country is no longer asking the world to admire what it built in the 1990s and 2000s. It is inviting it to Tallinn to inspect what comes next.