Riga, Latvia · Startup Aerones is the world-leading provider of robotic wind turbine maintenance and inspection services. Founded in 2015 by Dainis Kruze and Janis Putrams, the company deploys rope-suspended robots guided by AI software to perform blade cleaning, leading-edge erosion repairs, lightning protection checks, and autonomous visual inspections — completing tasks up to four times faster than manual methods. A Y Combinator W18 graduate, Aerones has raised $115 million in total including a $62 million Series B in 2025, serves customers representing over 50% of global wind power capacity, and operates in 30+ countries.
Riga, Latvia · Event AI Connect is a one-day artificial-intelligence conference at the RTU Science and Innovation Centre in Riga, structured in three tracks: Build (technical sessions for AI engineers and data specialists), Use (practical AI for business and the workplace) and Explore (demos and workshops for newcomers). Its aim is to make AI understandable, practical and human, connecting developers, businesses, students and the public.
Riga, Latvia · Event Organisator AI Studio is a joint initiative of RTU Riga Business School and the Latvian Information Technology Cluster, launched in 2024 to accelerate AI education and practical application in Latvian businesses. It combines academic knowledge with industry expertise to deliver training programmes covering AI automation, digital transformation, and advanced digital skills. AI Studio connects businesses, universities, developers, and public institutions to advance responsible AI adoption in Latvia, and is a principal organiser of the AI Connect 2026 conference.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Atlas Aerospace is a Riga-based UAV manufacturer founded in 2015 by Ivan Tolchinsky that produces lightweight reconnaissance drones for military and civilian use. Its flagship drone weighs under 2 kg, is man-portable, and carries a camera for real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Atlas is a NATO supplier and has delivered over 200 drones to Ukrainian armed forces for battlefield reconnaissance. Beyond defence, the company's systems are used by Norwegian mountain-rescue teams and firefighting services worldwide. Atlas is a member of MilTech Latvia, the national defence industry cluster.
Riga, Latvia · Venture Capital BADideas.fund is a Riga-based early-stage syndicate and pre-seed/seed fund whose 200+ members are operators and founders from CEE unicorns including Wise, Veriff, Printify, and Bolt. The fund is backed by Latvian development bank Altum under the EU ERDF-supported programme, with a total fund size of €20.67 million, active from 2024 to 2029. It focuses on globally ambitious founders from Latvia and the broader CEE region.
Riga, Latvia · Event BalticNOG 2026 is the annual Baltic Network Operators Group conference, moving to Riga for its next edition at the Radisson Blu Latvija Conference & Spa Hotel. It unites 400+ network engineers and internet-infrastructure professionals around routing security, IPv6 deployment, network automation, cybersecurity, cloud networking and regulatory developments, plus a new community-driven 'Skunk Works' format for tackling operational challenges.
Riga, Latvia · Venture Capital Buildit is a Riga-based hardware and IoT accelerator-VC hybrid founded in 2014, operating as the first accelerator in the Baltics and Nordics focused on physical-device startups. It runs cohort programmes and provides pre-seed funding up to €250k for Latvia-incorporated startups, with seed follow-on up to €1.5M for Baltic and Nordic companies. The firm has made over 120 investments and manages the Buildit Latvia Pre-Seed Fund (2022 vintage). Portfolio companies span energy, health tech, smart living, and robotics, including Aerones.
Riga, Latvia · Accelerator Commercialization Reactor is a deep-tech venture creation platform and accelerator established in 2009 in Riga, ranked among the most experienced science-commercialisation programmes in Europe. It pairs scientists and researchers with entrepreneurial co-founders to build deep-tech startups, and provides up to €50k in pre-seed investment through a six-month programme focused on market and customer development. In 2024 it launched ESA BIC Latvia as the national ESA incubation centre operator, and has supported over 40 portfolio ventures across biotech, cleantech, materials, and space.
Riga, Latvia · Event Annual international cybersecurity conference organised by CERT.LV across three tracks (#CyberStory, #CyberShock, #BalticDomainDays) with policy panels, technical sessions on AI security and threat intel, plus a two-day Capture the Flag competition.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Dealita.ai is an AI-powered deal-flow management platform that automates the screening and initial evaluation of inbound investment opportunities for venture capital and private equity funds. Its algorithms process pitch decks and company data to perform initial filtering and scoring against investor-defined criteria, reducing manual triage workload. Dealita won the Startup of the Year 2024 award in Riga.
Riga, Latvia · Event Organisator DevOps & AI Latvia is a Riga-based technology community organised around DevOps and artificial intelligence topics, operating under the tagline 'Upgrade the Culture.' With nearly 2,000 members and over 32 regular meetups hosted as of mid-2026, the community facilitates technical talks, networking dinners, and hands-on workshops for Latvia's tech professionals. Led by Uldis Karlovs-Karlovskis alongside other community organisers, it serves as a co-organiser of the AI Connect 2026 conference at the RTU Science and Innovation Centre.
Riga, Latvia · Event An annual event exploring the intersection of technology, digital rights, and startup innovation in Riga. Features discussions on internet freedom, data sovereignty, and civic tech alongside startup showcases. Attracts a mix of policy makers, activists, and tech entrepreneurs from across the Baltics.
Riga, Latvia · Incubator ESA BIC Latvia is the official European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre for Latvia, operated by Commercialization Reactor, opened in November 2024 at Riga Technical University. Over five years the centre aims to support 12–18 startups with free financial assistance, two years of business coaching, technical training, access to ESA expertise and satellite data, and legal consultations. It is part of the pan-European ESA BIC network and focuses on space-tech applications and downstream services.
Riga, Latvia · Event Organisator EVO VC & Startups is a global founder-and-investor networking community spanning dozens of cities across more than a dozen countries with tens of thousands of members. It runs recurring informal evening socials, including editions in Riga, that connect tech founders, angel investors and venture capitalists to find co-founders, funding and scaling partners.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Handwave is a Riga-based biometrics-as-a-service startup founded in 2021 by Janis Stirna and Sandis Osmanis-Usmanis that replaces cards, phones, and apps with a palm scan for payments, age verification, loyalty activation, and access control. The platform captures both surface palm lines and subdermal vein structures to build a unique encrypted biometric ID backed by two-factor authentication. Handwave has raised €4.3 million in total funding, including a €3.6 million seed round in 2025 led by Practica Capital with participation from FirstPick and Inovo.vc, and is piloting with live retailers across Europe and the US.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Hyperjob is a recruitment SaaS platform that lets companies create branded, interactive job-ad microsites reported to achieve up to six times higher candidate conversion rates than plain job board listings. Founded in 2021 by Janis Kreilis, Juris Sorokins, and Roberts Tomme, the company raised €435k in a seed round led by SMOK Ventures in 2023. The platform also offers automated, personalised LinkedIn and email candidate outreach.
Riga, Latvia · Event Second annual summit at Radisson Blu Daugava Hotel uniting iGaming studio heads, product managers, game designers and marketing leads for two days of market-expansion strategy, technology insights and cross-region networking.
Riga, Latvia · Venture Capital Imprimatur Capital Fund Management is a Riga-based early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2010 and affiliated with London-headquartered Imprimatur Capital Ltd. The firm manages seed and start-up funds backed by the Latvian Guarantee Agency and institutional investors, with over €17M under management and more than 70 portfolio companies. It targets B2B software, digital health, learning and training, and robotics startups at pre-Series A in the Baltic Sea Region. Key partners include Toby Moore (Managing Partner) and Jānis Janevičs (Partner).
Riga, Latvia · Event Organisator Latvia's national Artificial Intelligence Centre (Makslīga Intelekta Centrs) was established by law and officially opened on 2 April 2025 at the RTU Science and Innovation Centre in Riga. Founded jointly by the Ministry of Smart Administration and Regional Development, the Association of Latvian Universities, and the ICT Association LIKTA, it is structured as a state-supported private foundation with €370,000 in initial Ministry of Economics funding. The Centre serves as Latvia's primary collaborative platform for AI research, ethics, governance, Latvian language preservation in AI systems, and technology commercialisation, and is a principal organiser of the AI Connect 2026 conference.
Riga, Latvia · Event Organisator One of two European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIH) in Latvia, the Latvian Digital Innovation Hub supports companies through digital transformation via digital maturity assessments, personalised training programmes, and expert consultancy. Funded with €3.5 million (50% EU, 50% Latvia), it operates across six regional centres in Riga, Liepaja, Jelgava, Rezekne, Valmiera, and Ventspils, focusing on AI, 5G, and GovTech innovation. The hub is a co-organiser of the AI Connect 2026 conference at the RTU Science and Innovation Centre in Riga.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Lokalise is a Riga-founded localization platform built to help product teams ship multilingual software without turning translation into a bottleneck. Instead of relying on spreadsheets and manual handoffs, the product integrates with design, development, and collaboration tools so text can be extracted, translated, reviewed, and returned to live applications as part of normal shipping workflows. This turns localization from a late-stage publishing task into a continuous process that scales with product development. For companies expanding across Europe and beyond, that capability is operationally important because language support affects onboarding, conversion, support quality, and market-entry speed. In the regional ecosystem, Lokalise stands out as a Latvian SaaS export that solves a very real cross-border problem for digital products. It also connects naturally to companies focused on media generation and international product distribution, making it a strong addition to the directory's view of how European startups build tools for expansion across fragmented markets.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Longenesis is a Riga-based digital health company founded in 2017 that builds platforms connecting pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, and patients to accelerate biomedical research. Its three core products — Curator, Themis, and Engage — enable privacy-preserving patient cohort discovery, consent management, and real-world evidence generation. The company has positively impacted over 850,000 patients across the EU and MENA, holds partnerships with Medtronic and Novartis, and has raised over €1 million in seed funding. It won second place at the EIT Health Catapult programme and earned an AWS Industry Award in 2023.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Mintos is Europe's largest regulated investment marketplace for alternative assets, founded in 2014 by Martins Sulte and Martins Valters. The platform connects retail investors with loans originated by non-bank lenders across 30+ countries, offering consumer, business, and real estate loan investments. It has facilitated over €12 billion in cumulative investments, holds a MiFID II licence from the Central Bank of Latvia, and manages over €700 million in assets for more than 500,000 registered users globally.
Riga, Latvia · Event Organisator MoonMoon is a Riga-based IT and artificial intelligence consulting company providing services in AI implementation, cloud consulting, and IT strategy for businesses, with a team of 10 to 49 professionals at hourly rates of $30–70. The company was founded by Uldis Karlovs-Karlovskis, who also leads the DevOps & AI Latvia community and is a prominent organiser in Latvia's technology ecosystem. MoonMoon serves as an organising partner of the AI Connect 2026 conference at the RTU Science and Innovation Centre in Riga.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Naco Technologies develops proprietary PVD nano-coatings that replace expensive platinum-group metals in hydrogen electrolysers and fuel cells, reducing the cost of green hydrogen production at scale. Founded in 2010 by Aleksandrs Parfinovičs and Raivis Nikitins, the company secured €8 million in equity plus a €2.3 million EIC Accelerator grant in 2023, followed by a further €2.5 million pre-Series A round in 2025. Naco's coatings target bipolar plates, gas diffusion layers, and membrane electrode assemblies.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Nordigen is a Riga-based open banking data platform that was acquired by GoCardless in 2022. The company provides free access to bank account data through PSD2-compliant APIs, enabling fintechs, lenders, and financial service providers to retrieve transaction histories, account balances, and payment data from over 2,300 banks across 31 European countries. Nordigen's freemium model disrupted the open banking aggregation market by making basic bank connectivity accessible without per-API-call fees. As part of GoCardless, the Riga team continues to develop open banking infrastructure and represents an important Latvian contribution to Europe's financial data ecosystem.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Origin Robotics is a Latvian defence-tech company founded in 2022 by Agris Kipurs and Ilja Nevdah in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The company develops advanced autonomous UAV systems combining AI computer vision with cost-effective hardware. Its flagship BEAK system is a man-portable, mid-range precision-guided weapon with a 15 km reach already deployed by Latvian and Ukrainian armed forces, while BLAZE is an autonomous counter-UAS interceptor using radar and AI vision. Origin has raised €4 million in pre-seed funding led by Change Ventures and secured an additional €4.5 million European Defence Fund grant.
Riga, Latvia · Venture Capital Outlast Fund is an early-stage venture capital firm co-headquartered in Riga and Stockholm, founded in 2024 by Egita Polanska, Marija Rucevska, Kristaps Prusis, and Mikaela Pedersen. The fund closed its debut €21 million vehicle backed by Latvian sovereign fund Altum, the EU's ERDF, and Baltic angel investors. It targets pre-seed tickets up to €250k and seed rounds up to €1.5 million, with a focus on B2B SaaS, fintech, and cybersecurity across the Baltics and Nordics.
Riga, Latvia · Venture Capital Overkill Ventures is a pre-seed B2B tech fund founded in 2017 and headquartered at Dzirnavu iela 105 in Riga, Latvia. The firm backs founders it calls 'overkillers' — operators who work smarter and challenge conventions — primarily across the Baltics, Nordics, CEE, and CIS regions. Overkill focuses on helping startups reach product-market fit and has made over 40 investments to date. It is registered as an Alternative Investment Fund Manager (AIFM) in Latvia under the entity Overkill Ventures AIFP.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Printful is a Riga-founded print-on-demand and fulfillment company that enables e-commerce entrepreneurs, creators, and brands to sell custom-designed products without holding inventory. The platform handles printing, warehousing, and shipping of apparel, accessories, and home goods through its own fulfillment centers in the US, Europe, and Mexico. Printful integrates with major e-commerce platforms including Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, and Amazon, and has fulfilled over 70 million items. With over 1,000 employees and revenues exceeding $200 million, Printful is Latvia's largest technology company and one of the Baltic region's most significant startup success stories, demonstrating that global-scale e-commerce infrastructure can be built from Riga.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Printify is a print-on-demand platform founded in Riga in 2015 that connects e-commerce merchants with a global network of third-party print providers. Merchants can design and sell custom products — apparel, accessories, home goods — without holding inventory. In 2021 the company raised $45 million, including from H&M Group. In late 2024 Printify merged with fellow Latvian unicorn Printful to form one of the world's largest print-on-demand groups.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Rebookify is a Riga-based travel-automation platform that turns the price volatility of hotel inventory into recovered margin for travel agencies, TMCs, and OTAs. The system ingests a customer's refundable bookings, continuously rescans the same and equivalent room types across dozens of supplier APIs, detects when a cheaper identical alternative is available before the cancellation deadline, and either alerts the agent or auto-rebooks to capture the delta — all without disturbing the guest's reservation experience. In practice this is a meaningful margin lever: hotel rates move constantly, and even a few percent of recaptured spread across a large corporate travel book flows straight to agency bottom line. The product combines price tracking, room-equivalence matching, and workflow automation tuned to the actual operational realities of travel desks, and is a representative example of the practical B2B AI automation wave coming out of the Baltic startup scene.
Riga, Latvia · Event Organisator Founded in 1991 as a faculty of Riga Technical University (RTU) in cooperation with the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Ottawa, Riga Business School was the first institution in the Baltic States to offer MBA programmes in English. It holds international accreditation and ranks 4th in Eastern Europe for MBA by Eduniversal Rankings, with a 20-month Executive MBA programme priced at €33,000. Riga Business School co-founded AI Studio together with the Latvian IT Cluster and is an organising partner of the AI Connect 2026 conference.
Riga, Latvia · Event Latvia's leading business technology conference and expo at the Kipsala Exhibition Hall. Covers digital transformation, cybersecurity, and enterprise IT with 2,000+ attendees. Strong presence of Baltic corporates seeking startup partnerships and technology vendors. Tickets from EUR 50.
Riga, Latvia · Event Riga EVO VC & Startups is an evening networking social run by the global EVO VC & Startups community, hosted at PILS Bar in the Grand Palace Hotel in Riga's old town. It connects investors and tech founders — including micro-cap and deep-tech founders — for informal conversations around finding co-founders, team, funding or scaling partners.
Riga, Latvia · Event Monthly community evening organized by Startup Latvia and the Riga TechHub at the MadCity coworking space. Each edition features 3 founder talks, a pitch session with local VCs (Change Ventures, Overkill Ventures), and drinks. Autumn 2026 edition focuses on seed fundraising in a difficult climate. Free with registration.
Riga, Latvia · Event Organisator Riga Technical University (RTU) is the largest technical university in Latvia and a hub for engineering, IT and innovation research and education. Through its Science and Innovation Centre it co-organises public technology events such as AI Connect, connecting developers, businesses, students and the public around practical artificial intelligence.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Spotwise.ai is a Riga-based B2B SaaS company that automates competitive radio advertising intelligence for broadcaster sales and ad-ops teams. Its system continuously monitors hundreds of terrestrial and digital radio streams, uses audio fingerprinting and ASR to detect and transcribe every ad break, identifies the advertiser and creative, and then pushes the resulting 'who is advertising on my competitor' feed into CRM and lead-routing workflows that the broadcaster's sales team can actually action. The product is explicitly built for multilingual European markets where a single media group may operate stations in four or five languages, which is a harder technical setup than the US-centric incumbents handle well. For Baltic and CEE broadcasters, Spotwise is one of the few tools that turns ad monitoring from a manual panel-listening exercise into a live competitive-intel feed, and the company sits in the broader category of AI-enabled sales intelligence products coming out of the Riga ecosystem.
Riga, Latvia · Support Organization Startin.LV is the Latvian Startup Association, a non-profit founded in 2016 to unite the country's startup community under a common voice. With over 100 member companies it advocates for startup-friendly legislation, connects founders with investors and partners, and promotes Latvian startups internationally. The association organises community events and collaborates with universities, government institutions, and Baltic ecosystem partners.
Riga, Latvia · Event Startup BBQ is a long-running informal summer gathering of the Riga startup community — founders, friends, food and open conversations with no main stage or strict agenda. The 2026 edition, billed '10 Years Later', marks a decade of the tradition and runs the evening of 20 August at Startup House Riga, serving as a community networking event rather than a conference.
Riga, Latvia · Innovation Hub Startup House Riga is a non-profit, founder-led community hub that opened in February 2024 in the Spīķeri creative quarter, co-founded by Printify's James Berdigans and TechHub Riga. The space offers co-working desks, private offices, 18 call booths, and event facilities, and serves as the central gathering place for Riga's startup community hosting TechHub Riga Meetups and events organised by Startin.LV and TechChill.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Sun Finance Group is a Riga-based fintech company founded in 2017 by Toms Jurjevs and Emils Latkovskis that operates a mobile and online lending marketplace across Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Latvia, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, and Mexico. Its platform analyses up to 10,000 data points per applicant to deliver microloans, instalment loans, lines of credit, and Buy Now Pay Later products. The company has issued close to €2 billion in loans to over 25 million registered customers, employs 1,400+ people, and is repeatedly ranked in the Financial Times FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies.
Riga, Latvia · Event Baltic startup conference at Hanzas Perons with 2,300+ attendees and 250+ investors. Known for the Fifty Founders Battle (EUR 200k+ syndicate prizes) and strong Day 0 networking side events.
Riga, Latvia · Event Connectivity and digitalization forum at ATTA Centre with 600+ speakers and guests covering digital sovereignty, AI adoption, 5G/6G, defence tech, digital identity, satellite connectivity and European data centres under the theme 'Security and Prosperity Through Digitalization and Connectivity'.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Tilde is a European AI-driven language technology company founded in Riga in 1991, with 150+ professionals across offices in Riga, Vilnius, and Tallinn. The company specialises in neural machine translation, multilingual virtual assistants, and speech technologies for low-resource European languages. In 2025 it released TildeOpen LLM — a 30-billion-parameter open-source large language model covering 34 European languages, trained on the LUMI supercomputer after winning the European Commission's Large AI Grand Challenge with a €250,000 prize and 2 million GPU hours.
Riga, Latvia · Startup TWINO is a fully licensed and regulated investment marketplace headquartered in Riga, Latvia, founded by Armands Broks in 2015. The platform gives retail investors across 30 European countries access to consumer, business, real estate loans, and invoice financing, with average returns around 10–12% per year. TWINO holds an investment brokerage licence from the Central Bank of Latvia and is supervised under MiFID II. It has facilitated over €1 billion in cumulative loan volume and employs over 300 people worldwide.
Riga, Latvia · Event UN:BLOCK is a two-day blockchain, fintech and AI conference held in Riga, drawing around 3,000 attendees from 50+ countries and 700+ companies. Day one focuses on blockchain, digital assets and AI agents, while day two covers fintech, payments, banking regulation and financial infrastructure. The event is backed by the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (LIAA).
Riga, Latvia · Accelerator UniLab is Latvia's university-backed startup accelerator, jointly run by Riga Technical University, the University of Latvia, Riga Stradinš University, and the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies. Its programmes include UniLab Elevate (incubation for technology-based university spinouts), Venture Catalysts (a commercialisation course for scientists), and UniLab Defence (co-led with NATO DIANA). Active since 2020, UniLab has supported more than 53 emerging startups with personalised mentoring and financial grants.
Riga, Latvia · Startup Vigo Health is a digital therapeutics company that developed the Vigo app, an evidence-based, CE-marked rehabilitation tool for stroke survivors combining physiotherapy, cognitive exercises, and patient education. Founded in 2018 by healthcare innovator Kristaps Krafte and neurosurgeon Jānis Šlēziņš, Vigo became the first digital therapeutic in the Baltic states to receive a state reimbursement code from the Latvian National Health Service in 2021. The app is available for home use 24/7 via iPad.
Riga, Latvia · Startup WeedBot builds autonomous laser weeding machines for organic vegetable farming, using computer vision and directed laser beams to destroy weeds without chemicals or manual labour. Founded in 2020 out of research at the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies, the company raised €425k in a round led by Overkill Ventures in 2023. Its Lumina Laser Weeder is initially targeted at carrot cultivation, with plans to expand to other row crops.
Riga, Latvia · Venture Capital ZGI Capital is one of the most experienced venture capital firms in the Baltics, founded in 2005 in Riga. It has operated four successive fund generations (ZGI-1 through ZGI-4), with ZGI-4 attracting the largest single private VC investment in Latvia at €10M. The firm targets seed and Series A rounds of €500k–€5M in Latvian and Baltic companies across SaaS, fintech, food-agtech, logistics, and industrial sectors. ZGI Capital has won Latvia's VC & PE sector award six times, including in 2024 and 2025.