Foreign Trade minister says government is helping to finance startups

Estonia’s government wants to ensure that variety of financial instruments is available to companies in order to overcome the weaknesses of current macro-economic situation, Anne Sulling, minister of Foreign Trade and Entrepreneurship of Estonia said.

Sulling said at the opening speech of the Finance Estonia International Forum held in Tallinn today that the government has been busy working on implementing new initiatives to boost for growth in the bank-loan dominated economy.

For example, 145 million euros of European structural funds will be directed into a variety of financial instruments. Furthermore, a 100 million euros Baltic Innovation Fund was set up by Baltic governments and European Investment Fund to support growth stage investments.

Sulling said that Estonia is internationally known as a start-up nation, where everybody is developing something. To cater for start-ups, the government has set aside 60 million euros to the Estonian Fund of Funds. This will be dedicated to invest in early and very early stage companies—the ones that have the most difficult time attracting investments.

According to Sulling, one of the most notable recent achievements of attracting foreign capital to Estonia has been the attraction of back-office operations of different international companies. The minister quoted one back-office company in Estonia who said that Estonia is an open economy with relatively low costs and a cutting-edge ICT infrastructure that make Estonia an ideal base for business process outsourcing.