Good practice:

Startup Visa

Estonia struggles with lack of talent as stated in Estonian cybersecurity strategy. On 18 January 2017 the Estonian Startup Visa was launched and it was seen as a new and promising opportunity for Estonian startups and the whole Estonian startup ecosystem for bringing in talent from all over the world and start developing an even more international and diverse community. Before the Startup Visa programme was established, the legislation for foreigners set various requirements that startups generally were not able to fulfil. For example, in order to have a residence permit, a normal company should have at least 65000 EUR in capital, in order to invest this in business activity in Estonia. Due to the nature of startups, it is not easy to fulfil such requirements in the first few years of business, it is more or less impossible.
Startup Estonia is working on creating a full-service for the countries they have seen the most interest from and also expanding to new target markets which can benefit the most from the Estonian business environment.
As Estonia is one of the most digitally advanced societies in the world, strengthening the cybersecurity startup ecosystem has been a governmental focus area since 2017. The Startup Estonia team has a member whose role is to find the factors in the startup ecosystem which help to create new cyber security startups and support the growth of existing startups.

Support has been crucial from the Ministry of Interior, as well as the Police and Border Guard Board, who directly works with Startup Estonia on this programme. There is currently one project manager who works on the project full-time. All the applications are assessed by a seven-member committee.

Startup Estonia has received over 1100 applications from companies across sector for the Startup Status and 931 people altogether have relocated to Estonia already or granted the right to do so. There are currently around 650 startups in Estonia and 155 of them have come to Estonia trough Startup Visa programme. 42 startups are active in Cyber security field and 31% of these startups have come to Estonia through Startup Visa programme.

It is relatively hard to track who in the end actually comes to Estonia, as Startup Estonia provides support and additional information to the Police and Border Guard Board for making the visa process easier and more effective, but then no longer participates in the process.

Startup Visa should be a programme that is relatively easy to transfer to other regions. Every region/state have their own legislation and processes, meaning it will be hard to predict what exactly needs to be done to transfer it, but in Estonia it just meant a small modification to the National Foreigners Act.
Startup Visa can be a very useful tool for regions that struggle with the same issue as Estonia – lack of talent. This programme gives easier access to third country employees who might not always be so easy to find and recruit, as well as for foreign business to benefit from the local business environment (tax system, community, etc.).