Estonia has ~15000 people working in the tech sector. There are 1500 tech/IT companies, 26 of them above 100 employees. IT/Tech is ~5.8% of GDP (2010).
Here is one Estonian Startups list:
http://hub.garage48.org/estonian-startups
- all in all, there are 100+ active startups in Estonia, which I would say for a country of 1 million people is quite a startup culture. Estonia now has I believe 7 or 8 European startup accelerator Seedcamp winners, trailing only UK, Seedcamp's home country.
This is kind of misleading. Many of the start-ups on that list are headquartered (or host major operations) outside of Estonia; they're considered Estonian only because the founders hold Estonian nationality. You wouldn't call start-ups headquartered in the US and founded by Indians "Indian start-ups", would you?
This might not be the case for quite a few Estonian startups though -- with 1.3 million people you're desperately lacking a large enough target market for the niche products that some startups are developing, and looking to other countries may actually be a part of a strategy, not simply a case of 'I happen to be an Estonian living in the UK so I'll just go with the flow and do my startup here'. I would call these startups Estonian.
Here is one Estonian Startups list: http://hub.garage48.org/estonian-startups - all in all, there are 100+ active startups in Estonia, which I would say for a country of 1 million people is quite a startup culture. Estonia now has I believe 7 or 8 European startup accelerator Seedcamp winners, trailing only UK, Seedcamp's home country.