What is a scale-up company?

Estonian immigration laws recently introduced a new term - scale-up company (in Estonian "kasvuettevõte"). The aim is to make hiring of foreign talent easier for these companies.

The criteria to qualify as a scale-up are quite significant:

1) the company has been in business for at least 10 years;

 2) has at least 50 employees in Estonia;

 3) has paid at least 1 million Euros of salary taxes in the past year in Estonia;

 4) the cumulative growth of salary taxes in the past 3 years has been at least 20%.

The assessment of these criteria has been given as a task to Startup Estonia:

https://startupestonia.ee/start-up-in-estonia/startup-visa/estonian-scale-up/

Working for a scale-up is a path to obtain a long-term visa or a residence permit to Estonia and as a beneficial exception from the general rule, the salary obligation is 80% of the statistical average salary.

There is a list of already approved scale-ups which is the following:

• Bolt Technology OÜ

• Fleet Complete Eesti OÜ

• Erply Software OÜ

• Estateguru OÜ

• Linn Systems OÜ

• Milrem AS

• Pipedrive OÜ

• Playtech Estonia OÜ

• Scoro Software OÜ

• Skeleton Technologies Group OÜ

• Microsoft Development Center Estonia OÜ

• Perforce Software AS

• Testilo OÜ

• Threod Systems OÜ

• Wise Payments Limited Estonian branch