Tallinn, where the future meets in person
Latitude 59 degrees north. The same parallel as Helsinki and Anchorage, Alaska. This is the name of the festival held every year in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.
For some years now, Tallinn has been home to me. Not in the romantic, postcard sense, but in the concrete sense of someone who has roots, business, and a social life here. Estonia is the country of digital natives by definition: the government even has a department called Accelerate.ee, whose official task is to make illegal things legal. Mind you: we are talking about regulations, not criminal activities. The slogan is "Make legal illegal things," meaning breaking down the bureaucratic walls that prevent innovation from existing. In almost no other place in the world does a public official work with this mandate every day. How could it not have become my home for several years now?
Last week I attended Latitude59 as an accredited journalist. Every year, the festival brings the best of global innovation to my neighborhood.
Let's start with the numbers. This year, for its 14th edition, the festival gathered 3,500 participants from 70 countries, with over 800 startup representatives, more than 800 investors, and 180 speakers on stage. Forty side events were spread across the city, from morning until late at night. But numbers alone don't explain why people come from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. An Israeli founder explained it well while we were waiting for coffee at Kultuurikatel: "Davos is where the powerful are. Here is where the people who do things are."
The festival takes place at Kultuurikatel, a former power plant converted into a cultural space. 19th-century bricks, 2026 fiber optics, and in between, three hundred conversations that change companies, careers, and entire sectors.
I had the opportunity to meet and interview many prominent figures. The President of the Republic of Estonia, Alar Karis, opened the proceedings of this edition with words worth reporting. Karis put artificial intelligence in human terms: AI has already changed many jobs, but the biggest transformation is yet to come. "If we want society to benefit fully from artificial intelligence, we must talk more about the skills people need to develop so that AI makes us smarter, instead of simply replacing us," he said. A head of state opening a tech conference with such lucidity is not common. Those who live in Estonia know: here, institutions talk about technology differently than in almost the rest of Europe, because they don't have to convince anyone that digital works. They have taken it for granted since 1997.
Among the most surprising innovations was 1ROLLO, developed by the Estonian startup Rollo Robotics. This is the world's first commercial autonomous robot on a single wheel, designed for security: it patrols industrial and urban environments autonomously, costs ten times less than a security guard, and consumes less energy. The underlying technical problem was real and ancient: how do you keep a robot upright on a single wheel? Physicists call it the "stability paradox." Rollo solved it with high-frequency sensors and proprietary balance-control software, achieving a slim and agile profile capable of moving in tight spaces where traditional robots cannot pass. The company was founded in 2025 by Arno Kütt and Sander Sebastian Agur, is based in Tallinn, and has already raised 3.7 million euros in funding. I saw it moving through the festival corridors and people stopped to look at it just as they did, twenty years ago, in front of the first smartphones.
On the mobility front, a Berlin-based startup called Bliq brought a specific proposal to Tallinn: a driverless car on a monthly subscription, remotely supervised by certified operators, bookable for time windows rather than single rides. The idea is not entirely new. Google's Waymo operates autonomous taxis in San Francisco and Phoenix. Tesla has been promising the Robotaxi for years. Bliq focuses on a different model: not an automated public transport service, but a private car without a driver, available when needed, which charges and parks itself. It has already launched the service in Estonia and is expanding in Europe. A small market as a laboratory, then global scale. An approach Estonians know well: Skype, Wise, and Bolt were born here—three unicorns in a country about the size of Switzerland but with only 1.3 million inhabitants.
The country has the highest number of startups per capita in the world, with over 30 per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to a European average of five. Almost all public services work online and Wi-Fi covers even the most remote locations. This is not Baltic Silicon Valley nostalgia. It is an ecosystem that produces, year after year, because someone decided that bureaucracy is an engineering problem, not destiny.
On the stage of the NATO DIANA Demo Day, one of the official side events, twelve teams from ten NATO countries presented dual-use technologies, from defense to cybersecurity. Estonia shares a 294-kilometer border with Russia and has turned 그hat geographical pressure into one more reason to run, and to innovate.
What one takes away from Latitude59 is not a list of names. It is a precise feeling: the world is changing faster than newspapers can report, and the places where this change is still discussed in person are worth a great deal. AI hasn't learned how to shake hands yet.
More details at: Latitude59: https://www.latitude59.ee
1ROLLO: https://www.1rollo.com
BLIQ: https://www.bliq.ai