Estonian Startup LeapIN, which enables anyone to run their everyday business remotely, has managed to raise €1.3 million on the Funderbeam Crowdinvesting platform. The company had previously raised €200,000 in 2016.
LeapIN was founded in 2015 in response to Estonia’s e-Residency initiative launched one year earlier, which enables entrepreneurs from around the globe to register and administer location-independent online businesses in Estonia. As an Estonian e-Resident, entrepreneurs gain access to services such as banking, taxation, and payment processing, and also receive smart cards which they can use to sign documents — a dream come true for those aspiring to run a business remotely.
Estonia’s e-Residency initiative was designed to capitalize on the flexibility that technology offers in regard to work, as well as the recent trends of freelance and remote work popularity. With this idea in mind, LeapIN aims to cut through the bureaucracy involved in the process of becoming an e-Resident to give freelancers, contractors, and digital nomads a simple solution to manage their businesses from any part of the world.
The company has created a platform which effectively provides support for those who aim to run their businesses by essentially taking care of all the complicated procedures and paperwork involved in becoming an e-Resident and starting a new company — including sales invoicing, transaction, document collection, accounting, taxes and compliance.
Additionally, once the new e-Residents have successfully opened a bank account and launched their businesses, LeapIN also provides an online app which serves to display business transactions with a real time overview of how much money they have in their bank accounts throughout the process.
Despite being a small nation with a population of roughly 1.2 million people, Estonia’s push forward with e-Residency has made it a front-runner in the world when it comes to technological advances. In the first year of the initiative alone, Estonia received more than 20,000 applications for e-Residency, with over 3,000 coming from Finland. Additionally, the Estonian government predicted that this program would signify that by 2022 foreigners will have created more companies in the country than Estonians themselves.
The program can also be seen as further evidence that Estonia is trying to establish itself as a global front-runner when it comes to technology, with the country having already produced some of the most popular tech startup companies in the world such as Skype and Transferwise.
With the latest news that LeapIN has raised €1.3 million in funds to keep growing, one could be forgiven for predicting that the company could be well on its way to follow the same path as its famous predecessors. Since its launch in 2015, the company has already grown to boast over 20 employees.
