Janus Friis is a Danish entrepreneur best known for co-founding the file-sharing application Kazaa, and the peer-to-peer telephony application Skype. In September 2005, he and his business partner Niklas Zennström sold Skype to eBay for $2.6B. Friis has maintained ownership interest in Skype through Silver Lake Partners, which sold Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion, in May 2011.
Jaan Tallinn is an Estonian billionaire computer programmer and investor known for his participation in the development of Skype and file-sharing application FastTrack/Kazaa.
Estonian Fund for Nature or ELF is an Estonian environmental non-profit organisation.
Dragon is a family of spacecraft developed and produced by American private space transportation company SpaceX. The first family member, later named Dragon 1, flew 23 cargo missions to the ISS between 2010 and 2020 before retiring. This version, not designed to carry astronauts, was funded by NASA with $396 million awarded through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, with SpaceX announced as a winner of the first round of funding on August 18, 2006.
Christopher John "Chris" Cassidy is a retired NASA astronaut and United States Navy SEAL. Chris Cassidy achieved the rank of captain in the U.S. Navy. His first spaceflight was on a Space Shuttle mission in 2009. He was the Chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA from July 2015 until June 2017.
Taber MacCallum is the co-founder and co-CEO of Space Perspective, a human spaceflight company planning to take people and payloads to the edge of space by balloon, and the former chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF). He is co-founder and former CTO of World View Enterprises, a stratospheric balloon company using its un-crewed Stratollite for remote communications and sensing. MacCallum was also a founding member of the Biosphere 2 design team and a crew member from the original two-year mission inside the materially-closed ecological system.
Rainer Nõlvak is an Estonian entrepreneur and nature protector who is the chairman of the board of the Estonian Nature Fund.
Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.
Mark D. Papermaster is an American business executive who is the chief technology officer (CTO) and executive vice president for technology and engineering at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). On January 25, 2019 he was promoted to AMD's Executive Vice President. Papermaster previously worked at IBM from 1982 to 2008, where he was closely involved in the development of PowerPC technology and was two years as vice president of IBM's blade server division. Papermaster's decision to move from IBM to Apple Inc. in 2008 became central to a court case considering the validity and scope of an employee non-compete clause in the technology industry. He became senior vice president of devices hardware engineering at Apple in 2009, with oversight for devices such as the iPhone. In 2010 he left Apple and joined Cisco Systems as a VP of the company's silicon engineering development. Papermaster joined AMD on October 24, 2011, assuming oversight for all of AMD's technology teams and the creation of all of AMD's products, and AMD's corporate technical direction.
Let's do it 2008 was a large campaign on 3 May 2008, to activate civic society in Estonia in an effort to cleanup the country from litter. It was organized by Let's Do It! World.
The Volunteer of the Year is a national award in Estonia for volunteer work, established in 2005.
Chris C. Kemp is an American entrepreneur who, along with Dr. Adam London, founded Astra, a space technology firm based in California, in 2016. He served as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and as NASA's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for IT. While at NASA, Kemp partnered with Google and Microsoft and helped in the creation of Google Moon and Mars. He worked with the White House to develop the cloud computing strategy for the United States Federal Government and co-founded OpenStack, an open-source software project for cloud computing. He was also one of the founders of Nebula, a company that from 2011 to 2015, worked to commercialise the technology.
Priit Kasesalu is an Estonian programmer and software developer best known for his participation in the development of Kazaa, Skype and, most recently, Joost. He currently works for Ambient Sound Investments and lives in Tallinn, Estonia.
Paul Eremenko is a Ukrainian American innovator and technology executive. He was formerly the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of United Technologies Corporation. Earlier, he served as the CTO of Airbus, and former CEO of Airbus Silicon Valley innovation center. He is a former Google executive and head of Google's Project Ara, an effort to create an open, modular smartphone platform. Eremenko was named one of the Top-10 Tech Leaders of 2015 in FORTUNE Magazine. Eremenko has also come out as a strong proponent of artificial intelligence and autonomy research. Eremenko has cited his desire to build a starship as the motivation underpinning his career.
Starship Technologies is an Estonian company developing autonomous delivery vehicles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia, and Helsinki, Finland. Starship also has offices in London, UK, Germany, Washington, DC, US, and Mountain View, California, US.
Slush is a startup and tech event held annually in Helsinki, Finland. Slush facilitates meetings between the founders of startups and investors such as venture capitalists, accomplished with events such as matchmaking and pitching competitions. Slush aims to build a worldwide startup community. In 2021, Slush brought together 8,800 attendees from around the world to participate together in this global networking festival.
ESTCube-2 was a three-unit CubeSat built by the Estonian Student Satellite Foundation. ESTCube-2 launched from Kourou, French Guiana, with the European Space Agency's Vega launch vehicle on 9 October 2023 at 4:36 a.m. EEST. The satellite failed to deploy and was destroyed on reentry.
George Kurtz is the co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and an American racing driver. He was also the founder of Foundstone and chief technology officer of McAfee.
Rauno Heinla is an Estonian professional strongman competitor. He is a specialist in the deadlift events and is regarded as one of the best deadlifters in the world.
