Latvia treats the internet as a physical object, because it is one

How Latvia’s tech scene grew

The digital economy here

Most of Europe treats connectivity as a utility that simply exists. On the Latvian coast it is understood as infrastructure with a physical location, a vulnerability and a defence requirement. In January 2026 a submarine fibre cable between Lithuania and Latvia was damaged in Latvian waters a few kilometres off Liepāja, and it was not an isolated incident — the Baltic Sea has seen a run of cable disruptions since late 2024 serious enough for the states around it to discuss sabotage openly. The Baltic carries more than thirty-five subsea cables, and fibre of that kind carries the overwhelming majority of the world’s internet traffic.

The country’s other piece of remarkable infrastructure has a stranger history. In the forest at Irbene, north of Ventspils, stands a 32-metre dish built in 1974 by the Soviet military under the codename Zvezdochka — "Little Star" — inside a closed town that did not appear on maps. It is widely thought to have been used to listen to communications traffic between Europe and the United States. It stayed secret until 1993; when the Soviet army withdrew in 1994 the Latvian Academy of Sciences took it over, and the departing troops did what damage they could on the way out. It now operates as the Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Centre, doing radio astronomy and space-debris tracking. RT-32 is the largest radio telescope in northern Europe and among the ten largest anywhere.

Riga is the largest city in the Baltics and, by most counts, the region’s biggest startup hub — concentrated unusually in and around the Old Town rather than in a business park. It is smaller than comparable scenes in the Nordics or Germany and the people in it say so freely, but what it has produced is disproportionate: Printful, founded there, raised $130 million in 2021 and became Latvia’s first unicorn, alongside Infogram and a long tail of smaller exits. The community is tight enough that most of it knows each other, which means introductions travel quickly — and so does a bad reputation.

Where the work happens

One startup city, and two coastal towns whose significance is infrastructural rather than commercial.

How Latvian businesses buy websites

Latvian first, with a significant Russian-speaking population making a second language a real commercial decision rather than a courtesy in parts of the country — and English for anything aimed at the startup scene or at export.

Reputation travels faster here than in any market in this series. Riga’s business community is small enough that most of it overlaps, which makes a referral genuinely valuable and a bad job genuinely expensive. That cuts both ways and is worth knowing before you take on work you cannot deliver.

How well do you know Latvia’s digital economy?

5 quick questions. Get all 5 right and you win a 10% off discount code. Every answer is somewhere on this page.

Why FastSites works here

A small market rewards suppliers who do what they said, on time, at the price quoted. Ours is published before you speak to anyone, which removes the part of the process most likely to go wrong.

Live in days, built mobile-first and light. Tell us which languages your customers read in — in Latvia that is a commercial decision with a real answer, not a formality.

The Latvia series

One piece per city, written in an editorial register for people assessing the market rather than shopping for a supplier.