Estonian tech company Ridango acquires a Slovenian public transit-specialised IT firm

By Sten Hankewitz 

December 27, 2021

Estonian technology company Ridango has acquired a 100% stake in LIT transit, a Slovenia-based firm providing solutions for public transit; together, the companies now operate systems in over 25 countries.

Ridango is an Estonian company specialising in the development of systems for public transport ticketing as well as payments and real-time passenger information solutions.

“Our joint ambition is to become one of the leading providers of public transport mobility technology systems globally by 2026. The acquisition of LIT Transit is an important milestone, as they’re the leading players in the public transport real-time industry,” Erki Lipre, the chairman of the management board of Ridango, said in a statement.

“Ridango’s main focus has been account-based ticketing and payments in Baltic and Nordic markets. /—/ The transaction will significantly increase our global reach and the number of markets we operate, as well as provide very strong expertise in real-time and ticketing solutions,” he added.

Extending its reach to Asia and Oceania

Ridango is operating in Estonia, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Norway, Ukraine and Greenland.

Following the acquisition of LIT Transit, the group now offers its ticketing, transit management and payment solutions in countries and cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Qatar, New Zealand, Oman and others.

Ridango is headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, and is a transportation solutions provider founded in 2009.

LIT Transit was founded in 2012 in Slovenia and has customers in Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Middle East, Mexico etc. Among other solutions, LIT has a leading transit management system and an estimated time of arrival prediction engine.

Resource: estonianworld

CAN AI BE A FAIR JUDGE IN COURT? ESTONIA THINKS SO

25/03/2019

GOVERNMENT USUALLY ISN’T the place to look for innovation in IT or new technologies like artificial intelligence. But Ott Velsberg might change your mind. As Estonia’s chief data officer, the 28-year-old graduate student is overseeing the tiny Baltic nation’s push to insert artificial intelligence and machine learning into services provided to its 1.3 million citizens.

“We want the government to be as lean as possible,” says the wiry, bespectacled Velsberg, an Estonian who is writing his PhD thesis at Sweden’s Umeå University on using the Internet of Things and sensor data in government services. Estonia’s government hired Velsberg last August to run a new project to introduce AI into various ministries to streamline services offered to residents.

Deploying AI is crucial, he says. “Some people worry that if we lower the number of civil employees, the quality of service will suffer. But the AI agent will help us.” About 22 percent of Estonians work for the government; that’s about average for European countries, but higher than the 18 percent rate in the US.

Siim Sikkut, Estonia’s chief information officer, began piloting several AI-based projects at agencies in 2017, before hiring Velsberg last year. Velsberg says Estonia has deployed AI or machine learning in 13 places where an algorithm has replaced government workers.

For example, inspectors no longer check on farmers who receive government subsidies to cut their hay fields each summer. Satellite images taken by the European Space Agency each week from May to October are fed into a deep-learning algorithm originally developed by the Tartu Observatory. The images are overlaid onto a map of fields where farmers receive the hay-cutting subsidies to prevent them from turning forests over time.

Recourse: wired