Stagnation Lab · Tartu, Estonia · since 2012
We design and build complex software solutions for businesses across industries — from digital identity and financial systems to connected devices, web platforms and consumer applications.
Our twelve-person engineering team has built software used by banks, manufacturers, telecom operators and millions of people across Europe.
years, building since 2012
long-term clients
unique Smart-ID users
Telia TV customers
We have built production systems for
Customer-facing products and the internal platforms behind them. TypeScript across the stack, React or the framework that fits, and whatever the integration actually requires underneath. Written to be maintained by whoever comes after us.
Software that ships on hardware: televisions and set-top boxes, POS and kiosk systems, IoT devices, robotics prototypes, museum installations. We have vast experience in all of them, and even in building reliable solutions for businesses where the memory and computing power of the environment are very limited but everyday usage and the customer base are huge, so the reliability of the solution is critical.
Mobile identity apps, qualified electronic signature, strong customer authentication and biometric enrolment. AML and KYC: onboarding and remote identification, screening, transaction monitoring, case management. Built to be explained to a regulator.
Quotes, orders, approvals, documents and cases moving through defined steps — with the rules, the current state and the audit trail in one system rather than in six spreadsheets and an inbox. We use AI where it removes manual reading and sorting, and leave the decision with the person who has to sign for it.
Developed in Estonia, Smart-ID is an app-based electronic identity solution for strong authentication and digital signing. It enables users to securely access public and private e-services and confirm transactions, including bank payments. Qualified Smart-ID accounts can also create qualified electronic signatures (QES) for contracts and documents, with the same legal effect as handwritten signatures across the European Union.
We built the Smart-ID mobile applications for Android and iOS, distributed through Google Play, Apple’s App Store and Huawei AppGallery. Smart-ID operates across the Baltic states and Belgium, while the same underlying application technology also powers locally branded identity solutions in other markets.
Our work includes biometric enrolment, QES signing and PSD2-compliant strong customer authentication flows for payment confirmation.
A financing analysis tool, built end to end — from the first workshop through to the version bankers use in their daily work. Our whole scope: product, engineering, delivery.
Internal banking tool — not shown publicly
A JavaScript application for televisions and set-top boxes, used daily by Telia TV customers across Estonia. A large codebase running under tight memory and compute constraints, with no room to fail quietly.
Selected work
Most banks have seen an AI demo. The harder part is putting AI into production where material outputs must remain traceable, reviewable and defensible long after launch.
That requires more than a model: defined data boundaries, evaluation against agreed risk thresholds, human escalation, access controls, versioned models and prompts, monitoring and rollback. We bring the engineering discipline developed through identity, signature and payment systems, where reliability and auditability are design requirements.
Prioritise alerts and reduce analyst workload while preserving the supporting evidence and rationale. Decisions to suppress, escalate or close an alert follow bank-approved rules and remain available for review.
Extract and compare document data, identify potential fraud signals, and route low-confidence or exceptional cases to a human reviewer.
Ground answers in approved policies, procedures and data, with cited sources, existing access controls and appropriate activity logging.
Maintain versioned models and prompts, evaluation datasets, approvals, monitoring and durable records of inputs, retrieved sources and outputs.
Obligations differ by use case, and by whether the bank is the provider or the deployer under the EU AI Act. We build to the classification your own risk assessment sets, rather than assuming every output carries the same duties.
How we build AIFrom five IT enthusiasts to a twelve-person company. In 2012 we took on our first real challenge: the world's first STB-free IPTV solution built with web technologies alone. Then we ported the same code onto low-end set-top boxes, which taught us how to write a large codebase for a machine with almost nothing in it — used by hundreds of thousands of people a day.
That is where the habit comes from. Tight constraints, unforgiving hardware, an audience that notices immediately when something breaks. It is the same discipline a bank needs, arrived at from a different direction.
We are in Tartu, home to Estonia's most prominent university, which is where a good share of the team came from and where the next ones are.
And if you’re wondering about the name — why “Stagnation Lab”?
Because “Innovation Hub” was already taken by three thousand other startups.
Urmo
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Taavi
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Priit
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Riho
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Sander
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Ott
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Dmitri
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Toomas
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Jaanus
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Mihkel
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Martin
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Whether you are planning a web platform, industrial system, AI-assisted workflow or regulated product, start with a technical conversation. We will tell you plainly whether it is something we should be doing.
Email usinfo@stagnationlab.comRüütli 7, Tartu, Estonia
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Stagnation Lab