Built from the
outside in.

That is not a metaphor. I was a Peace and Security Consultant with a law background from Kenya - and had worked with the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, the Balsillie School of International Affairs, British High Commission, IGAD, and the British Council across four countries - and ended up building a technology company in Northern Europe. The honest version of that story is that it started with a Google search.

I had been working in tech for a few years at that point - first consulting NGOs on data analytics, then building Kontorva to connect skilled African engineers with European companies that needed them. The company was growing, but I knew we needed a proper European base.

In January 2024, one year after that Google search, I landed in Tallinn for the first time. I went back to Kenya in April, and in August 2024 I returned permanently, with my family. A month later, we started the Tehnopol incubator programme. In January 2026, we established our Nordic base in Helsinki - not a departure from Tallinn, but an expansion of it. Kontorva is now genuinely Finnish-Estonian: two entities, two cities, one company.

Most technology firms operating in the Nordic-Baltic corridor grew up inside it. We understand it because we had to learn it - from the outside, under real conditions, with no network to fall back on. And we committed to it in the way that people commit to things they actually believe in: we moved our families here.

That knowledge is not incidental to what Kontorva does. It is the foundation of it. And it is what we are selling - not abstraction, but the operational knowledge that comes from having actually done it.