Report · One-off

Who Starts Companies in Latvia

The median person founding a Latvian limited company is 37 on the day it is registered, and 66.9% of founders are between 25 and 44. At least 7.2% of founders run more than one live company they started, and at least 10.4% of the companies registered in 2025 had a founder who already did. Those last two are floors, for reasons the second half of this page sets out.

How Old Are Company Founders in Latvia?

The median person founding a Latvian limited company is 37 on the day it is registered, and 66.9% of founders are between 25 and 44. 8.0% were under 25 and 8.1% were 55 or older, among the 93.3% of founders whose age can be read.

Across companies registered from 2015 to 2025 that are still active, 42,742 founders can be given an age. Founders who already ran another company had a median age of 39, 2 years older than first-time founders at 37.

The age comes from the register itself. The masked personal codes it publishes keep the six digits that encode a date of birth, and foreign shareholders are listed with a birth date instead. Personal codes issued since July 2017 carry no date, and most founders without an age hold one of those.

How Many Latvian Founders Run More Than One Company?

At least one in 14. Of the 49,314 people who founded a company registered since 2015 that is still active, and who still hold the shares they started with, 3,526, or 7.2%, founded at least one other company that is also still active.

Most repeat founders founded two, 3,033 people. 364 founded three, 89 four, and 37 between five and nine. Fewer than 20 founded ten or more.

That is a floor, and it measures something narrower than serial founding. Both companies must still exist, because the register lists shareholders only for live companies: a founder whose first company closed before they started the next one is invisible here. So is a founder who has since sold their shares, and one whose name changed between the two.

How Long Do Latvian Founders Wait Before a Second Company?

Among founders with more than one company, the median gap between the first and the second is 2.7 years. 26.9% registered the second within a year, and 69.6% within five. Only 8.3% registered both within a month, so this is rarely a holding company and a trading company set up together.

Long gaps are undercounted. A founder’s earlier company mostly shows up only if it was registered from 2014, for the reason given below, so a first company from before then is usually missing and the gap to the second with it.

Are Riga’s Founders More Experienced Than the Rest of Latvia’s?

Yes. Of Riga’s companies registered from 2015 to 2025, 8.6% had a founder already running another live company, against 6.8% in the rest of Latvia. For companies registered in 2025 alone the figures are 12.1% and 8.9%. Riga’s founders had a median age of 37 at registration, against 36 elsewhere.

Is Serial Founding Rising in Latvia?

The data cannot say. The share of new companies with an experienced founder rises from 3.3% for 2015 to 10.4% for 2025, but almost all of that rise comes from how the register records founders, not from a change in who starts companies. Two things drive it.

Founding records are visible from 2014. A founder shows up when their shares are dated the day the company was registered. For companies registered before 2014 that holds for at most 19.4% of them, against 41.9% for companies registered in 2014, because most shareholdings in older companies carry a later date. So a founder’s earlier company counts mostly if it was registered from 2014: a 2025 founder has 11 years in which an earlier company can be seen, and a 2015 founder has 1 year.

Only survivors are counted. The earlier company also has to still exist, and older years have lost more of theirs. The test used in the foreign ownership report applies here and fails: across the 6 years from 2015 to 2020, the share of companies still alive spans 25.7 points in the company survival report, and the experienced-founder share moves with it, a correlation of 0.91. Median age moves with it too, at 0.823, though only across 2 years. So this page gives age as one pooled level and the experienced share as a floor for the latest year, never as a series.

What Can Latvian Founder Data Not Tell You?

Whether a founder’s second company outlasts the first, or what founders do after a failure, because the register lists shareholders only for live companies. It also cannot cover the companies on this map, founders who hold through another company, or anything about a person, since names are used only to match founders and are never stored.

• Whether a founder’s second company outlasts the first. The register publishes shareholders, beneficial owners and board members for live companies only. Not one struck-off SIA has any of them on record, so the question cannot be asked of public data.
• What founders do after a failure. For the same reason, a founder whose company closed leaves no trace in these files.
• The companies on this map. Only 153 of the 564 mapped companies still in the register have a person holding founding shares, too few for a share under the 200-company rule, even though 518 of them were registered since 2014.
• Founders who hold through another company. 1,724 companies registered since 2015 were founded only by other companies, and 27,963 have no founding shareholder left at all. Neither kind is counted.
• Anything about a person. Names and partial identity codes are read only to recognise the same person across companies. They become an irreversible key in memory and are never stored. The page publishes counts, and withholds any under 20.

Method

• Founder. A natural person holding shares in an SIA dated no more than 7 days after the company’s registration, and still holding them.
• Same person. The same full name with the same masked personal code, or for foreign shareholders the same birth date.
• Age. Whole years from the date of birth to the date of registration. A masked code shows the day, month and last two digits of the year; the century is the one that gives an age from 0 to 100.
• Population. Active SIAs registered from 2015 to 2025. The members file covers limited liability companies, so AS are not included.
• Withheld figures. A count from 1 to 19 is shown as fewer than 20, and no share or median is published over fewer than 200.

Definitions are frozen at version 4. The full set is on the methodology page.

Sources

• Uzņēmumu reģistrs, members of limited liability companies, with the date each shareholding began. Extract of 10 September 2026.
• Uzņēmumu reģistrs open data, the company register. Extract of 4 September 2026.
• Company survival in Latvia, the survival rates the test above is measured against.
• Women in the Latvian register, the same founding teams counted by gender rather than by experience.