Resilience in the Age of Agentic AI: Baltic Spotlight

​The Friday events of the West Coast Estonian Days 2026 in San Francisco bring 150+ founders, investors, tech leaders, policymakers, educators, and civil-society voices from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and across North America into the Union Square Grand Hyatt for a single coordinated day.

Brought to you by headline sponsors: Kistler-Ritso Foundation, Vabamu, Stanford University Libraries.

​Morning: Baltic Startups in the Age of Agentic AI

​A tech-heavy half-day on the agentic shift and what it means for the people building and backing companies right now.

​What we'll cover

• ​The move from assistant tools to agents completing long tasks in the background, and what that does to org design, VC playbooks, and the definition of a "successful company".
• ​Human roles shifting from task execution to orchestrating agentic systems across parallel workstreams.
• ​The Baltic and Ukrainian founder lens: resource-constrained markets that force faster adaptation and tighter learning loops.
• ​Innovation House for Baltic Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: an exploratory conversation on a transatlantic platform for capital, business diplomacy, and strategic visibility.

• ​Sectors in focus: AI/ML, B2B SaaS, defense tech, fintech, consumer tech, cleantech.

   

Moderator: Ģirts Graudiņš (Latvian Startup Association Startin.LV & TestDevLab)

Panelists:

Eli Chen (Andrew Ng's AI Fund, Technology Partner)

Eugene Malobrodsky (One Way Ventures, Managing Partner)

Vlad Mysla (Emerging AI Solutions, Founder & AI Strategy Consultant

Andis Blukis (Provectus, Director AI Engineering)

Kadri Tuisk (Wundamental.ai & Clanbeat, Founder)

​12 PM: Networking Lunch 
(Co-sponsored by Korp! Vironia USA)

​Networking and ecosystem-building opportunity designed to encourage cross-community conversations. Founders meet VCs, policymakers, educators, journalists, and diaspora leaders. Innovation House for Baltic entrepreneurs discussions continue informally over the table.

​$30 Early Bird tickets currently include the Networking Lunch spot for FREE (limited participants).

​Afternoon: Resilience Forum

​If the morning is about how companies adapt to Agentic AI, the afternoon is about how democracies do. Same room, and the lens is pulled wider.

​Estonia and the broader Baltic region sit on the geopolitical frontline of contemporary hybrid threats: a real-world laboratory for how democratic societies hold together under technological and geopolitical disruption. The Forum convenes experts to examine interconnected questions.

​Afternoon sessions

• ​Keynote by Kristina Kallas - Estonian Minister of Education and Research: The opening keynote will present a broader vision for Estonia’s future as a digitally advanced and globally connected democratic society within the New Nordics framework, spanning Stanford partnerships, diaspora engagement, innovation, and the next phase of Vabamu’s development.
• Presentation: “Olga Kistler RItso’s Amazing Life Journey: Love of Freedom, Love of Country" by Sylvia Kistler Thompson and Andrew Thompson, Kistler-Ritso Foundation
• ​Panel I: Information Integrity in the Age of Agentic AI. Can mandatory, age-appropriate information analysis in schools build resilience more effectively than reactive counter-disinformation tools?
  • Halyna Padalko, Phd - Disinformation Researcher, Fulbright Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  • Dmitri Teperik - Director / Cognitive Security Expert, National Centre of Defence & Security Awareness (NCDSA)
  • Gundars Bergmanis-Korāts, PhD - Chief of the AI Lab, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) StratCom COE
  • Siim Kumpas (moderator) - eam Leader; Info Integrity & Counter-FIMI Division, European External Action Service (EEAS)
• ​Panel II: AI in Education. How do we integrate AI into learning without weakening judgment? Estonia's emerging approach as a model that could scale across democracies.
  • Kristina Kallas - Estonian Minister of Education and Research
  • Ivo Visak - CEO of AI Leap Foundation, Estonia
  • Kadri Tuisk - Founder of Clanbeat / Co-Founder of EdTech Estonia
  • Adam Barton - PhD, Global K-12 Education Lead, Anthropic
  • Dan Effland (moderator) - Senior Director of Innovation, Summit Public Schools

​Who'll be in the room

​A curated transatlantic mix: Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian startup founders, U.S. venture capitalists, angel investors, corporate innovators, technologists, policymakers, educators, journalists, and diaspora leaders.

• ​Founders, investors, operators: The morning sharpens your view on Agentic AI's impact on company-building, agentic ways of working and capital. The afternoon shows you the policy and societal weather you're building into, and puts you in the room with the people writing it.
• ​Policymakers, educators, civil-society leaders: The afternoon is your core program. The morning grounds it in live founders, real capital flows, and the technologies you'll soon be shaping policy around.
• ​Everyone: Friday is also the professional entry point into the full West Coast Estonian Days 2026 weekend: cultural and community programming runs through Sunday.