2022 was a banner year for Finnish startups, raising €1.8 billion ($1.9 billion), according to the Finish Venture Capital Association—a record amount of investment. 2023 was likely even better: in comparison to its European peers, when measured relative to GDP, Finnish startups lead the way in the amount of VC funding they get.
The influx of money is testament to the scale and diversity of the Finnish startup sector, with Helsinki at the core. It has grown quickly. “It’s an endlessly exciting place to be,” says Eerika Savolainen, CEO at Slush, Helsinki’s annual startup event. “In 2008, I would say that we had almost nothing,” says Teemu Seppälä, the startups soft-landing lead at Business Helsinki, a business development organization working to attract international companies to the Finnish capital. “That was the date we started the startup movement.” Seppälä says Helsinki is a uniquely welcoming place to set up a business. “It's very easy to connect with investors, clients or the players in the ecosystem—and us as the city,” he says. “We help you from the very beginning.”
The idea for metabolic health startup Veri came about because Verneri Jäämuru struggled with ulcerative colitis while growing up, an illness doctors blamed on his consumption of ultra-processed foods. In 2020, Jäämuru (who previously worked at smart sleep-tracking ring company Oura), Anttoni Aniebonam, and Frans Lehmusvaara launched Veri. The startup developed a small, button-sized wearable sensor which, once attached to a user’s arm, monitors blood sugar levels. Data is fed in real-time to an app and then analyzed, providing personalized nutrition recommendations based on your metabolic profile. “Unlike other options that provide data without guidance, or push drugs and restrictive diets, we value empowerment through data and education, with the support of guidance and community,” says Aniebonam. The 40-strong company raised its first funding round from Lifeline Ventures within two weeks of launching. To date, the company has raised €11 million. veri.co
Niklas Sandler Topelius researched 3D printing and drug manufacturing for more than ten years at Åbo Akademi University, where he was a professor in pharmaceutical technology. His research caught the eye of serial entrepreneur Charlotta Topelius and, in 2021, the two launched CurifyLabs. Their MiniLab 3D printer can be loaded by hospital pharmacists with a special paste made of pharmaceutical ingredients to manufacture drugs. “Mass produced medicines often fail to meet the needs of some patient communities,” says Topelus. “Pharmacists have been manufacturing medicines manually for many years, but are limited by an error-prone and laborious process.” Initially focused on the veterinarian space, producing beef-flavored tablets tailored to cats’ and dogs’ medical needs, the startup has since expanded to human drugs such as beta-blocker propranolol and brain-cancer treatment temozolomide. The 18-strong company has raised €3.1 million to date, and was awarded €2.5 million from the European Innovation Council Accelerator in April 2023. curifylabs.com
Quanscient uses quantum computing to make industrial simulations more powerful. Founded in September 2021 by Tampere University researchers Valtteri Lahtinen and Asser Lähdemäki, alongside Juha Riippi and Alexandre Halbach, the firm works with customers to develop digital prototyping. “Computer-aided designs can be imported to multiphysics simulation platforms so engineers can simulate how their products work before committing the time and resources to build a prototype,” says Riippi. That’s important in areas including fusion energy, MRI scanners, and maglev trains—all sectors Quanscient is targeting. Using quantum computing allows the simulations to be 100 times faster and more than 100 times more complex—making the outcomes more accurate. “We reached accuracy within two percent of the experimental measurement data for an electrical motor simulation for a California-based customer, whereas the competitor was only within 20 percent,” claims Riippi. Finnish venture capital fund Maki.vc led the latest €3.9 million funding round into the firm in April 2023. quanscient.com
Onego Bio reinvents the egg for the modern day. “With precision fermentation, we can create proteins that are bio-identical to the foods we know and love, with 90 percent fewer resources,” says Maija Itkonen, cofounder and CEO of the company. "When using one hectare of land to cultivate feed for microorganisms instead of chickens, we can produce ten times more egg white protein," she says. Launched in February 2022 by Itkonen and former VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland employee Christopher Landowski, the company makes an egg-white substitute from the microorganism Trichoderma reesei. In 2022, the startup raised €14.5 million in funding from venture capital fund Agronomics, Maki.vc and Business Finland. Future plans include building a factory in the United States that can produce one billion non-animal eggs a year, equivalent to those from two million chickens. onego.bio
Aaro Isosaari’s AI-powered writing assistant, Flowrite, foreshadowed the generative AI revolution when it was founded in 2020. Isosaari was frustrated by the number of emails he was asked to read and write in the course of his day running Finnish startup accelerator Kiuas. The product can turn short phrases into fully-formed emails. Flowrite has raised $5 million in funding and, in April 2023, the company rolled out a chat-based user interface that can understand more than 20 languages. flowrite.com
Founded in 2021 by Alberto Scherb, Andro Lindsay, and Jaime Alvarez Gerding, 100 Thousand Million wants to build sustainable cities. The company is planning its first sustainable space, Earth City, in Chile, near cofounder Alvarez Gerding’s hometown, following six sustainable principles that redesign urban areas from the ground up. “We will start with an energy and water footprint per capita that is one third compared to Helsinki, which is a leading city by today’s standards,” says Scherb, who has previously worked for Apple and Google. “The design of the city involves creating micro grids that are replicable and fully dependent on solar and wind energy. We also will design homes that consume and recycle water.” 100 Thousand Million has secured $750K from Oregon-based AriaTouch. 100tm.earth
Inside the headquarters of IQM—which builds high-performance quantum computers for computing hubs and data centers—stands a gong that employees ring every time the company has a major success. It has been noisy lately. IQM has raised more than €200 million since it was spun out of Aalto University in 2018, expanding to 250 employees located in offices in Espoo, Paris, Madrid, Munich, and Singapore. Cofounders Jan Goetz, Kuan Yen Tan, Mikko Möttönen, and Juha Vartiainen are also one of the most impressive in the quantum computing sector: Collectively, they’ve featured in more than 640 scientific publications with more than 27,000 citations. meetiqm.com
Making sneakers from coffee grounds and recycled plastic is the business model of Vietnamese expats Jesse Tran and Son Chu. The duo founded Rens Original in 2018, and launched their first sneaker in the summer of 2019. Each pair of shoes is made from 21 cups of coffee grounds and six recycled plastic bottles. The coffee grounds—which have antibacterial properties, preventing shoes from smelling—and waste plastic are combined and then made into plastic pellets, which are spun into a polymer yarn that can be tightly knitted onto a waterproof membrane. More than 40,000 pairs have since been sold, recycling 250,000 plastic bottles and 750,000 cups of coffee. rensoriginal.com
Ville Lehto and friend and cofounder Ville Leppälä were working for mixed reality startup Varjo, when they decided to start a new business—in the food delivery sector. The pair launched Huuva in 2020, working with restaurants to set up shared kitchens and aiming to bring more delivery options to suburban areas. For instance, one of their shared kitchens—15km from Helsinki’s city center—serves food from five different downtown restaurant brands. “It employs five chefs who are assisted by our proprietary technology aiming to reduce stress in the operation. This high level of integration is what enables us to cook multiple menus under one roof.” The 70-strong company has launched 12 shared kitchens, including a dine-in location in Berlin, and raised €6 million to date. huuva.io
Circular commerce platform Twice Commerce (previously known as Rentle) doesn’t work directly with end users, but instead with ecommerce platforms, providing the infrastructure they need to introduce rental, subscription, and buyback and resell features for products from skis and bikes to trailers, tools, and caravans. “It’s like commerce on repeat,” says Tuomo Laine, who founded the firm with Joel Mikkonen and Toomas Kallioja in 2018. The team honed their idea with a powerbank rental service at a Supercell e-sports event, and now are a 30-strong team that has attracted €8 million in funding from the likes of Maki.vc and Tera Ventures. twicecommerce.com
This article appears in the January/February 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
