finland
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xEdu gives education startups homework of their own
The Finnish accelerator puts learning science inside the business plan. From Helsinki to Turin and Vilnius, its founders get mentors, classroom questions and a reason to rethink what they are selling.
Boost Turku gives first-time founders a summer to find out
Eight weeks. No fee. No equity taken. In Finland’s student-run startup community, the first business idea is only part of the education.
LUTES Gives Students the Keys to the Startup Club
In Lappeenranta, a student-run society turns curious newcomers into project leaders and first-time founders. Its most useful lesson is what happens when the board lets other people take charge.
Maria 01 turned a hospital into a shortcut for startups
In Helsinki, an old hospital puts founders down the hall from venture capital. Maria 01’s real business is making the right people easier to find - with desks, introductions and a €2,000 accelerator among its tools.
Innovestor puts venture capital on the roof
The Finnish investment manager connects startup funding, commercial property and battery storage. Its wager: owning more of the route from invention to everyday use can make each investment more useful.
Helsinki Think Company makes room for the first bad idea
Free workshops, campus workspaces and small grants give academic ideas somewhere to grow. Helsinki Think Company’s real product is the chance to try entrepreneurship before betting a livelihood on it.
Leo Kankkunen Wants to Make the Scuba Tank Optional
A Finnish electrical engineer surfaced from a dive with an inconvenient question: if the oxygen is already in the water, why carry it down in a steel tank? DAIVIN! is his attempt to turn that question into working hardware.
Sampo Parkkinen Is Teaching Beauty Tech to Be More Helpful
The Revieve founder has spent two decades studying how people choose - first in physical stores, now through AI. His useful heresy is simple: stop selling so hard and start helping people buy.
Documill
Inside Espoo, a small Finnish team quietly rebuilt the paperwork that runs sales - contracts, quotes, approvals and signatures - so it never has to leave Salesforce.
Haltian
Haltian is a Finnish IoT company from Oulu that turns physical spaces into smart, sustainable environments. Founded in 2012 by former Nokia product engineers, it pairs its Thingsee wireless sensor hardware with the Empathic Building digital twin software to help offices, hospitals, warehouses and logistics sites measure occupancy, air quality and asset location - and act on the data. Having earned early fame designing the Oura smart ring, Haltian now runs one of Europe's largest IoT deployments and serves roughly 400 customers across 36 countries.
ŌURA
ŌURA makes the Oura Ring, a titanium smart ring that reads sleep, recovery, heart rate, temperature and activity from the finger. Founded in Oulu, Finland in 2013 and now co-headquartered in San Francisco, it has shipped more than 5.5 million rings, surpassed $500M in 2024 revenue and reached an $11B valuation in its 2025 Series E.
Timo Korpela
Timo Korpela is CEO of Haltian Inc. and VP of Sales for North America at Haltian, the Finnish IoT pioneer behind the Thingsee sensor platform and the 'Empathic Building' concept. Raised under the Northern Lights in Finnish Lapland and educated at Helsinki University of Technology, he bridges the precision of Nordic engineering with the deal-making culture of Silicon Valley. Operating from Palo Alto, he drives Haltian's North American growth - a market that accounts for roughly a third of the company's revenue - while negotiating global partnerships with Cisco, Microsoft, and healthcare systems across three continents.
Tero-Pekka Alastalo
Tero-Pekka Alastalo is a Finnish-born physician-scientist turned serial entrepreneur who trained as a pediatric cardiologist, completed his postdoctoral work at Stanford University School of Medicine, and has spent the last 15 years building life science companies in Silicon Valley. He co-founded Blueprint Genetics in 2012 - a clinical genetic testing company later acquired by Quest Diagnostics in 2020 - before launching Avenue Biosciences in 2023, a transatlantic AI-powered protein engineering company that uses signal peptide libraries and machine learning to unlock the secretory pathway and dramatically boost therapeutic protein yields. Based in Menlo Park, California, Alastalo is turning a fundamental cellular mechanism overlooked by the industry into a platform that could accelerate every class of next-generation biologic.