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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.
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.