Finnish startup scene
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The
startup A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...
scene in
Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...
has given birth to companies such as
Angry Birds ''Angry Birds'' is a Finnish action-based media franchise created by Rovio Entertainment. The game series focuses on the eponymous flock of angry birds who try to save their eggs from green-colored pigs. Inspired by the game ''Crush the Castle ...
,
Supercell A supercell is a thunderstorm characterized by the presence of a mesocyclone: a deep, persistently rotating updraft. Due to this, these storms are sometimes referred to as rotating thunderstorms. Of the four classifications of thunderstorms (s ...
,
Wolt Wolt is a Finnish technology company known for its delivery platform for food and merchandise. On Wolt's apps (iOS and Android) or website, customers can order food and other items from the platform's restaurant and merchant partners, and either p ...
, and many others. Entrepreneurship itself in Finland is quite an old phenomenon. However, as everywhere else, the first startups appeared in the early 1990s and some faced demise with the end of
dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...
in early 2000.


The early days

Prior to 1995, one of the key influences was the Finnish demo scene which gathered together people interested in burgeoning technology. Many companies such as
Hybrid Graphics AMD Hybrid Graphics technology, is a collective brand from AMD for its Radeon line of discrete and integrated GPU, promoting higher performance and productivity while saving energy consumption in GPUs. The technology previously applied to selec ...
and Riot-E as well as others have their roots in the demo scene.


The dot-com bubble

The
dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...
in the USA lasted between 1995-2000. The bubble has had a major impact on the Finnish start-up ecosystem. One of the most well-known dot-com companies, together with Riot-E, was Iobox. IObox Oy was a Finnish mobile and
web portal A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayin ...
operator. Formed in 1999, the dot-com company became part of Telefónica Mobile. At a sale price of $250m (€230m) in 2000, IObox was the largest venture capital exit in Finland. It was not surpassed until the sale of
MySQL AB MySQL AB was a Swedish software company founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, Sun was in turn acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well as r ...
in 2008 for $1bn (€670m). MySQL was another start-up that was built in the middle of the dot-com bubble. The company was founded in 1995 and the first version of MySQL was released in 1996.


Life after dot-com

The period starting in 2003 and ending, roughly, around 2006 was a post-dot-com recovery time for the Finnish start-up ecosystem. One of the key players in the ecosystem at the time was Sulake, which was founded in 2001, but had its most important actions take place after registering as Sulake Corporation in 2003. Aula movement was one of the key events in 2006 gathering people from different backgrounds to talk about social software. This software community was the beginning of companies like Jaiku (later acquired by Google) and Dopplr (later acquired by Nokia).


Since 2007

This period is characterized by the rise of a grassroots student movement initiated by
Aaltoes Aaltoes, also known as Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, is a non-profit organization run by students, based in Helsinki, Finland. Founded in 2009, Aaltoes has helped the rapid emergence of a startup culture in Finland in 2008-2011. Aaltoes's purp ...
, the emergence of a new wave of start-up entrepreneurs as well as creation of ArcticStartup, a local media 100% dedicated to covering the start-up scene in the Nordic and
Baltic Baltic may refer to: Peoples and languages * Baltic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and extinct Old Prussian *Balts (or Baltic peoples), ethnic groups speaking the Baltic languages and/or originati ...
region.
Aaltoes Aaltoes, also known as Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, is a non-profit organization run by students, based in Helsinki, Finland. Founded in 2009, Aaltoes has helped the rapid emergence of a startup culture in Finland in 2008-2011. Aaltoes's purp ...
, or
Aalto Entrepreneurship Society Aaltoes, also known as Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, is a non-profit organization run by students, based in Helsinki, Finland. Founded in 2009, Aaltoes has helped the rapid emergence of a startup culture in Finland in 2008-2011. Aaltoes's purp ...
, was founded in 2009 by a disciplinary group of students from the three founding schools of
Aalto University Aalto University ( fi, Aalto-yliopisto; sv, Aalto-universitetet) is a public research university located in Espoo, Finland. It was established in 2010 as a merger of three major Finnish universities: the Helsinki University of Technology, the He ...
. Currently,
Aaltoes Aaltoes, also known as Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, is a non-profit organization run by students, based in Helsinki, Finland. Founded in 2009, Aaltoes has helped the rapid emergence of a startup culture in Finland in 2008-2011. Aaltoes's purp ...
remains student-run and a non-profit, while maintaining the largest startup community in Finland. As in
Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...
most startups in Finland are IT related. Recently, however, companies developing physical end-products has risen. Notable examples include Jalo Helsinki and Uploud Audio. Former producing fire alarms while the latter producing nice looking loudspeakers. In 2009 Finland was second largest investor in early stage startups in Europe measured in venture capital as a percentage of
GDP Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced and sold (not resold) in a specific time period by countries. Due to its complex and subjective nature this measure is often ...
. Finnish member of Parliament
Lasse Männistö Lasse Pekka Männistö (born 16 March 1982) is a Finnish politician and an executive in charge of outsourcing and public relations at the Finnish private hospital corporate group Mehiläinen. He has been criticized for violating the dignity of Par ...
has established a startup group inside the Finnish parliament. In 2019, Finland accounted for 10 percent of global startup exits, according to TNW. In terms of local connectivity, the 2018 Global Startup Ecosystem report ranks Helsinki's ecosystem as the best in the world. In the 2020, Finnish startups raised a record-high of €951 in growth funding, the largest investor group being
venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...
investors, who invested €495 million into Finnish startup during the year.


Notable companies

*
Hybrid Graphics AMD Hybrid Graphics technology, is a collective brand from AMD for its Radeon line of discrete and integrated GPU, promoting higher performance and productivity while saving energy consumption in GPUs. The technology previously applied to selec ...
(1994) * Iobox (1999) * Riot-E (2000) *
Rovio Entertainment Rovio Entertainment Oyj (formerly Relude Oy and Rovio Mobile Oy and doing business internationally as the Rovio Entertainment Corporation) is a Finnish video game developer based in Espoo. Founded in 2003 by Helsinki University of Technology s ...
(2003) *
Jaiku Jaiku was a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter, founded a month before the latter. Jaiku was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that ...
(2006) *
Supercell A supercell is a thunderstorm characterized by the presence of a mesocyclone: a deep, persistently rotating updraft. Due to this, these storms are sometimes referred to as rotating thunderstorms. Of the four classifications of thunderstorms (s ...
(2010) *
Jolla Jolla Oy (sometimes referred to as Jolla Ltd.) is a Finnish technology company; vendor and developer of Sailfish OS. Headquartered in Tampere, Finland, Jolla has its own research and development offices in Helsinki, Tampere and Cyberport, Hong ...
(2011) *
Wolt Wolt is a Finnish technology company known for its delivery platform for food and merchandise. On Wolt's apps (iOS and Android) or website, customers can order food and other items from the platform's restaurant and merchant partners, and either p ...
(2014)


References

{{Finland topics Economy of Finland Entrepreneurship