Oulu, Finland — The Arctic startup event, Polar Bear Pitching, marked its live return after a hiatus of four years. A sizable crowd gathered at Oulu Market Square, while online viewers from around the globe tuned in to witness ten selected startups take the plunge into the Avanto (Finnish for ice hole), each aiming to impress the panel of judges …

Helsinki — In a stride towards revolutionizing the European hospitality sector, Finnish tech-enabled hospitality operator Bob W has announced its Series B funding of EUR 40 million. This round, led by Evli Growth Partners and joined by growth capital investors and prominent European entrepreneurs, including Taavet+Sten, the investment firm of Wise’s founder Taavet Hinrikus and Sten Tamkivi, Flashpoint, and Supercell’s …

Stockholm — A Swedish deep technology company N-ink is announced as the winner of a science challenge by Voima Ventures, an early-stage investor based in Helsinki and Stockholm. The challenge targeted Nordic and Baltic early-stage startups and research teams with groundbreaking science-based innovations. By winning the challenge, N-ink secures a €1M investment as a convertible note from Voima Ventures. Out …

At a sizable booth, Samar Malik was promoting SAP for startups, emphasizing the company’s wealth of knowledge and expertise. It marked her inaugural attendance at Slush, where she commended the event and its arrangements. However, the genuine slush and sleet outdoors left the London resident a bit hesitant. Sami Vuorenmaa recently established his consultancy, Clarinum Insights, which focuses on helping …

The iconic Slush 100 winner is Faircado. The startup is turning e-commerce into recommerce — by making second-hand the most obvious and easy choice of every consumer. Our browser plugin uses AI to automatically find the best second-hand alternatives to what users are looking for online. Making them save time, money and CO2 without effort, and for free.Berlin-based Faircado received …

  At the Slush startup event in Helsinki, Nico Rosberg, the 2016 Formula 1 World Champion, revealed what led him to pass by a lucrative contract extension in the pinnacle of motorsport and transition into an investor. – Nice to be back to my roots, said the 38-year-old to the extensive audience. By a fireside chat with Robert Lacher, the …

Failup Ventures, a new globally operating early-stage venture capital fund, has announced the first closing of €30 million of its new early-stage fund of €50 million. Founded by three previous Finnish entrepreneurs – Jesse Heikkilä, Topias Soininen, and Oscar Andersin – Failup Ventures backs early-stage startups with strong, mission-driven teams. Failup’s typical initial investments range from €200k to €1 million …

The most coveted pitching competition is the iconic Slush 100. The winner will get an equity investment from the leading early-stage funds in Europe: Accel, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA, and Northzone. These iconic funds have backed historic companies like Meta, Stripe, Airbnb, Snap, Uber, Spotify, Salesforce, Instacart, and Klarna. The race is on and the original amount of …

The eternal flame was ignited in 2008 in Helsinki with a one-day affair made up of around 250 people. Since that the event has grown by leaps and bounds, our goal has stayed the same: the focus is on how best to serve startup ecosystems across the world. As the founders and present employees of Slush organization want to inspire …

As an event, Slush succeeds to impress all the attendees, even those Teflon-surfaced veterans, who have many previous Slushes on their belt. So it is no wonder, that the first-timers are generally astonished what comes to the atmosphere, solid arrangements, and the solid flux of meeting interesting people, especially  new ones. Deirdre Mc Gettrick from U.K. was attending Slush to …

The world’s leading startup conference Slush has decided to revoke the prize funding valued of 1M€ for Immigram, the Slush100 pitching competition winner after its alleged connections to Russia and Russian experts who want to exit their homeland. The company has also a presence in Russia. Immigram and its founders Anastasia Miroljubova and Mikhail Sharonov have created a platform, which …

The world’s largest start-up festival, Slush will take place in Helsinki on November 16-17, but Slush isn’t just the official single event. Slush Week, running from Nov 14-18, is loaded with a good variety of Side Events. Plus, and even no Slush Pass will be needed to access many of these events. Side Events are the perfect way to get …

The term “Crowddroning” means to unleash thousands of drones and their operators to provide ultra high resolution Earth observation data from every corner of the earth. This way, the collected data supplements the underused information the numerous satellites have to offer. The data itself is ready-to-analyze high-resolution data, straight to any server so the clients of GLOBHE can focus on …

The revenue of the member companies of the Finnish Startup Community, founded a year ago, has grown by 62 per cent from last year. The combined revenue of the companies was EUR 3.5 billion in 2021. The growth is expected to remain strong in 2022. “The majority of the revenue of our member companies comes from exports, so the importance …

The Arctic15 Helsinki takes place on June, 7-8, 2022. Before the unforeseen pandemic hiatus, the event attracted over 1500+ Startups, VCs, CVCs, Angels, and Investors to get together. For this year, the arranging committee has some realistic numbers drafted: “We aim for 300+ investors, 450+ startups, 150+ corporates, a maximum of 2000 attendees and again – the name of the …

Although R&D investments in Finland will continue to grow, some brutal challenges are looming in the future. R&D investments in Finland will continue to grow, driven by public funding. Finnish companies will continue to increase their product development investments in Finland also in 2022. Growth will be accelerated by the green transition, the advancement of digitalisation and the growth of …