Spotlight

This piece is part of the Slush Chronicles series, “Founders Unplugged,” where we interview founders and key personnel of innovative companies, to hear their thoughts on the event we’re attending or dive into other spontaneously chosen topics. Slush 2024 founder: Jukka Tuhkanen, HIIL I ran into Jukka Tuhkanen, Director of Sales and Partnerships from Hiil, a wood “startup” transforming waste …

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 …

More than ever we need strong role models and entrepreneurs who can inspire others and actively help put focus on growth and innovation. For 25 years, EY has paid tribute to Denmark’s best growth creators, and this year they want to engage the business community and the participating companies in the fight to defy the crisis we are in and to see opportunities in adversity. …

The founder of the startup Colive wants to use premium Cypriot olive oil to spark global conversations about peace. He connects family farms on both sides of the UN Buffer Zone to create the first product in what he hopes will be an entire line of culturally significant ingredients and foods to encourage cooperation. That idea secured him the Startups4Peace …

Agriculture and fire prevention are not what you expect to talk about when you discuss IoT trends, but perhaps you should.  Haytech, a new startup from Finland, aims to help farmers prevent fires. Often, when we talk about the Internet of Things (IoT), we imagine trendy consumer products – wearables such as Fitbits, for example, which people find exciting but …

Aalborg is a lot of things:  it is a student city, a trade city, and the fourth largest city in Denmark- but the most interesting thing about Aalborg is that there are approximately 1,000 new businesses every year, many of which are tech startups. BusinessAalborg, Aalborg Kommune’s business department, offers free, one-on-one advice and the possibility of financial assistance for …

SBT Aqua‘s stated goal is to “radically improve the standards of water quality control” to prevent the spread of water-born illnesses, and they are not far from making this a reality. As DTU students, founder and CEO Gustav Erik Skands, along with his team, Frederik Peter Aalund (CIO) and Christian Vinther Bertelsen (CTO), discovered that the current way of detecting …

As exciting and interesting it is to live abroad,  the experience comes with many challenges. For example, communication, contact, and building of relationships can be quite a pickle when you move to a new place. Plane is an icebreaker app for expats in Scandinavia built to solve exactly those challenges. “We built Plane to address an itch I had when …

For five years now, Swedish developers Might and Delight’s goal has been to make games that stand out from the crowd. Combining unique aesthetics with unfamiliar stories and settings, Might and Delight’s games have taken gamers on trips with badgers, lynxes, and even in a space ship. And that is the goal – to create games that combine a strong narrative …

RetinaLyze is a company that aims to help patients with diabetes suffering from Diabetic Retinopathy, a common complication of the disease, by finding distortions in the retina. It is important innovation, since patients rarely ever notice symptoms before an advanced state of the disease, and by then it has a high probability to cause total blindness. To combat this, RetinaLyze …

Miia Liesegang and Taina Tallala are the architects behind the direction of a new Finnish startup which wants to make gardening more enjoyable and bring a real product to customers. With backgrounds in marketing and design, and a foothold in the entrepreneurial world for some time, they decided to team up to create Belightful, a startup aimed at producing butterfly …

A new app is ready to conquer Aarhus. With YourLocal you get the opportunity to buy products to reduced prices, if you can do it with short notice. The reason for this app is that there is way too much food, which gets thrown into the trash. YourLocal can be mistaken for a deal site, but it isn’t. The significant …

When living in an apartment block, doing your laundry can be very frustrating, time-wasting activity. Now, three female entrepreneurs have developed an application,Book N Wash, which makes the entire booking process easier. People who live in an apartment block knows how frustrating it is to walk down to the laundry room with all your laundry, only to find there is …

Welcome to the first week of Planday’s adventure in the United States. This week really brought the heat in the Lemonsqueeze office, where Planday is housed.  Onboarding was on the agenda, and Lemonsqueeze had divided it into two phases:  Company Onboarding and Employee Onboarding. Company Onboarding focuses on getting Planday’s DNA into ‘Plandayers’ – new employees.  The top priority is …

Sofie Lundström, founder of To Borrow, is building a lending platform, easing access to capital for new smaller  companies. Originally published in #NordicMade magazine. When Sofie Lundström was growing up, she did a great deal of sports. It is during that time she got her strong  character and zest to be the best at what she does. Later on, in …

The new Danish platform Praice received an investment of one million from four private investors, including former Endomondo co-founder Christian Birk. The platform Praice caters to companies and job seekers. In addition to a normal CV and letter of motivation, job-seekers can have a social profile based on their network. The Danish-developed platform has landed four private investors, who will …

The Nordic region is experiencing an entrepreneurial blossoming. Nordic Innovation wishes to brace the progress and is therefore currently running ten different projects to help strengthen the Nordic startup ecosystem. In the individual Nordic states there are several initiatives working to support the flourishing environment, both public such as the ‘Væksthus’-initiative in Denmark or private such as the grassroot organization #sthlmtech in …

Entrepreneurs Academy is a Swedish student organization from Uppsala University, which want to encourage the students and turn all the knowledge at the university into willpower, to become entrepreneurs. Uppsala, the fourth largest city of Sweden with more than 40.000 students, has a growing startup community but the students are leaving for Stockholm because it is bigger, somewhat close by …

These days the Nordicstartupbits team is placed in the middle of the tech hurricane at the SxSW conference in Austin Texas. Today we got to talk with a lot of Nordic startups, so the next few days, we will be posting articles about the startups and general news from the SxSW conference & festival. The first startup we want to …

The Stockholm-based startup FishBrain is the leading social sport fishing app with more than 650,000 users. The team is founded in 2012 by the two Swedish guys, Jens Person and Marcus Fransson. Johan Attby the current CEO came into the picture a year later after selling his previous company, which was located in Silicon Valley. After selling my company I …