Finland’s Million Dollar List: An Open Source Guide To The Country’s Startup Investors
Scenic summer panorama of the Market Square (Kauppatori) at the Old Town pier in Helsinki, Finland / Photo Credit: Shutterstock
According to the European Commission, small and medium sized businesses created 85% of net new jobs in the EU between 2002 and 2010.
Finland has taken this lesson to heart. When Apple introduced the first smartphone in 2007, Nokia’s fortunes plummeted. The country’s largest private employer, which generated 4% of its GDP in 2000, went through round after round of layoffs.
“Steve Jobs took our jobs,” Finland’s prime minister Alexander Stubb quipped.
As a result, Finland’s government has invested heavily in the country’s startup scene, resulting in some major post-Nokia success stories such as billion dollar startups Rovio and Supercell.
And there’s a lot more where they came from. Nokia’s Bridge Program alone has created 1,000 startups.
To help startups, investors, and potential business partners navigate their way through this exploding startup scene, we’ve created an open source document – a database, if you will – of Finnish angel investors, VC management firms and accelerators, along with their contact information and what kind of opportunities they’re looking for.
Geektime’s Finland Crowdsourced Investors list
Feel free to add, edit or comment. The idea is to crowdsource information for the benefit of the entire Finnish startup ecosystem. If you’re not on the list and would like to add your name, feel free to do so. Also, if you’re an investor and would like to amend your entry, please do. We hope this list will be useful to Finnish investors and startups as well as to individuals all over the world looking for an entry point into the Finnish market.
To enter the database, click on this link!
If you have any thoughts or suggestions about this crowdsourcing experiment, please share your opinions in the comments below.
Simona Weinglass contributed reporting.
Disclousre: None.