What’s going on in Finland?

by Dylan on March 17, 2011

I was having coffee with a corporate finance guy the other day and he told me that one fund has just completed three deals in Finland. Funny to think that the company which now epitomises complete innovation inertia (Nokia) is based in the same country which is spawning start-ups like Supercell, Dopplr, Rovio, Applifier, and Grey Area (who just closed a $2.5MM investment round from Index Ventures, London Venture Partners and Initial Capital).

Finland has a population of about 5m people. Which isn’t a great deal more than Ireland (approx 4.5M). Yet, the throughput of start-ups (particularly well-funded ones) seems disproportionally greater. I’ve spoken to a few people involved in the Finnish start-up scene but nobody seems to point to any one particular factor in their success.

Curious indeed. Those even curiouser can follow the general Scandinavian start-up space over at Arctic Startup

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By Blogsdna
  • max

    Interesting post about Finland since I’m currently visiting Helsinki. One correction tho. Grey Area link does seem to direct somewhere else than the company’s home page which is at http://www.greyarealabs.com/

    After a bit of investigation, I was told that Grey Area’s first game beat Angry Birds in the Finnish App Store charts on its first day out. People are nuts about the game here. It’s called Shadow Cities at http://www.shadowcities.com/

    Is there similar stuff in Sweden?

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