Helsinki Introduction

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2 Helsinki Introduction Following-on from successful events in Madrid, Copenhagen, Munich and Prague, this year s Ntegra Greenside European Technology Leaders Summit was held in Helsinki on 26th and 27th October, Working with leading international law firm Bird & Bird, Ntegra selected Finland for its showcase due to the abundance of great engineering, coding and networking talent, nurtured in Nokia and leading Finnish universities, who are starting new and innovative technology businesses. With high levels of research, innovation and an active venture capital investment scene, our delegates enjoyed a wide range of interesting and thought-provoking presentations. The technology showcase was hosted at Bird & Bird s office in central Helsinki on Thursday, and by M-Files at the Technopolis business park in the city of Espoo, west of Helsinki, on Friday. Nokia s status as the world s leading mobile phone manufacturer drove self-confidence in Finland throughout the 1990s and 2000s. At the top of its game, the company was delivering a quarter of Finnish corporate tax receipts and 4 per-cent of GDP. Its decline and near financial collapse was deeply felt by Finns, and contributed to a national economic crisis. Nokia is one of the things that Finns have been most proud of in their history, and its near-demise had a big impact. Nokia s Q results were released while we were in Helsinki and, thankfully, their technologies are once again driving strong profit growth. A side-effect of the rise and fall (and rise again) of Nokia, has been the availability of highly trained and highly skilled technology professionals in a marketplace looking for alternative outlets. This coupled with a wide range of initiatives, put in place by the Finnish Government, aimed at plugging the gap in the economy, has resulted in a very active and buoyant start-up, venture capital and technology ecosystem, bringing many new and innovative products to market. During our time in Helsinki, we saw presentations from: Enreach, Anaplan, Hoxhunt, Kompozure, The Curious Ai Company, Upcloud, Pivotal, Leaddesk, M-Files, Tosibox, Flashnode, Kontena, Aves Netsec, Haltian, Riisk And Poimapper. In common, we felt that all the companies had an approachable, open and friendly culture coupled with a work-man-like, no-nonsense style. The owners and founders are quietly confident, good humoured and polished professionals who are comfortable tackling big-ticket technology problems. A good grasp of DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery is reflected across their business models and processes, and it was refreshing to hear about their infrastructure and IT platform focus (they leave the fluffy dog walking apps for others to pursue). An unassuming and understated nature tends to concentrate their product and service offerings to be made attractive to, and consumable by small and medium sized businesses across Scandinavia. On inspection, Ntegra believes that their apparent lack of enterprise focus and ambition is unfounded, and they could easily compete with more internationally recognised new and established brands across the globe. Neighbours, Estonia have rebranded themselves as the unicorn factory of the world and Stockholm can claim to be the joint unicorn capital of the world, alongside Silicon Valley. We think Finland should, and deserves to be, aiming high too. Adrian Fern CTO Ntegra Greenside 1

3 Nordic Venture Capital Scene INVENTURE.FI Introduction to the Nordic venture capital scene was provided by Sami Lampinen, co-founder and managing partner of Inventure ( a seed and early-round investment company. Founded in 2005, they have three offices in Helsinki, Stockholm and Shanghai. The Shanghai office was opened recently to give the firm access to Chinese volume manufacturing capabilities. With a focus on trade sale exits, they favour investing in companies that have global potential and, therefore, devote a lot of time researching and forecasting how the world might look in 5 to 7 years. Inventure have made 15+ seed and early stage investments this year and claim to be the most active VC in Finland. As proactive investors, they like to take board places (often as Chair), in their invested companies. They have developed a Portfolio as a Platform service offering access to a variety of tools, templates and best practice guidance for their portfolio companies and broader community. Sami stated that Inventure like to invest in interesting companies, for example Beddit, which they recently exited by selling to Apple. Beddit is a sleep and wellness monitoring application that uses an ultra-thin sensor, placed under the bedsheet, to track users sleep patterns, heart rate and breathing without the need for a wearable sensor. COMPANIES A synopsis of a cross-section of the companies that presented is given below. More detail about all the companies, and others that we unable to attend, can be requested from Ntegra at any time. 2

4 KOMPZOURE.COM CEO and co-founder of Kompozure ( Sakari Nahi, likes to refer to himself as Chief Coding Officer. His company has been delivering cloud development and consulting services since 2011 and they focus solely on Microsoft s Azure platform. The company started with a 6,000 investment and has bootstrapped to over 25 staff, all of whom are employee shareholders. Growing organically, without external investment, they have a goal of building a long-term sustainable, healthy business. Kompozure s operating model is very open, personal and transparent. Everyone in the business knows how salaries are determined and apportioned, and how they contribute to company success. Work/life balance is very important, so late or out of hours working is discouraged. They only accept work that can be undertaken at their own offices, believing that interaction between their staff delivers higher quality results, in a shorter timeframe, compared to doing development on client sites. Sakari says, We roar at challenge. Grow stronger, fitter, better, badder. I AM LEGION! Kompozure exemplify this as: looking for challenges, growing better through hardships, enabling everyone to develop themselves whilst knowing that there is support from the others, and that every day is kept interesting through challenges and learning so that, in the morning, it doesn t feel like sh*t waking up and going into work. Their key values are: Passion (everyone is passionate about learning and they can rely and trust in their co-worker s drive); Team (nobody can build a complete system by themselves and, hence, team mates help and reduce workload and thus earns respect, regardless of which company they come from); and Trust (Kompozure have chosen to trust each other as life is better that way and they want to be a blameless environment). All staff enjoy a high degree of autonomy, freedom and flexibility. For example, they can choose when and how much holiday they take. Recruiting good people is a real challenge currently because all tech and related companies are competing to recruit the best personnel, so it makes sense to respect and treat their employees well. Investing in staff development, culture and values helps to recruit high quality software developers who are passionate team players and exhibit great honesty. 3

5 The Curious AI Company THECURIOUSAICOMPANY.COM Co-founder of The Curious AI Company ( thecuriousaicompany.com/), Timo Haanpää, described how they are building the future components of AI and will sell them commercially when ready. The company focuses on autonomous and interactive machine learning technologies, building on more than two decades of work in bio-inspired AI by founder Harri Valpola, PhD. They deliver industrial pilot projects whilst building a long-term, complete AI deep tech portfolio. Their four areas of interest are: Deep Networks; Unsupervised Learning; Perceptual Grouping; and Interactive Inference. Timo described 3 waves of AI, saying that the initial focus had been on machine learning research with a longerterm goal of achieving autonomous unsupervised Artificial Intelligence. Wave 1, in the 1980s, was primarily handcrafted software trying to implement Perception, Leaning, Autonomy & Reasoning (but most solutions achieved only the last). Wave 2, in the 2000s, was all about Machine Learning, trying to implement Perception, Learning, Classification & Prediction. Wave 3, in the 2020s, comprises all the Wave 2 capabilities plus Autonomy & Reasoning. Timo encourages a move from what he called Classic AI to Modern AI. Classic AI pertains to rules based programmes, mathematically exact and robotic like, but solutions that tend to be clumsy. Modern AI, solutions learn from examples, use fuzzy computation, are probabilistic, holistic and animallike in their flexibility. Solutions are more elegant as a result. Examples include Siri, which allows you ask verbal questions and uses Google s natural language search to provide contextually appropriate answers. An aspect that Timo highlighted was that the AI community is very open to sharing and how quickly they can collectively move if there is benefit in doing so. He quoted the example of how development used to be done using KERAS, an open source neural network library, to TensorFlow, a similar library developed by Google s Brain team and released to the Apache Foundation as open source in November Many of the AI development community moved from Keras to Tensorflow almost within a week of it being announced. In 2017, Facebook released its SDK for Python Arg 3.0 and since then almost the entire industry has moved to it. The future of artificial intelligence is in machine learning and in how our brain works Harri Valpola Tech Crunch Oct 2,

6 Haltian HALTIAN.COM Haltian ( is a product design and development company providing solution to global telecoms and consumer electronics companies. They help their customers through the entire product development lifecycle, from concept to mass production. The company was founded in September 2012 by former Nokia employees and is headquartered in Oulo, Finland with a second office in Palo Alto, USA. They have a wide-ranging portfolio from tiny wearable consumer electronics, such as the Oura Wellness Ring through to large and complex industrial products including imaging devices. They specialise in IoT devices and device-layer acceleration, and have developed their own IoT platform called Thingsee. A great deal of their development is in wireless battery powered devices, saying they are one of the most experienced wireless companies in the world (a claim bolstered by their Nokia heritage). Their in-house product development teams work with their customers to create devices for consumer, industrial and professional use. They work from the early feasibility stage, through to mass production and after sales, covering: Product Innovation; Product concept; Product development; Manufacturing; and After sales support. Haltian s Thingsee Platform delivers Sensors as a Service, providing customers with custom made sensor devices, a complete IoT device platform and full stack IoT development capabilities. Platform capabilities are coupled with management services delivered through the Thingsee operations cloud. Thingsee provide: Evaluation kits; Solution prototypes; Solution building; and Product launch, hence covering the entire lifecycle for innovation and adoption. To achieve this, it has developed its own range of wireless devices which are available in a variety of physical form factors. Thingsee products use Wirepas, a proprietary decentralised radio communications protocol for large scale IoT applications, supporting hub and spoke, peer to peer and mesh topologies. Thingsee One QuietOn earplugs Ōura Wellness Ring Omata Speedometer 5

7 Ntegra Greenside NTEGRA.COM/GREENSIDE A shot of innovation adrenaline! Ntegra Greenside ( is a conduit between some of the most innovative and disruptive companies on the planet and enterprise technology leaders. Alumni Network and Executive Advisory Programme For our members, the end of the event is not the end of the benefits, with a Greenside Alumni Network and numerous UK events throughout the year providing information on disruptive technologies and the value they deliver. Our seminar programme looks at both verticals e.g. Telecommunications and horizontals such as Security & Privacy. Members of our Executive Advisory Programme (EAP) enjoy complimentary tickets, hotel accommodation, local transfers and dining on all of our Greenside Events, worldwide, and a bundle of consulting days in addition to personal mentoring support from one of our network of technology leaders. When you join the EAP, we invest time in determining the most effective way to align these benefits to your business challenges to deliver competitive advantage for your business and kudos for you. 6

8 USRT2018 Save the date! Since 1996 we have hosted research tours to Silicon Valley where we have strong working relationships with many Valley based companies and venture capitalists, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Intel Capital. Our delegates have access not only to technology typically 2 years before widespread adoption, giving them first mover advantages, but also how early to market firms innovate and deliver. Additionally, as an invitation-only event, we are able to ensure that our delegates are connecting within their own peer group providing a unique forum to discuss challenges and share learning. Since the programme began we have worked with over 250 early stage companies, many of which have gone on to become global successes. The 22nd Ntegra Greenside United States Research Tour (USRT2018) in Silicon Valley has been scheduled for 19th to 25th May Contact: events@ntegra.co.uk 7