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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland
Helsinki IntroductionFollowing-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, 2017. 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
Q3 2017 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
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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland
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.
Nordic Venture Capital Scene
Introduction to the Nordic venture capital scene was provided by Sami Lampinen, co-founder and managing partner of
Inventure (http://inventure.fi), 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.
I N V E N T U R E . F I
C O M PA N I E S
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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland
KO M P Z O U R E . C O M
CEO and co-founder of Kompozure (http://kompozure.com),
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.
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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland
The Curious AI Company
“ The future of artificial intelligence is in machine learning and in how our brain works ”
Co-founder of The Curious AI Company (https://
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 longer-
term 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 ‘animal-
like’ 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 2015.
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.
Harri ValpolaTech Crunch Oct 2, 2015
T H E C U R I O U S A I C O M PA N Y. C O M
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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland
Haltian (https://haltian.com/) 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.
HaltianH A LT I A N . C O M
Thingsee One QuietOn earplugs
Ōura Wellness Ring Omata Speedometer
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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland
A shot of innovation adrenaline! Ntegra Greenside (http://ntegra.com/greenside/) is a conduit between some of the most
innovative and disruptive companies on the planet and enterprise technology leaders.
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.
Ntegra Greenside
Alumni Network and Executive
Advisory Programme
N T E G R A . C O M / G R E E N S I D E
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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland
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 2018.
Contact: [email protected]
USRT2018Save the date!
E V E N T S @ N T E G R A . C O . U K