Innovate!100 List Features Many Nordic And Baltic Startups
Guidewire Group has announced on 3rd of December the Innovate!100 list. The list features, according to the blog post, the 100 most innovative and fastest growing startups from around the world. The participants have been chosen based on the 30 or so Pitch Slam contests which were held on five continents over a duration of 10 months.
Canatu: The Next Finnish Technology Breakthrough?
My guess is that one of the Finnish technology breakthrough companies for 2010 will be Canatu's team, lead by CEO David Brown. Canatu produces and sells a new class of versatile carbon-based components to OEMs and brand names. These components are based on carbon nanotubes and a novel NanoBud nanomaterial. The key competitive advantages of Canatu's components include low cost, high performance and a diminished environmental footprint for optical and electrical devices. For instance, Canatu's components are 25 times stronger than steel, 1000 times more conductive than copper and heat twice as well as diamond. The environmentally friendly aspect covers both the production and recycling process. And finally, the production of these components can be industrially scaled.
The Finnish Cleantech Market In 2010
Recently, we have seen increasing investor interest in the Finnish cleantech market, which closed a total of €40-50m worth of investments in Q3 including those in companies such as European Batteries, a large scale lithium ion battery manufacturer, Nokia spin-off There Corporation, a sub/smart metering technology provider, and Preseco, a waste-to-energy company. Investments in Finnish clean technologies represented around 50% of cleantech VC investments in the Nordics, which closed a total of €100m worth of investments (source: Cleantech Scandinavia). Examples of Nordic investments are in companies like Danish biomass fuelled engine technology provides Stirling, Swedish nanowire semiconductor LED developer Glo (a link to release), Norwegian solar cell manufacturer Innotech Solar and EV company Think Global.
But will the investments in Finnish clean technologies in 2010 exceed those for 2009? We do not know the final figures for 2009 yet. In 2008, Finnish cleantech companies posted a total of €139.5m in investments, which represented the highest proportion (37%) of total investments (€372m) in all Nordic countries.
