ArcticEvening Helsinki, Successful Night With Successful Companies
Thank you everyone who made it to ArcticEvening Helsinki last night. The evening was a great success and a special thank you for that goes out to the panelists David O'Weger who covered for Ari-Pekka Salovaara from Severa, Michael Falck from Relex as well as Mikko Kaarela from Technopolis Ventures as well as our sponsors for making the event possible in the first place.
ArcticEvening Helsinki Coming Up October 27th!
We'll be continuing our tour of the ArcticEvenings around the Nordics and Baltics with our next event being held in Helsinki, Finland. Our event will be themed software growth businesses. We'll be hosting a fabolous panel for you on the 27th of October. It will have some young, but extremely successful local startups from the software sector.
A Finnish Success Story Nobody Knows Of
Relex is a Finnish success story that not too many people know about. The most obvious reason for this is that Relex is not one of the sexy social media services that don't have a business model, but a company providing software for more efficient and automated demand forecasting and inventory managment. The company didn't get any external risk capital from Angels or VCs except some goverment funding and have gottten a flying start with that.
This yet again comes to show that Finland seems to be very strong in software. Historically this is very obvious by looking at the exit market. Out of all the exits between 2000 and 2006 in Finland over 50% has been in Software, whereas Sweden has been the strongest Nordic market in Internet Services, even though that was mostly due to Skype's €2200 million exit. After taking Skype out of the equation, software exits in Sweden count for about 35% of all the exits in the country during the time given time frame (Exit-study by Creandum, 2008).
