Oulu, Finland — The Arctic startup event, Polar Bear Pitching, marked its live return after a hiatus of four years. A sizable crowd gathered at Oulu Market Square, while online viewers from around the globe tuned in to witness ten selected startups take the plunge into the Avanto (Finnish for ice hole), each aiming to …
Slush mainstage acted as a platform for company launches and product announcements, and the Media Area right behind the stage had instant Q&A session with the launchers and announcers. What a great concept, hoping this would cover even more of the speakers. One of the launches was Starstuff, that came out of the stealth mode …
Silo.ai, the Finnish AI Lab, which is Europe’s largest private AI Lab, made some remarkable launches today at Slush 2023 In short, this is concerning a new platform training LLM’s, PORO1 and 2, with deployment for European languages, with keeping the data also in Europe. But NSN had a chance to sit down with Founder …
Failup Ventures, a new globally operating early-stage venture capital fund, has announced the first closing of €30 million of its new early-stage fund of €50 million. Founded by three previous Finnish entrepreneurs – Jesse Heikkilä, Topias Soininen, and Oscar Andersin – Failup Ventures backs early-stage startups with strong, mission-driven teams. Failup’s typical initial investments range …
Slush is on the ground (even if it’s still snow, and frozen right now). Remembering back to the Slush earlydays, there was this saying: “It’s cold and dark outside, and the coolest developers are inside”. Back then the inside meant Kaapelitehdas aka Cable Factory, and a selected venue for after party. These days Slush is …
The most coveted pitching competition is the iconic Slush 100. The winner will get an equity investment from the leading early-stage funds in Europe: Accel, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA, and Northzone. These iconic funds have backed historic companies like Meta, Stripe, Airbnb, Snap, Uber, Spotify, Salesforce, Instacart, and Klarna. The race is …
Last week I had a pleasure to join the 2nd ever NORDEEP 2023 Summit, to see and hear what’s happening in Deep Tech scene within the Nordics. The opening keynote insights were given by Risto Siilasmaa, and that paved the way for this 2 days conference for a good crowd of attendees mainly from Finalnd …
As an event, Slush succeeds to impress all the attendees, even those Teflon-surfaced veterans, who have many previous Slushes on their belt. So it is no wonder, that the first-timers are generally astonished what comes to the atmosphere, solid arrangements, and the solid flux of meeting interesting people, especially new ones. Deirdre Mc Gettrick from …
Few years ago the tagline (and the hashtag) for #Arctic15 was #FindTheOne. Nowadays it has evolved to #ActionMatters, and at this years LIVE comeback, it was really in the center of the activities. Arctic15 happened in the beginning of June in Helsinki, Finland, where the sun was shining, and a decent groups of over 1000 …
The Norwegian medical startup projects HoloCare and Illumie were present at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Robert Stigliano After a cancellation in 2020, and an online-only version in 2021, South by Southwest was back this year to it’s full, pre-pandemic glory, showcasing the trends and technologies influencing our collective future. One of this year’s …