Say hi to the new Startup Foundation board members
Kristo Ovaska steps in as Startup Foundation's new chairperson of the board, and Ernesti Sario and Josefiina Kotilainen join as board members.
Kristo Ovaska co-founded and scaled Smartly.io into one of Finland's most successful technology companies, one of the 20 Finnish Centaurs today. Today he's founder and CEO of Taito.ai. He has also been a driving force in the ecosystem since its early days: co-founding Aaltoes, Startup Sauna, and Aalto Ventures program, which is known as Aalto Founder school today. He was also a founding board member of Startup Foundation.
“We started Aaltoes in 2009 because a handful of students believed Finland could be a leading startup country. Today the companies from this movement employ around 50,000 people and raise twenty times more capital each year than back then," Kristo says.
As chairperson, Kristo wants to continue the momentum toward the ecosystem's shared 100x100 goal: 100 Finnish Centaurs, startups that grow past €100 million in annual revenue.
"About half of the next hundred Centaurs will be built by founders who haven't moved to Finland yet. We need to attract the best of founders here as early as possible to build new startups in our strongest clusters like satellites and quantum."
He also reminds that Finland can't afford to become inward looking.
"We must send more local teams to learn from Silicon Valley. Y Combinator is still the best program in the world to learn company building. The learnings and networks the alumni bring back home raise the level of ambition and execution of teams around them."
We're also excited to welcome two new board members.
Ernesti Sario co-founded FR8, a new institution for the most ambitious young technical people shaping the future. FR8 has pulled in people from places like Stanford, MIT, and ETH, and taken over an empty university building. The companies from its first cohorts have reached a combined valuation of over €200M in less than a year. It's exactly the kind of talent magnet Finland needs.
"We won't get the next Nokia, Google, or OpenAI from Finland unless our most technical people get excited about building startups. That's the culture we're trying to change," Ernesti says.
Josefiina Kotilainen is a founder, angel investor, and former CEO of Startup Foundation. She has worked as the CFO of Slush and Maki.vc and for Carbo Culture.
"We started the individual grant program a few years ago. To date, 63% of grantees have founded a startup, and they've raised €17M in total so far. Grantees have founded companies like Realm, Rotomate, and Clair. I'm excited to see this work continue, and the impact it has on the ecosystem,” Josefiina says.
Oskari Saarenmaa, co-founder of Aiven, and Mika Tammenkoski, co-founder and CEO of Metacore, continue as board members. Both have built Centaurs of their own, bringing hard-won perspective to helping the next generation of founders to do the same.
We also want to warmly thank Emma Lehikoinen, who has served as chairperson since 2024, helping guide the Foundation into its next phase, and Katariina Helaniemi for her impactful work as a board member.
