Lars-Michaël (Micke) Paqvalén, M.Sc. (Econ.), is a company builder who has lived and worked internationally for over 25 years and exited four major software companies. Micke is the founder & chairman of TRÄ Group and Buildbite, co-founder of Brandbassador, Learning Intelligence Group (Claned & GraphoGame), Kiosked, Telepo, HansaWorld and an active early-stage investor in many disruptive companies, such as Proof Analytics among others. Micke is also on the Advisory Board of Nordic Innovation and Nordic Scalers, a pan-Nordic initiative to find and accelerate next generation unicorns in the Nordics.
As an entrepreneur, Micke was awarded with the European ICT Grand Prize, the award for Best Enterprise Software solution at the Mobile World Congress, growth entrepreneur of the year in both Finland and Sweden, the American and European Business Awards, and many other awards. Micke is a proud father of four children.
Micke joins Helsinki Incubators as an esteemed Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Mirva Nevalainen is an enthusiastic product, service & business development professional. Mirva is a board member, mentor and coach, and gets energy from working on solutions for productisation / servitisation challenges. Mirva has helped tens of start-ups to seek their focus & customers, identify gaps, and concentrate on the essentials.
Mirva joins Helsinki Incubators as a valued Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Topi Manu, former Fourkind co-founder and board sitting investor, has an extensive background in marketing comms and tech consulting. In the past few years, Topi's range has grown to include growth entrepreneurship with Fourkind, where he exited in early 2021. As a mentor, Topi offers insights into matters like how to sell, do marketing, expand and recruit in foreign markets with the right determination, in addition to more general cornerstones of how to run a company such as finance, contracts, payroll, corporate structure, cashflow management, acting as an employer, and so on.
Topi joins Helsinki Incubators as a respected Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Saila Tykkyläinen, (D. Sc.) social impact expert, co-founder & partner at Vaikuttava Yritys Oy/Impact Business Ltd. coaches and trains all types of organisations to solve our common problems. Over the years Saila has helped over 200 NGOs, companies and public sector organisations with impact-led design, impact leadership and metrics. In her doctoral thesis on social enterprises’ growth, Saila focused on business models and strategies which enable social enterprises to balance their social and financial missions while seeking growth.
Saila joins Helsinki Incubators as a trusted Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Vladimir Chepurnoy is a senior advisor at Helsinki Partners, the City of Helsinki's marketing, investment and talent attraction company. For the past 10 years, Vladimir has been actively working with high-tech business ecosystems in Finland and abroad, helping international companies to find growth opportunities worldwide. Helping entrepreneurs and business owners on their way to success by finding the right solution with systematic approach is what encourages Vladimir in his daily work.
Vladimir joins Helsinki Incubators as a wisened Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Varpu Rusila, MSc, is the founder of the Her Finland platform which helps international people turn their Finnish dreams into reality. Varpu is an expert in creator economy, storytelling to global audiences, community-based co-creation, and scaling consumer-focused digital services. Her Finland courses are used by 12 000+ students all around the world, and the authentic content reaches millions of people interested in Finland annually. Before starting her own company, Varpu worked in various managerial and expert positions in retail and big science. She loves "a-ha!" moments, staying curious, and her newest interest is learning bird songs.
Varpu joins Helsinki Incubators as an honourable Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Juhani Lehtonen, a.k.a. "Leksa" – a nickname which he earned during his studies while playing in Retuperä's WBK (the Helsinki University of Technology's, now Aalto's, student brass band) which is still used today by many of his friends and customers – is a partner at Innotiimi-ICG Finland, chairman of the board of GloCell Oy, and a member of the board of Kauko International Oy.
Juhani has a background as an entrepreneur whose strengths lie in sales, internationalisation, innovation, and the development of growing business in general, and has practical experience ranging from being the CEO of a small company to doing sales, as well as research and development. This gives Juhani a very practical perspective on what should and should not be done in start-up companies.
Juhani was born in 1968 and graduated from Aalto University with a Master of Science in Bioproduct Technology in 1998. Having worked abroad for longer periods on several occasions, Juhani is able to work in Finnish, English, Swedish and German.
Juhani joins Helsinki Incubators as a respected Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
With her unique background spanning VC, law, behavioural science, and change design, Maya Markovich delivers technology, process, and business growth services worldwide. For over five years she worked with Nextlaw Labs/Nextlaw Ventures at Dentons, the world's largest firm, as chief growth officer. Maya is currently justice tech executive in residence at Village Capital and executive director at the Justice Technology Association, a nonprofit trade association supporting technology solutions that foster hope, independence, and self-empowerment and contribute to a fairer legal system. She also advises multiple high-growth startups, investor and venture funds, and consults on innovation and transformation initiatives.
In 2020 Maya was named one of five “Influential Women of Legal Tech” by ILTA, a “Woman Leading Legal Tech” by The Technolawgist in 2019, and an ABA Legal Technology Resource Center “Woman of Legal Tech 2018” for her work in designing, promoting, and driving the future of the legal industry around the globe.
Maya joins Helsinki Incubators as a highly respected Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Originally from Finland with a business degree from the Helsinki School of Economics International Track, Pete Karumo has lived and worked the past 25 years in Finland, France and Singapore.
An experienced veteran from the ICT industry Pete has built a career with notable technology giants Oracle, Nokia and Texas Instruments. He built a reputation for excelling in managing global customers and driving productivity by pioneering data-driven CRM and supply chain solutions. He is passionate about helping clients with commercialisation efforts, digital transformation, building easy-to-use solutions and increasing productivity. He has helped several Finnish companies to enter and expand in the APAC region. Pete is fluent in Finnish, English and French.
Pete has 10+ years of entrepreneurial experience over the past three decades as a Co-founder, Managing Director and first employee in several scale-ups. He developed the first Wi-Fi hotspots in Europe with the goal of enabling easy and affordable internet access to everyone. He co-founded a pioneering Singaporean social enterprise, a multiplayer online game empowering pre-teens to learn about the world and making a social impact in the Asian region. Pete also co-founded and managed Innovation Home, a joint Singaporean - Finnish company. Through collaboration with startup ecosystems and multinationals Innovation Home facilitates exchanges and cross pollination of growth companies.
With the past 10 years living and working in Singapore Pete has developed an active network at regional managing director level. He has built distribution channels in Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia and Thailand as per clients' market expansion requirements. Pete helps both multinationals and smaller enterprises by executing market entry evaluations, developing go-to-market strategies and generating sales.
Pete joins Helsinki Incubators as an experienced Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Krista Pohjanlehto has over a decade of experience working with digital marketing, B2B sales and sales leadership from startups to tech companies and consulting. Currently, Krista works at Google helping global brands originally from Finland to succeed in global competition and is a local Head of Digital Marketing Transformation Program. Prior to joining Google Krista successfully launched and scaled an ad tech startup in the Finnish market and has built and led multiple sales teams.
Krista is one of the founders and a board member of the Future Female network, a pioneering diversity in tech movement, since 2010 and is a co-founder and host of the award winning Ruuhkavuosirakkautta podcast. Krista is passionate about system level change making and has previously founded an online peer-to-peer marketplace - despite zero coding knowledge.
Krista joins Helsinki Incubators as an esteemed Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Anna Pyykkö is a generalist and feminist with over 15 years of experience in various businesses, positions and companies. Anna has been planning and executing advertising strategies with the biggest B2C companies in Finland, ideated, organised and led hundreds of event marketing projects for various companies of all sizes and run a Nordic marketing team in one of the Big Four consulting companies. During that time she also led an Entrepreneur of the Year project, a competition for growth entrepreneurs, for three years, deep diving into the startup and scale-up world.
As the world of entrepreneurs is still very male oriented, Anna wanted to change that. She started up a community for female entrepreneurs in Finland in 2020 (at that time, without being an entrepreneur herself). Today, Female Founders Suomi is a growing community with more than 2000 followers in different social media channels, monthly live events and a membership program. The community wants to empower more women to start their own businesses and think big. Anna is also a host of Crush Talk Show & Podcast.
Anna joins Helsinki Incubators as a respected Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Curious, helpful, funny, and insightful. These are some of the words that have been used to describe Jonas Lundberg.
Jonas has a master’s in business administration and leadership which he has found to be a good choice for my personality. Even though Jonas has always been interested in technology, be it information technology of mechanical technology, his main interests are on the business side. Jonas wants to understand and make things happen on the business side. This, in combination to his love of early venturing, ie. building startups or anything else from scratch, has led Jonas to his current job as a venture builder: "At Liquido Ventures, we are startup architects."
Previously, Jonas has worked in different sales and business leadership positions, and was a founding partner at nSense, a company he & his co-founders boot-strapped to international growth until it was sold to F-Secure in 2015, where he stayed for almost six years in different business development positions.
Jonas joins Helsinki Incubators as an insightful Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
As the Creative Director of Goodio Taru Pilvi is responsible for the development of truly sustainable chocolate brand all the way from chocolates, design and sustainable ways of working. Taru is a PhD in nutrition and her career is a mixture of industry-academia collaboration, corporate innovation leadership, and sustainable startup life. She has wide experience in development of innovation culture, sustainable development and internationalisation in the corporate, public sector and startup worlds.
Taru joins Helsinki Incubators as a valued Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Markus Raivio is a a social entrepreneur and a long-standing mental health professional and organisation leader. He has developed multiple social innovations in the social and health sector, such as the GFP- framework for Culturehouses, Kukunori, Mission PropellerHeads, as well as the POKKA evaluation tool. Markus' strengths are in implementing operational methods and developing organisational culture – how these can be developed to create new innovative ways to work for social impact. His key competencies are in organisations with a developmental disability, mental health and substance abuse work, recovery-oriented work models for volunteering, employment and equality, digital platforms and services, and project-funded activities. In 2022, Markus was chosen as Finland's first ASHOKA fellow and designated as "the World's Leading Social Entrepreneur" for the year.
Markus joins Helsinki Incubators as a renowned Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Mari Tikkanen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Scope Impact, a leading global innovation company working at the intersection of health and climate. Mari stewards the organisation and supports Scope's interdisciplinary team in scaling system innovations across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Prior to co-founding Scope, Mari worked for 12 years on global health and rights, including for the WHO in New Delhi, the UN in New York, the IPPF in London and the Aurat Foundation in Islamabad. During her 20 years in the social impact field, Mari has built numerous sustainable interventions connecting people to life saving services. Mari is a requested speaker on social innovation internationally and serves on a number of advisory boards, including Ashoka and the Missing Billion Initiative. Mari holds a MSc in Population and Development from LSE and a BSc in Sociology from Helsinki University.
Mari joins Helsinki Incubators as a globally insightful Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Turo Numminen is an entrepreneur, startup-investor and mentor. Turo is a fan of sustainability, but looks at it with the eyes of an investor. "We have limited resources, so let's make the best use of them." He manages Sofokus Ventures where the team deploys capital to early stage digital companies solving real business problems.
Turo worked in entrepreneurship education (JA Finland) before jumping to the investment world, and believes in the power of education. He is also a mentor in Pikkuli (Social and Emotional Learning for 2-6 y/o)
Turo joins Helsinki Incubators as an esteemed Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Iiro Jussila is best introduced by recent remarks from those with whom he has sparred:
“Iiro has an extremely inspirational yet realistic touch to issues”
“With his spectacular expertise Iiro can find the right sore spots”
“Iiro has a skill to present innovative perspectives in a well-argued and understandable manner”
Iiro is an entrepreneur at Skillmotor Finland focused on helping firms and organisations find and execute their unique purpose and to continuously renew themselves from strategy to everyday praxis. In addition, he is a founder of several other companies and a global social enterprise.
While Iiro is deeply immersed in everyday practices of organisations, he also has strong academic background. Today he remains a part time management professor in LUT University, specialised in systemic change.
Iiro’s position and role between theory and practice is well illustrated by awards of different nature. A book of his was one of the three finalists for the George R. Terry Book Award by the Academy of Management in 2012. The award is granted annually to the book judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the global advancement of management knowledge during the last two years. A few years later, Iiro won the Tamer of Science Award granted by the Helsinki University Rector to a person who has made a significant contribution to the popularisation of science.
Iiro joins Helsinki Incubators as an appreciated Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
With over two decades of experience in Finnish sustainability market, senior adviser Timo Rantanen has a motto for future success: “Sustainable business practises are license to exist.” During his career, Timo has consulted both listed companies as well family businesses. While the stakeholder groups may differ depending on a company’s market position and legal status, the facts remain the same. Sustainability can lead to more resilient business and better opportunities.
Timo's aim is to narrow the gap between social entrepreneurship and “traditional” business. Before career in consulting, Timo worked in an American oil company where corporate citizenship was very tangible part of daily operations. With that experience, Timo sees rise of sustainability as a global megatrend which can be utilised in pursuing the target.
Timo joins Helsinki Incubators as a pioneering Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Heikki Ilvessalo has over 25 years of experience in the legal field with a particular interest in developments that contribute to evolving the digitalisation of the legal field. Heikki is currently acting as the CEO of Ilves, his own family’s IT-firm, with a mission of making legal data valuable. He is also on a mission to accelerate the evolution of the entire legal field's ecosystem by running a legal tech network for Finnish legal techies and by co-organising the Nordic Legal tech Day in Helsinki.
Prior to joining Ilves, he was the development director of Castrén & Snellman (2005-2018). He received his LLM 2001 and started his career as a lawyer. He is the legal tech ambassador of Finland at the European Legal Tech Association.
Heikki joins Helsinki Incubators as a trailblazing Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Mikko Järvilehto is a serial Impakt entrepreneur. A specialist in innovative public procurement and data analytics, challenge competitions, innovation management and commercialization, Järvilehto has organised over 200 competitions with various industries to drive both digitalisation and societal change.
Mikko joins Helsinki Incubators as an impactful Senior Mentor for TREMOR.
Janne Neuvonen is a serial entrepreneur, having been involved in various business ventures over the years. The most important thing for him is to improve the world, so that everyone has an easier, more comfortable life. He also values taking care of nature, the environment, and animal welfare.
Janne wants to be a part of developing technologies and ways to influence society with the help of technology. He is at his best when drawing the big picture, but he also understands the importance of the finer details as well.
Janne joins Helsinki Incubators as an insightful Senior Mentor for TREMOR.