Tuomas Oksanen is Investor director and Partner at Grid.vc. He has a “Been there, done that” approach to things, thanks to years of hands-on startup experience from various positions, including as the first employee at a successful start-up, and as co-founder at another. He is also a former Aalto Startup Center advisor for funding and financing and has assisted 100+ startups to develop their businesses. He is an eternal optimist with honest realism, and joins us on May 12th to share interesting business stories and insights.
Elina Arponen is the CEO & Co-founder of Quicksave Interactive. She is a game industry veteran and a serial entrepreneur. Her previous game company was acquired by a social media app, and following that sale, Elina co-founded Quicksave in 2017 with the same team to develop the best HTML5 games. Prior to that, Elina was Head of Chat Games at Palringo and Chairman of the Board at the Finnish Game Developer Studios’ Association. Elina joins us on May 12th to share her inspiring business stories from the game world.
Caritta Seppä is the co-founder and COO at Tespack, a company specialised in developing mobile energy solutions for off-grid workers. Caritta has been recognised in Forbes' 30 Under 30 and was one of the finalist winners for the Nordic Women in Tech Award 2020. She currently serves as a One Young World coordinating ambassador for the Nordics and Baltics, and her expertise lies in international relations, business development, funding, and sales. Caritta is a TEDx speaker and often invited to leading tech and business events such as the WTO Annual Public Forum and ChangeNOW. Caritta joins us on May 12th to share some of her experiences in the business world.
Alisa Mick is a Circular Economy activist, who believes that the way to make the change from a linear to a circular economy is by combining tech, impact, and… circular economy. Alisa has worked as a business consultant with corporations and startups, as well as a co-founder of a tech startup. Most recently, Alisa founded MiXi, a nonprofit organisation focused on circular economy. Alisa is collaborating with investors, organisations and companies, municipalities, and academic institutions who share the same interest.
Alisa will be joining us on May 19th with other guest speakers to talk about building sustainable businesses and impact measuring.
Antti Moilanen is an early stage start-up entrepreneur interested in sustainability and the sharing economy. Antti believes that the world needs more new sustainable solutions and innovations, and has know-how in the early steps of founding a company, public funding and strategy/visioning.
Antti will be joining us on May 19th with other guest speakers to talk about building sustainable businesses and impact measuring.
Kaija Rossi is the Chief Strategy Officer at Bob the Robot, a leading Finnish advertising agency, as well as a former professor of philosophy and bioethicist. Kaija will be joining us on the 7th of June, and will be speaking about marketing & communications, how it's done at an award winning agency, and how you could implement some of their tools and systems in your own activities. Afterwards, Kaija and a few of her colleagues from Bob the Robot will stay on to answer all of your burning questions and give advice on how to best tell your idea's story to the world.
Nora Haapala is an attorney-at-law working for the international advisory company Rödl & Partner since 2011. Nora has extensive background in leading business negotiations, contract management and compliance procedures, with specialisation in intellectual property law (including SaaS and licensing agreements). In addition to having a degree in Law and jurisprudence from Charles University in Prague, she also deepened her legal skills while studying at Heinrich Heine Universität in Germany. As part of Rödl & Partner Asianajotoimisto she guides startups and SMEs through complex projects by identifying the goals and advising on how to handle possible issues.
Nora will be joining us on June 9th as part of the legal aid workshop.
Timo Huhtala is an attorney-at-law and since 2013 partner and head of the legal and tax department of Rödl & Partner Asianajotoimisto (Finnish subsidiary of an international advisory company Rödl & Partner). Timo specializes in advising domestic and international clients (including startups and SME's) mostly in employment, contract, and company law matters. Timo's strong suits include also extensive experience in cross-border transactions, tax law and dispute resolution (covering also complex employment law disputes). In addition, Timo has gained international experience by studying banking, competition law and private international law at the University of Giessen in Germany.
Timo will be joining us on June 9th as part of the legal aid workshop.
Sam Wrigley is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki who specialises in Information Law, and particular on privacy and data protection issues. He defended his doctoral thesis, entitled “Bots and AI-Related Technologies, Legitimate Interest, and Fair Processing Under the General Data Protection Regulation”, in 2021 and is currently part of the INDIGO project, where he is looking at EU regulation of targeted political advertising.
Sam will be joining us on June 9th as part of the legal aid workshop.
Veli-Matti Kimanen, Master of Laws, eMBA, is one of the most experienced M&A experts in Finland. He started within M&A in the year 1984 and since then has been active in over 300 M&A projects of various sizes and types as well as fields of business. He started in banking, moved over to venture capital and investment companies, started a M&A consulting business and has been active in the legal business since 2000 with companies like Krogerus, KPMG and Finsta Attorneys-At-Law.
Due to strict regulations and NDA agreements, it is not possible to list any of the companies advised during the 38-year career within M&A. We will, therefore, make a short list of fields of businesses covered: Manufacturing, engineering, mechanical wood, healthcare, electronics, software, energy sector, consulting, building sector, retail, bakeries, design services, clothing, industrial maintenance services, printing etc.
Veli-Matti will be joining us on June 9th as part of the legal aid workshop.
Andrés was born in Venezuela, moved to Colombia, lived in São Paulo, and has been in Finland for the past 12 years (Kemi, Jyväskylä, Helsinki, and Vantaa). He holds a Master of Business Administration – International Business Management, and will be leading the programme's Business Models & Funding workshop on May 25th.
In 2015, Andrés started his entrepreneurial journey in Finland with Viento Trading and has been working in International Trade (Coffee, Cacao, Clothing, tenders to Alko, etc.), consulting services (external consultant for the Finnpartnership Matchmaking program with around 50 assignments), designing market penetration strategies for EdTech companies in Colombia, and cooperated with Latin American embassies in Finland & Business Finland.
He has gathered plenty of real-world experience with Business Models and Funding while establishing his company, Viento Trading and during various market-entry strategy assignments. His thesis on the IoT Rapid-Proto Labs Value Proposition for Start-ups and SMEs focused on creating a new value proposition which included two different components: university-industry co-operation, and cost effective & rapid prototyping, co-creation of MVP, and deployment for commercialisation.
Minttu is a born Helsinkian and Univeristy of Helsinki alumna-cum-jack-of-all-trades, and has worked in 10 different professions both in Finland and the UK. She applied to the university with her practical nursing degree and started her university studies at the age of 30 as a mom of two small kids. She is a former athlete and today trains young talents to fulfil their athletic dreams in ringette.
Her master's thesis on “The Articulatory Strategies of Ventriloquists” led her to build a new professional field, clinical phonetics, in Finland which got her a spot in Harvard Medical School's CSRT-UK programme. Over the years, she's worked as an entrepreneur, a consultant, and a senior lecturer.
Minttu will host three workshops during our Kumpula pre-incubator program: how to work as a team, understanding customer needs together with Chiara Facciotto, and pitching and presenting with Chiara and Mikael Malmivaara. She is a strong believer in team learning and transferrable skills. “Whatever comes, comes” is a line you might often hear her say.
Santeri is specialised in developing startup communities around their entrepreneurs and supporting ecosystem actors. He was a part of the founding team at the Tribe Tampere collective, which unleashed a bottom-up culture in startup ecosystem development in the Tampere region. Santeri has lived in several cities in China, and helped Nordic entrepreneurs to enter its market. As a serious hobby, Santeri is a member of Self-Hack, the association facilitating the biggest life-planning movement in Finland. Santeri will be leading the May 19th workshop on building sustainable businesses and measuring impact, using a community approach in the workshop, and facilitating connections with the best practices and practitioners in the field.
Ari is a seasoned business developer, startup coach, and keynote speaker at different innovation events. He's been working mainly in the Otaniemi ecosystem in innovation and related businesses for a quarter century - helping companies grow, attracting Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) to Finland, and completing tens of internationalisation projects with and for companies. Ari will be joining us to help us understand what's the difference between sales and marketing, and how to do backcasting. He holds a Master's degree in international business and "Innovation without borders" is his motto!
Chiara has a research background in data science and biomedicine, and is passionate about bringing science to society. She has over five years of experience in coaching scientists in public speaking.
Chiara is Italian, but has been living in Finland since 2011. After completing her BSc split between Turin and Shanghai, she started her MSc in Bioinformatics at Aalto University and then continued with her doctoral training at the University of Helsinki. She completed her PhD in Bioinformatics and cancer research in 2021. While pursuing her PhD, Chiara was an active member of the local academic community, designing and teaching several university-level courses on a wide range of topics, including innovation and science communication. She has also been the lead organiser of TEDxHelsinkiUniversity and a co-founder and board member of The Science Basement. Currently, Chiara also works as coordinator of innovation activities at the Helsinki Institute of Life Science(HiLIFE, UH), leading projects like Y Science (an official side event of Slush) and connecting researchers with the broader life science innovation ecosystem.
Chiara will host two workshops during our Kumpula pre-incubator program: Understanding customer needs together with Minttu Ripatti, and Pitching with Minttu and Mikael Malmivaara.