What makes Finland such a hotspot for startups?

Finland, a country of less than 6 million people, is better known for forests and quiet resilience than high‑stakes hustle. But its startup scene is becoming increasingly lively and globally magnetic. According to one estimate, its ranks have grown to around 2,600 businesses.

This year alone, Finnish pitching events have ranged from Polar Bear Pitching in Oulu (where founders pitch waist-deep in the frozen sea), to an internationally-driven pitch day at Maria 01, with more than 100 startups from 20 countries, and regional events like Tampere Smart City Week. Then in the fall comes Slush: a global mega‑pitching event that brings in founders, investors and big-name speakers, recently including founders like Tony Xu (DoorDash), Nik Storonsky (Revolut), and Milda Mitkutė (Vinted). Last year’s Slush welcomed 5,500 startup founders and operators, along with 3,300 investors.

So what’s behind this unusual energy? Is Finland’s rise just a fluke of the national character or something more deliberately cultivated?

The Nokia legacy of engineers

Some attribute Finland’s startup rise to the 2014 fall in Nokia’s handset business. “When Microsoft stole a march in the handset business, suddenly, thousands of highly skilled people were pulled out of the company, or freed from it, depending how you look at it,” recounts Markus Terho, former Nokia Director now CEO of his own sustainability consulting company, Sparkter.

Rather than disappearing into the global job market, many of these Nokia engineers stayed in Finland. That’s thanks to Nokia’s Bridge programme, a generous offboarding initiative that offered entrepreneurship training and seed funding, and encouraged ex-employees to start their own ventures. Some started tech companies, but anything went. One of Terho’s former colleagues launched a cleaning business.

“The only requirement was that you showed up with motivation and built a legitimate business plan,” Terho recalls. “Nokia then reviewed the plans and gave you a start.”

Nokia had already created opportunities for an earlier wave of digital start-ups in the early 2000s, linked to the company’s push into content: games, apps, music, and media to boost the appeal of the first smartphones.

“These new startups benefited from one big domestic client,” says Terho. “Because Nokia was coming to them with insight and money and saying, ‘Let’s do this kind of content.’ That’s where these guys got their first real business.”

One of them was a small entertainment company called Rovio, later known worldwide for Angry Birds. Others included the founders of what would later become Supercell, one of the world’s most successful mobile gaming companies.

Kid power and the student-led Aaltoes

While Nokia was seeding these waves of experienced tech talent, on the other side of town at Aalto University, another wave of startup energy was coming from kids just starting out.

Aaltoes, short for Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, was launched in 2009, and is still run entirely by students.

“Give students a bit of money, a space, and the freedom to create things, and incredible things happen,” says Ernesti Sario, Vice President of Aaltoes and a founder at FR8, which recently spun out of the Aaltoes network. There’s been an estimated 10 million euro invested in Aaltoes over the years, which has produced over two billion euro in value, including startups like Wolt, Smartly, Swappie, and events like Slush.

While this might sound hard to believe, Aaltoes has been credited with helping spur a student-driven movement that made entrepreneurship not just viable, but also cool. The story goes that Aaltoes was founded after a professor told students that the worst thing they could do with their lives was become an entrepreneur. The Aaltoes goal is not just to build companies but to make entrepreneurship community-driven, where students aren’t just competing for the same ideas; they’re helping each other launch them.

Sario’s own venture, FR8, takes that thinking a step further. Billed as ‘a hacker hotel, startup incubator, and research lab, all in one,’ it gives young talent full support, from housing to tools, with no equity taken and no fixed outcomes required. The goal? To create a place where long-term, meaningful innovation can thrive without the pressure to monetise too fast. Or, as the FR8 website reads with characteristic Finnish bluntness: ‘Dark, freezing winters, ice-cold sea plunges, and people who treat small talk like a mortal sin.’ It’s a community built for outsiders with big ideas, and, as they put it, ‘a strict no-assholes policy.’

“If FR8 works out big time in the long run,” Sario predicts, “Finland will be the epicenter of the European startup ecosystem, starting to even compete with the US.”

A new kind of startup without the hustle

 FR8 isn’t the only one questioning how startups are built. Over at Maria 01, a new kind of accelerator has just been launched. Led by entrepreneur, Marianne Hughes, it’s called Northern Light, and its approach sets out to turn the traditional accelerator model on its head.

After building her own startup and experiencing the intensity of major accelerators like Y Combinator, Hughes, who is a British national with Finnish parentage, came to Helsinki in search of a better way to build, which doesn’t treat a startup founder’s wellbeing as an afterthought.

“We’re trying to do something genuinely new,” says Hughes. “None of the global accelerators are really targeting the founder as an individual. But if the person at the centre isn’t healthy, the whole thing can fall apart.”

The program will still help early-stage startups to refine their product–market fit and to land paying customers, but all with an emphasis on resilience and intentional work, not burnout.

“I’ve been through those programs. You wake at 7, pitch all day, and crash at midnight. There’s no space to think, no time to reflect. That’s not sustainable, and honestly, it’s not even productive.”

Hughes is also betting on Finland’s country-specific appeal to attract more international founders. “Even if not everyone realises it yet, I think Finland really offers a more sustainable way of working and living. That’s why I came.” She points to Finland’s reputation as the world’s happiest country as something potentially tangible, even measurable, in future results. “We want founders to experience that and build it into how they work.”

Even the name Northern Light is a play on the more typical Silicon Valley language of chasing a “North Star.” Here, the goal is clarity and focus without the pressure.

 Northern Light has an open call now for a cohort of 10–15 early-stage startups with at least one international founder. The three-month programme runs from September to November at Maria 01, with free office space and hands-on mentoring. It wraps up with a demo event timed to coincide with Slush week. Alongside the usual goals of customer validation and revenue growth, participants will be encouraged to track something else: their own stress levels, mindset, and ability to focus — the real early signals that something might go off the rails.

Hughes knows investors who have been blindsided by founder burnout or personal crises and believes there’s a hard business case for her approach. In a 2024 survey, one in two founders said they were struggling with burnout. Another survey in 2023 reported 72% experiencing burnout, with many saying it directly impacted their business outcomes. “Founder wellbeing is not a soft topic,” Hughes asserts, “it’s a business issue.”

Shared space and shared stakes

 In the end, what sets Finland’s startup scene apart may be less about scale and more about mindset. From the experienced talent left by the Nokia engineers and the student-led, billion-euro ripple effect of the Aaltoes, to bold new experiments like FR8 and Northern Light, Terho says there’s a shared belief in Finland that ecosystems can be intentionally built, and built better together. He sums it up well:

“In a country this small, our tech and startup communities aren’t competing against each other, they’re collaborating, sharing ideas, space, even sharing clients.”

This same thinking runs through new experiments like FR8, which openly reject equity-based pressure in favor of “figuring hard things out together.”