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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland

Helsinki IntroductionFollowing-on from successful events

in Madrid, Copenhagen, Munich and

Prague, this year’s Ntegra Greenside

European Technology Leaders Summit

was held in Helsinki on 26th and

27th October, 2017. Working with

leading international law firm Bird

& Bird, Ntegra selected Finland for

its showcase due to the abundance

of great engineering, coding and

networking talent, nurtured in Nokia

and leading Finnish universities,

who are starting new and innovative

technology businesses. With high levels

of research, innovation and an active

venture capital investment scene,

our delegates enjoyed a wide range

of interesting and thought-provoking

presentations. The technology

showcase was hosted at Bird & Bird’s

office in central Helsinki on Thursday,

and by M-Files at the ‘Technopolis’

business park in the city of Espoo, west

of Helsinki, on Friday.

Nokia’s status as the world’s leading

mobile phone manufacturer drove

self-confidence in Finland throughout

the 1990s and 2000s. At the top of

its game, the company was delivering

a quarter of Finnish corporate tax

receipts and 4 per-cent of GDP. Its

decline and near financial collapse was

deeply felt by Finns, and contributed

to a national economic crisis. Nokia is

one of the things that Finns have been

most proud of in their history, and its

near-demise had a big impact. Nokia’s

Q3 2017 results were released while we

were in Helsinki and, thankfully, their

technologies are once again driving

strong profit growth.

A side-effect of the rise and fall (and

rise again) of Nokia, has been the

availability of highly trained and highly

skilled technology professionals in a

marketplace looking for alternative

outlets. This coupled with a wide range

of initiatives, put in place by the Finnish

Government, aimed at plugging the gap

in the economy, has resulted in a very

active and buoyant start-up, venture

capital and technology ecosystem,

bringing many new and innovative

products to market.

During our time in Helsinki, we saw

presentations from: Enreach, Anaplan,

Hoxhunt, Kompozure, The Curious Ai

Company, Upcloud, Pivotal, Leaddesk,

M-Files, Tosibox, Flashnode, Kontena,

Aves Netsec, Haltian, Riisk And

Poimapper.

In common, we felt that all the

companies had an approachable, open

and friendly culture coupled with a

work-man-like, no-nonsense style.

The owners and founders are quietly

confident, good humoured and polished

professionals who are comfortable

tackling ‘big-ticket’ technology

problems. A good grasp of DevOps,

Continuous Integration and Continuous

Delivery is reflected across their

business models and processes, and

it was refreshing to hear about their

infrastructure and IT platform focus

(they leave the fluffy ‘dog walking’ apps

for others to pursue).

An unassuming and understated

nature tends to concentrate their

product and service offerings to be

made attractive to, and consumable

by small and medium sized businesses

across Scandinavia. On inspection,

Ntegra believes that their apparent

lack of enterprise focus and ambition

is unfounded, and they could easily

compete with more internationally

recognised new and established

brands across the globe. Neighbours,

Estonia have rebranded themselves as

the ‘unicorn factory of the world’ and

Stockholm can claim to be the joint

unicorn capital of the world, alongside

Silicon Valley. We think Finland should,

and deserves to be, aiming high too.

Adrian Fern

CTO Ntegra Greenside

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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland

A synopsis of a cross-section of the companies that presented is given below. More detail about all the

companies, and others that we unable to attend, can be requested from Ntegra at any time.

Nordic Venture Capital Scene

Introduction to the Nordic venture capital scene was provided by Sami Lampinen, co-founder and managing partner of

Inventure (http://inventure.fi), a seed and early-round investment company. Founded in 2005, they have three offices in

Helsinki, Stockholm and Shanghai. The Shanghai office was opened recently to give the firm access to Chinese volume

manufacturing capabilities. With a focus on trade sale exits, they favour investing in companies that have global potential and,

therefore, devote a lot of time researching and forecasting how the world might look in 5 to 7 years.

Inventure have made 15+ seed and early stage investments this year and claim to be the most active VC in Finland. As

proactive investors, they like to take board places (often as Chair), in their invested companies. They have developed a

“Portfolio as a Platform” service offering access to a variety of tools, templates and best practice guidance for their portfolio

companies and broader community.

Sami stated that Inventure like to invest in “interesting companies”, for example Beddit, which they recently exited by selling

to Apple. Beddit is a ‘sleep and wellness monitoring’ application that uses an ultra-thin sensor, placed under the bedsheet, to

track users sleep patterns, heart rate and breathing without the need for a wearable sensor.

I N V E N T U R E . F I

C O M PA N I E S

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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland

KO M P Z O U R E . C O M

CEO and co-founder of Kompozure (http://kompozure.com),

Sakari Nahi, likes to refer to himself as Chief Coding Officer.

His company has been delivering cloud development and

consulting services since 2011 and they focus solely on

Microsoft’s Azure platform. The company started with a

€6,000 investment and has bootstrapped to over 25 staff, all

of whom are employee shareholders. Growing organically,

without external investment, they have a goal of building a

long-term sustainable, healthy business.

Kompozure’s operating model is very open, personal and

transparent. Everyone in the business knows how salaries

are determined and apportioned, and how they contribute

to company success. Work/life balance is very important,

so late or out of hours working is discouraged. They only

accept work that can be undertaken at their own offices,

believing that interaction between their staff delivers higher

quality results, in a shorter timeframe, compared to doing

development on client sites.

Sakari says, “We roar at challenge. Grow stronger, fitter,

better, badder. I AM LEGION!” Kompozure exemplify this as:

looking for challenges, growing better through hardships,

enabling everyone to develop themselves whilst knowing

that there is support from the others, and that every day is

kept interesting through challenges and learning so that,

in the morning, “it doesn’t feel like sh*t waking up and

going into work.” Their key values are: Passion (everyone

is passionate about learning and they can rely and trust in

their co-worker’s drive); Team (nobody can build a complete

system by themselves and, hence, team mates help and

reduce workload and thus earns respect, regardless of

which company they come from); and Trust (Kompozure have

chosen to trust each other as “life is better that way” and

they want to be a blameless environment).

All staff enjoy a high degree of autonomy, freedom and

flexibility. For example, they can choose when and how much

holiday they take. Recruiting good people is a real challenge

currently because all tech and related companies are

competing to recruit the best personnel, so it makes sense

to respect and treat their employees well. Investing in staff

development, culture and values helps to recruit high quality

software developers who are passionate team players and

exhibit great honesty.

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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland

The Curious AI Company

“ The future of artificial intelligence is in machine learning and in how our brain works ”

Co-founder of The Curious AI Company (https://

thecuriousaicompany.com/), Timo Haanpää, described how

they are “building the future components of AI” and will sell

them commercially when ready. The company focuses on

autonomous and interactive machine learning technologies,

building on more than two decades of work in bio-inspired

AI by founder Harri Valpola, PhD. They deliver industrial pilot

projects whilst building a long-term, complete AI “deep tech”

portfolio. Their four areas of interest are: Deep Networks;

Unsupervised Learning; Perceptual Grouping; and Interactive

Inference.

Timo described 3 waves of AI, saying that the initial focus

had been on machine learning research with a longer-

term goal of achieving autonomous unsupervised Artificial

Intelligence. Wave 1, in the 1980s, was primarily handcrafted

software trying to implement Perception, Leaning, Autonomy

& Reasoning (but most solutions achieved only the last).

Wave 2, in the 2000s, was all about Machine Learning,

trying to implement Perception, Learning, Classification &

Prediction. Wave 3, in the 2020s, comprises all the Wave 2

capabilities plus Autonomy & Reasoning.

Timo encourages a move from what he called “Classic AI” to

“Modern AI”. Classic AI pertains to rules based programmes,

mathematically exact and robotic like, but solutions that tend

to be clumsy. Modern AI, solutions learn from examples, use

‘fuzzy’ computation, are probabilistic, holistic and ‘animal-

like’ in their flexibility. Solutions are more elegant as a result.

Examples include Siri, which allows you ask verbal questions

and uses Google’s natural language search to provide

contextually appropriate answers.

An aspect that Timo highlighted was that the AI community

is very open to sharing and how quickly they can collectively

move if there is benefit in doing so. He quoted the example

of how development used to be done using KERAS, an

open source neural network library, to TensorFlow, a similar

library developed by Google’s Brain team and released to

the Apache Foundation as open source in November 2015.

Many of the AI development community moved from Keras

to Tensorflow almost within a week of it being announced.

In 2017, Facebook released its SDK for Python Arg 3.0 and

since then almost the entire industry has moved to it.

Harri ValpolaTech Crunch Oct 2, 2015

T H E C U R I O U S A I C O M PA N Y. C O M

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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland

Haltian (https://haltian.com/) is a product design and

development company providing solution to global telecoms

and consumer electronics companies. They help their

customers through the entire product development lifecycle,

from concept to mass production. The company was founded

in September 2012 by former Nokia employees and is

headquartered in Oulo, Finland with a second office in Palo

Alto, USA. They have a wide-ranging portfolio from tiny

wearable consumer electronics, such as the ‘Oura Wellness

Ring’ through to large and complex industrial products

including imaging devices. They specialise in IoT devices and

device-layer acceleration, and have developed their own IoT

platform called Thingsee. A great deal of their development

is in wireless battery powered devices, saying they are one

of the most experienced wireless companies in the world (a

claim bolstered by their Nokia heritage).

Their in-house product development teams work with their

customers to create devices for consumer, industrial and

professional use. They work from the early feasibility stage,

through to mass production and after sales, covering:

Product Innovation; Product concept; Product development;

Manufacturing; and After sales support.

Haltian’s Thingsee Platform delivers “Sensors as a

Service”, providing customers with custom made sensor

devices, a complete IoT device platform and full stack IoT

development capabilities. Platform capabilities are coupled

with management services delivered through the Thingsee

operations cloud. Thingsee provide: Evaluation kits; Solution

prototypes; Solution building; and Product launch, hence

covering the entire lifecycle for innovation and adoption.

To achieve this, it has developed its own range of wireless

devices which are available in a variety of physical form

factors. Thingsee products use ‘Wirepas’, a proprietary

decentralised radio communications protocol for large scale

IoT applications, supporting hub and spoke, peer to peer and

mesh topologies.

HaltianH A LT I A N . C O M

Thingsee One QuietOn earplugs

Ōura Wellness Ring Omata Speedometer

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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland

A shot of innovation adrenaline! Ntegra Greenside (http://ntegra.com/greenside/) is a conduit between some of the most

innovative and disruptive companies on the planet and enterprise technology leaders.

For our members, the end of the event is not the end

of the benefits, with a Greenside Alumni Network and

numerous UK events throughout the year providing

information on disruptive technologies and the value they

deliver. Our seminar programme looks at both verticals e.g.

Telecommunications and horizontals such as Security &

Privacy.

Members of our Executive Advisory Programme (EAP)

enjoy complimentary tickets, hotel accommodation, local

transfers and dining on all of our Greenside Events,

worldwide, and a bundle of consulting days in addition

to personal mentoring support from one of our network

of technology leaders. When you join the EAP, we invest

time in determining the most effective way to align these

benefits to your business challenges to deliver competitive

advantage for your business and kudos for you.

Ntegra Greenside

Alumni Network and Executive

Advisory Programme

N T E G R A . C O M / G R E E N S I D E

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European Technology Leaders Summit | Finland

Since 1996 we have hosted research tours to Silicon Valley where we have

strong working relationships with many Valley based companies and venture

capitalists, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Intel Capital.

Our delegates have access not only to technology typically 2 years before

widespread adoption, giving them first mover advantages, but also how

‘early to market’ firms innovate and deliver. Additionally, as an invitation-only

event, we are able to ensure that our delegates are connecting within their

own peer group – providing a unique forum to discuss challenges and share

learning. Since the programme began we have worked with over 250 early

stage companies, many of which have gone on to become global successes.

The 22nd Ntegra Greenside United States Research Tour (USRT2018) in

Silicon Valley has been scheduled for 19th to 25th May 2018.

Contact: events@ntegra.co.uk

USRT2018Save the date!

E V E N T S @ N T E G R A . C O . U K