Startup event in Finland puts focus on European technology
Helsinki, Dec. 1: One of Europe’s largest startup events opened Thursday in Finland, with 2,600 companies and 1,500 investors networking and negotiating funding, as the region looks to ramp up an industry that has long struggled to compete with the tech giants of the US.
The two- day Slush conference in Helsinki brought in star power to promote itself, including former US vice- president Al Gore to kick off the event as well as Britain’s Prince William.
The location of Finland is symbolic for a national and regional technology industry that has been trying to renew itself from older tech — the oncedominant handsets of Nokia Corp. — into newer ventures.
Finland has managed over the past five years to build a flourishing entrepreneurial scene, evident in the rise of gaming heavyweights Supercell — the maker of Clash of Titans among others — and the Angry Birds developer Rovio.
The home- grown startups in Finland are now expanding from conventional information technology to new lucrative fields like education, health, virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
Yet as successful as some of these companies can be, they more often than not get bought up by bigger US or Asian companies, leaving Europe without a single software- based technology company to rival the likes of Google or Amazon. Supercell, for example, sold a majority of its shares to Japanese companies GungHo and Softbank in 2013 and then China’s Tencent in 2016.
Venture capital firm Index Partners, one of Europe’s largest technology investors based in London and San Francisco, is convinced Europe will get its own star companies in the notsodistant future.
“It’s just a matter of time,” said spokesman Vojtech Horna from Index’s London office. He noted Supercell’s market valued recently reached $ 10 billion. “There will be more companies like that. The more people see examples like that, the more you see people taking it for the long- term and building these businesses in Europe.”