By Symela Touchtidou
Revealed on
Over 6,000 start-up founders and fund managers with greater than €4 trillion of funds directed completely to start-ups. That is what this yr’s Slush 2025 innovation competition has achieved.
Such a purpose appeared an unattainable job in 2008, when Aalto College alumni determined to create an area the place revolutionary concepts that reply humanity’s most crucial challenges could be born and developed.
This yr, the variety of individuals exceeds 13,000 and so they come from each nook of the world.
On the opening ceremony — after greetings from the organisers — Anton Osika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable, was the primary to take the stage. Lovable is a Swedish firm that’s redefining programming with “vibe-coding”, permitting non-programmers to construct pure language functions.
“Once I joined Slush final yr, there have been solely 8 folks on the firm working in a co-working constructing,” Osika stated. “Now, greater than 100,000 new initiatives are constructed on our platform day-after-day. There are greater than 5 million folks utilizing apps constructed by Lava Bow day-after-day… Everybody stored telling me that to achieve success I needed to transfer to Silicon Valley. I resisted that and we stored the corporate in Stockholm, bringing expertise from the US to work for us…Europe is in some ways a greater place for AI improvement and particularly for constructing a product firm.”
The geographical make-up of Slush 2025 is telling. Over 80% of the individuals are from European international locations, primarily northern Europe, Germany, France, but in addition central and southern Europe.
“We all know that Europe wants extra founders, extra folks able to sort out the world’s hardest issues by entrepreneurship. Among the many volunteers, you can see among the brightest younger expertise on the planet, lots of whom will grow to be founders after failure. And nothing makes our work appear extra significant,” stated Aino Bergius, CEO of Slush on the opening ceremony of the competition.
Within the Slush 100 competitors, probably the most promising start-ups can apply for funding straight from main European VCs equivalent to Basic Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.
The themes cowl dozens of areas from deep-tech and AI, to fintech, well being, defence and sustainable power, highlighting that Europe’s technological management shouldn’t be one-dimensional.
Entrepreneurship injection for Finland
Slush has performed a key function in strengthening Finland’s financial system by performing as a gateway for international funding within the home tech scene.
Due to the attraction of worldwide buyers to the Helsinki ecosystem, town and the Finnish financial system extra broadly profit from important revenues. Every worldwide customer spends on common nearly €946 throughout Slush.
“Slush is getting larger and larger, though it began from one thing very small. In the present day it’s more practical and has a much bigger share in our financial system and in our financial development,” Elina Pylkkanen, Finland’s deputy finance minister, advised Euronews.
“Worldwide competitors is so powerful. It comes from all over the place. However, alternatively, we in Europe have a protracted custom, historic tradition, historic information, and all that is handed on in our high-quality merchandise, in our considering and in our creativity.”
On the identical time, the tradition of entrepreneurship has grown radically. By way of the participation of scholars, volunteers and younger founders at Slush, a era of younger entrepreneurs has been constructed: about 15% of former Slush staff discovered their very own start-ups.
This “leverage” of concepts, folks and capital is popping Finland into a significant hub of technological innovation in Europe.
