How Finland Rises as a Startup Powerhouse: Tesi's Piia Santavirta on the Numbers

Finnish startups raised nearly two billion euros last year — a record-breaking number. But the real question is whether we have the hunger and the courage to keep our top companies in Finland. On a recent HS Vision podcast, Tesi CEO Piia Santavirta brought infectious energy to a difficult conversation about Finnish growth entrepreneurship.

It is easy to get carried away with funding-round headlines. The real growth shows up in the daily challenges: hiring, retention, scaling internationally without losing your edge. Even when global economic news has been gloomy, Santavirta points to a generation of Finnish founders who are building globally competitive companies.

The pattern she sees

• Finnish founders are more international than ever — they speak to global investors fluently from day one.
• The Helsinki-Stockholm-Copenhagen axis is becoming a real ecosystem, not three separate markets.
• The risk is not that we run out of talent — it is that we lose top companies to bigger markets when they scale.

Watch the full HS Vision podcast on Innohub TV. Original Finnish article at /fi/.