Founders Fuel
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Congrats Wave!

Congrats Wave!

Roope Ripatti
May 19, 2025

I’ve been taking lunches with some of the top AI application layer founders of Finland for the past 2 weeks. My top 2 takeaways have definitely been that the pace of innovation in the field is crazy, and building your own AI agents is easier than you think. I kinda wanna challenge all you readers to build some simple AI workflow to benefit your own needs. I for example tried to automate going from news articles to Founders Fuel snippets to make my workflow quicker. For now I didn’t manage to make the snippets sound enough like my own voice, so I won’t be using them. Still the experience of setting up such an AI assistant showed me how easy such a process is. 10/10 would recommend!
- Roope Ripatti

Exciting news

Just as I was complaining how little news we’re getting from the Finnish startup ecosystem, things started to happen last week.

For the top news, our good friends at Wave Ventures gathered a new fund! The 7million $ fund 3 is tripling their previous fund 2 and their scope is ever increasing to all across the new Nordics. I’m super excited about what can happen when Wave can deploy the fund and back the most ambitious young founders that are coming from the New Nordics!

Wave Ventures, Europe's largest Gen Z-run VC Firm, triples fund size to €7M

Over its first two funds, Wave Ventures has made over 50 initial investments as the first backer and invested in nearly 80 per cent of VC-backed Finnish startups led by CEOs under 30.

tech.eu/2025/05/15/wave-venturs-europes-largest-gen-z-run-vc-firm-triples-fund-size

Neon is acquired by Databricks

Neon is one of the companies where I often forget one of the founders is Finnish. Part of this is because they are based in the US and have little presence in Finland, but still, a huge win to get acquired for ~$1B.

https://www.databricks.com/blog/databricks-neon