What the hell is Founders Fuel?

Author

Roope Ripatti
April 17, 2024

Hello and welcome to the journey!

I decided to start yet another newsletter! How amazing!

All jokes aside. The Finnish startup ecosystem lacked a place to remind you what opportunities, events, and learnings you could extract value from every week. I thought everyone could use some Founder fuel in their lives.

Founders Fuel will be a semi-weekly newsletter where I gather all the most exciting things happening in the Finnish startup ecosystem (mainly the capital region where I’m based). From events to must-reads, from exciting news to exciting opportunities. I want this to be the easiest source of grassroots news available.

The newsletter is mainly targeted at people interested in hopping into the startup ecosystem and needing help knowing where to start, as well as more seasoned ecosystem veterans who want to quickly find out what is happening on the other side of the ecosystem.

That said, welcome to the journey; let’s figure this out together!
- Roope Ripatti

Exciting news 

Iceye & 93M 🥳

Holy shit, Iceye just secured 93 million from the Finnish sovereign wealth fund & private investors.

This addition, on top of the Series D they gathered in 2022, brings the total funding to 438M.

Congrats, Iceye! This is what we need from deep tech companies!!!

The new generation of Startup Sauna companies are getting funded

In the past 5 months, a growing number of young, hungry startup founders have decided to call Startup Sauna their home. Today, I want to highlight one: Daze has just secured a pre-seed round from Antler and Wave Ventures. Daze is one of the first teams in Finland to get funded by Antler.

Huge congrats to Daze, and I’ll be waiting for what lies in your future!

Upcoming stuff

Tue 23.

Wed 24.

Thu 25.

Fri 26.

You can easily find all the startup events over at: https://lu.ma/finnishstartups

Help needed

At Startup Sauna, we always need help keeping the startup ecosystem's big wheels running.

Currently, we would benefit from help with:

  • an internal portal for the startups we have in our circles
    (made with Nextjs & Supabase, no experience necessary!)

  • Someone interested in helping us run a potential future podcast

  • Someone interested in developing the Founders Fuel newsletter!

Your weekly read

I was getting back to reading some Paul Graham (PG) essays this week and decided to highlight one this week. If you have never stumbled upon PG essays, I strongly suggest checking them out!

This week’s PG essay is The Reddits. A look back at how Paul Graham met the founders of Reddit and how Y-combinator was found.

https://paulgraham.com/reddits.html

Lastly

I’ll try to keep this short and sweet now and in the future.

Thanks for reading! I’m happy to take all the feedback and make the next one even better!

-Roope