Post Slush Analysis

All the news and fun tidbits from this years Slush!

Author

Roope Ripatti
November 25, 2024

While I could not make the guide for Slush you were asking for (I was sick for the weekend before Slush), I wanted to briefly recap all the news and other interesting stuff that happened at Slush this year! For those that want my fresh post Slush ideas of how to make the most out of the event, pin this somewhere for next year.

Firstly, the easiest way of getting a ticket to Slush is to become a Slush volunteer (I know, very surprising…). There are also other ways of “social hacking” yourself a badge, but becoming an e.g. construction volunteer gives you the full event access with much less work.

Secondly, the most valuable times for me came from side events. The good thing about side events is that most of them can be attended with no Slush ticket! My hack for finding good events came by accident since I had connected with one of the previous people responsible for startup events at Slush, and they reposted all the most interesting events again this year. Otherwise, you can usually find all the open side events from whichever event platforms are hot at that point (I looked at Luma and the official Slush platform for all my side events). And lastly of course you will be able to get into the best side events if you know the right people. Many of the events are invite-only, but with a little bit of social hacking, you can find yourself in interesting places!

Third, don’t message Finns on the matchmaking tool. Slush is the one place bringing globally interesting people to Finland, so don’t message the people you know from Finland. If you want to talk to interesting Finnish founders/investors/operators, make a note of the interesting people and message them after Slush. I had amazing conversations with Finnish founders in the side events, but 0 of them were planned.

Lastly, don’t make too rigid plans. For the afterparty, I suddenly got adopted by 3 YC founders and we had a blast listening to Windows95man (a surprisingly good gig :D ).


- Roope Ripatti

Exciting news 

Taito.ai launch

I had a conversation with a friend of mine at Slush and they commented that it seems like every new startup in Finland has an ex-Smartly employee in the early team. I feel this is mostly because of the amazing work Kristo Ovaska made with the team of Smartly.

Now Kristo & a bunch of other early Smartly employees are starting an HR tech company all about making performance management actually help the performance of the employees it is supposed to serve.

At Slush Taito announced their 2.7M seed round with some amazing angel investors and Accel participating in the round as well as a sneak peek into their product.

In Parallel launch

In Parallel was a complete surprise out of nowhere for me. I was browsing side events and saw that a Finnish company was having a launch party, so I had to attend.

Only at the event I found out that the Finnish founder CEO of the company has been working for Facebook on projects like internet.org, the original Facebook AI team (they apparently made an object recognition model with all the pictures from Instagram in 2015 with super good results) and WhatsApp after the original founders left.

The launch party is in the Silicon Valley style as well with bubbles for the guests, a live performance, a sneak peak hype video for the audience, etc.

While still not 100% sure what the company does on a practical level, they aim to fix the gap between company strategy setting and implementation by using AI agents to gather real-time data about the implementation process.

Donut Labs launch (by Verge)

For those unlucky who don’t know, Verge is a Finnish company making badass electric motorbikes. As one of my friends put it, “They are the Apple of electric motors.”

They literally reinvented the wheel by putting a round motor (“the donut”) in the middle of the wheel.

Now they are figuring out other applications where their awesome motor could be used, and for that, they created Donut Labs!

They have some super interesting projects done together with their partners in the pipeline. Some of these are e.g. a snowmobile that looks like a literal Batmobile (they had a full-scale prototype with black 3d printed parts at Slush), an electric helicopter that has double speed compared to existing models, and supercars & trucks that we could not yet hear more about.

They are also unveiling something defense-related on the Finnish Independence Day in 2 weeks.

Oura announces more funding

Not announced at Slush, but I feel like I would be committing a crime not including this. Oura grabbed another 75M as a series D from a strategic investor Dexcom. Dexcom is a US based publicly traded company that does glucose monitoring. The idea is that Oura and Dexcom services can be integrated to provide even better service to the end users.

Oh yeah and they are now valued at 5B$.

Your weekly read

One more thing was published at Slush this year!

The State of European Tech report is always an interesting read for data nerds like me, hopefully, you’ll enjoy it as much!

https://www.stateofeuropeantech.com/

Until next week!

-Roope