Silo and Lifeline SPAC news!

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Roope Ripatti & Niklas Hamberg
July 15, 2024

This week we’ll kick things off with a greeting from my friend Niklas Hamberg:

Greetings from Stanford!

What’s in common among companies like Smartly.io, Wolt, Swappie and AMD’s blockbuster acquisition, Silo.ai?

Besides stellar valuations, these companies, and many more, have been founded through ES’s

ES’s? For those unfamiliar, ES stands for Entrepreneurship Societies, the grassroots engines of our startup scene. We currently have 18 of them, around the country, working to empower the brightest students of Finland toward high-growth entrepreneurship.

For the past fifteen years, student-led activities have brought life to Finland’s startup scene through countless experiments and events, reaching nearly 10% of Finnish students annually. These activities have also been springboards for hundreds of companies and just this summer alone around 30 new student-teams are building growth companies in various summer accelerators around the country

I went over a good chunk of ES-data with the Startup Foundation and as a result, compiled two pretty interesting documents for anyone interested in understanding our unique startup scene:

ES Impact Report:

I compiled all companies founded by former ES board members into one place, alongside other ES-information: 

Database of all ES Alumni Companies:

I complied all companies founded by former ES board members into one place, alongside other ES-information. :

That’s it for now, though there may be some more stuff coming in the future…😉 

-Niklas Hamberg

Exciting news 

Lifeline SPAC 1 found a partner!

For those that are not deep in the startup lingo:

A SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) is a company that does an IPO to raise enough money to buy out another company. SPACS are usually made to IPO companies that doent’t want to undergo traditional IPO processes.

The Lifeline SPAC 1 was founded in 2021 and has been looking for a partner to make public ever since.

Last week they found a partner in Canatu a Finnish deep tech company working with carbon nanotubes.

AMD Acquires SiloAI for 665M

The Finnish AI company SiloAI just got acquired by the American computing company AMD.

While it’s amazing to see the big acquisitions coming out of Europe, some people like the Visio reporter Alex af Heurlin have brought up that this goes somewhat against the mission of Silo “Our mission is to make sure Europe has a flagship AI company.

But if this gives new before unavailable resources for Silo for making the Helsinki-based team even more significant, I see it as a win for Finland.

Happening this week

Thu 18.7.

We’ll have an Ignite BBQ after the event if you want to join both!

Your weekly read

The datasets gathered about the ecosystem by Niklas are super interesting. Go give them a look if you haven’t yet!


The ES impact report.
The Finnish startup ecosystem has been built by students. Take a look!
https://www.startup-saatio.fi/s/Startup-Foundation-Entrepreneurship-Society-Impact-Report-2023.pdf

ES alumni companies database
The companies founded by the people in the startup scene are pretty impressive!
https://www.startup-saatio.fi/entrepreneurship-societies

Have a nice summer!

-Roope