Top 5 Nordic Startup Founders According to Nordic Startup Awards

    Yesterday we published the list of top 5 finalists of the Nordic Startup Awards in the category Startup of the Year. We featured 25 Nordic startups from 5 Nordic countries, and today we are going to present you the list of Nordic startup founders.

    Choose a tech startup founder that has shown notable achievements over the last year in terms of great customer growth, sales, funds raised, uniqueness, impact of the product/service and leadership, and do not forget to vote for your favourite candidate here.

    Iceland

    Arnar Jonsson, CEO of Memento Payments, Icelandic social payment platform, which became an App of the year 2016 in Iceland. Jonsson also became a winner of “best of show” at Finovate and launched a new Payment solution Kass in Iceland for Islandsbanki.

    Margrét Juliana Sigurðardóttir, co-founder and CEO of Mussila. She is a versatile musician with background in classical music, jazz and pop music. She finished her postgraduate studies in voice in 2004 from the Royal Academy of Music but prior to that she studied voice, piano and composition in Reykjavik Music College. She founded Rosamosi gaming studio with computer engineer Hilmar Thor Birgisson in 2015 with the aim of developing Mussila – a series of music apps for kids that teach the basics of music through fun and creative play. Rosamosi currently has three Mussila apps in App Store and their fourth one Mussila Planets will be launched in May 2017.

    Jökull Sólberg Auðunsson, co-founder of Takumi, and former Head of Product at QuizUp. He built a revenue generating business in multiple markets servicing the world’s biggest agency groups and brands.

    Stefán Baxter, founder and CEO of Activity Stream, an AI company that makes your organization better and more efficient by turning underutilized business data into actionable intelligence and insights.

    Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, co-founder and CEO at Soólfar Studios, a VR studio developing multiple projects across all major VR platforms, including PlayStation VR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Chaos Physics.

    Norway

    Agnes Dyvik, founder and CEO of VIO -The platform that provides users with unlimited access to the stories they care about – premium quality, no noise.
    Agnes is a former champion in windsurfing, and has been an active dog musher. This has given Agnes the ability to cope with adversity and be ambitious – something that comes in handy when you are working with innovation in a well established media industry.

    Camilla Lindelid Strand, founder of AbleOn Medical, a company that develops the only aid that help elders and people with disabilities trough out the entire shower routine. In 2016 she and the project were announced the winners of a huge Nordic competition (Nordic Independent Living Challenge) and she received international coherence and verification of the idea and the technology.

    Trine Almenningen, founder of Altina, training tool that makes digital planning, monitoring and analysis simple and smooth. Trine has been coach for young athletes & junior athletes in track and field. When training athletes on a national level she discovered the lack of good digital solutions for tracking athlete training load. Her background is in software engineering.

    Tom Arnøy, CEO and founder of Zedge, content platform for mobile personalization and self expression. Zedge has more than 60 employees and offices in New York, Norway and Finland.

    Lars Mangerud Flesland, CEO and founder of Flow Motion, smartphone stabilizer. The crowdfunding platform for the Flow Motion was 100% funded in 1 hour on Kickstarter. He has got 2nd place Technoport Pitching Competition Winner Technoport, and became a winner of Venture Cup National Finals Norway in 2015.

    Denmark

    Habib Frost, CEO and founder of Neurescue. He is the youngest to ever graduate with a Medical Doctor’s degree in Denmark at the age of 23. Habib was also selected to participate in the Singularity University 10 Week Flagship Program, and has won several nominations, among others Forbes 30 under 30 Technology and Berlingske’s Talent 100 list.

    Jeppe Rindom, CEO & Co-founder of Pleo, offering smart company cards that automate expense reports. Before starting Pleo, Jeppe was an executive in the startup success, Tradeshift and he has been involved as an advisor and investor in several startups and fintech companies.

    Camilla Hessellund Lastein, founder Lix.com. Frustrated by the cost and weight of traditional books, Camilla dropped out of university to make a better solution. Lix.com started out as a simple method for digital textbooks, and it has now developed into a collaborative learning platform for students. She was chosen as 1 out of 15 entrepreneurs in Denmark to be a member of the Danish Government’s “Entrepreneur Panel” which is led by Brian Mikkelsen, DK’s Minster of Business, and Tommy Ahlers. Did a TEDx talk for TEDxAarhus. Nominated in EY Entrepreneur of the Year, the startup category.

    Sara Green Brodersen, founder of Deemly. Sara founded her first startup at the age of 16 and has been a part of the startup scene ever since. She’s worked in Copenhagen, London, and Silicon Valley. She founded the promising, born-global startup, deemly, a year ago and they have customers in Denmark, Singapore, Switzerland, the Netherlands, among others.

    Claus Risager, co-founder of Blue Ocean Robotics. Claus has co-founded the most productive robotics incubator in the Danish robot hub Odense Robotics. Since 2004 Claus has been a driving force in the creation of the robotics community on Funen. Taking a big lead in the creation of Universal Robots, Technological Institute of Denmark, and the EU he has brought vivid knowledge about how to create a robotic business and a knowledge sharing ecosystem. He was selected as TEDx Speaker for TED event Odense, which brings him in the league of legends together like Bill Gates, Sir Ken Robinson and Simon Sinek.

    Sweden

    Hjalmar Nilsonne, founder and CEO of Watty, one of the hottest AI startups in Sweden. Hjalmar has been engaged in commercialising Cleantech technologies for the past six years, initially in the solar industry and more recently in the energy sector. Watty is a market leader in energy disaggregation and was the winner of Niklas Zennström’s (Founder of Skype) Green Mentorship Award 2014.

    Maria Lindqvist, founder of Monivent. She studied Industrial Engineering with a master in Entrepreneurship and Business Design at Chalmers University of Technology. During the final year of the studies she started working on the idea to enable safer resuscitation of newborns in need of respiratory support immediately at birth and has been working on it ever since.

    Martina Elm, an entrepreneur, event organizer and food enthusiast. She’s the CEO & co-founder of Confetti, Nordic.js, Nordic.design & Hackaway. She regularly gives lectures on topics such as innovation and startups. She was listed as one of Sweden’s most progressive voices in the prestigious list “Årets Uppstickare” by Shortcut magazine and was named one of the most important female founders in Sweden by Di Digital 2017.

    Linnéa Olsson, CTO and co-founder of Mevia, Gothenburg-based company that provides intelligent solutions to increase the quality of medical treatments.

    Mehrdad Mahdjoubi, CEO and founder of Orbital Systems, an award-winning leader in optimizing personal use of fresh water. Based Mahdjoubi’s work with the NASA Mars missions, Orbital Systems technology lets people use all the water they want without wasting any of it.

    Finland

    Rudi Skogman, CEO & founder of Blok, a platform that automates home sales. Previously he was one of the main organizers of Slush for years, growing the event from 1500 people to 15000 people. He’s also worked at Samsung Electronics and latest at Reaktor Ventures as an investor. He’s into cycling, skiing & traveling.

    Mikko Honkanen, co-founder of Vainu.io, one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in Europe. After studying at Helsinki School of Economics and Oxford, Mikko spent 8 years building sales & customer success departments in Europe and in the U.S. at Meltwater Group. In 30 months he was able to grow Vainu.io from a small operation in the founders’ apartments to a global company with 5 offices, 100 people and over 1,200 paying customers. The growth has been achieved without any external funding.

    Miki Kuusi, CEO and co-founder of the Helsinki-based tech company Wolt. Previously, Miki ran Slush as co-founder & CEO, leading the event’s growth from a local, 300-person gathering to become one of the leading tech and investor events in the world with 15,000 attendees for the main event held in Helsinki. Miki has been listed as #32 on Wired’s top technology influencers in Europe for 2015, while Forbes featured Miki on their 30 under 30 list for 2016.

    Antti Vilpponen, co-founder of UpCloud, the company that offers the most high-performance public cloud resources available to power the business critical web around the world. It is both a price leader and performance leader in its space.

    Lasse Leppäkorpi, CEO of Beddit, sleep tracking device. His company was acquired by Apple earlier this year. He also has an experience in science and is very much involved in R&D as well as IPR around biomedical engineering including sensors, electronics, signal analysis, clinical studies, scientific publications and patents.