Editor’s Note: Dmitri Sarle, the CEO of ArcticStartup is a mentor at Nestholma.
A battle between two major Finnish photographic-service retailers, which has been raging for the last 40 years, reached an end this week. The Lahti based photo shop, Eirikuva, has been acquired by Ifolor, Finland’s largest photograph products manufacturer and retailer. They will be keeping the Ifolor brand in the process and the Eirikuva’s production activities in Lahti will cease.
So, that is all good and well, but how is this interesting for the startup world? Basically the people behind Eirikuva were also running a startup accelerator – Nestholma. This acquisition did not include Nestholma, thus the team will now be able to focus solely on the accelerator from the imaging sector. That being said, now that they are not tied to Eirikuva, it might make sense for them to expand the range of startups too.
To date the Nestholma accelerator has already mentored over 30 startup companies and 7 new startups will come out of the programs latest batch by the end of March. The 3-month long program offers mentoring in the form of dialogue and courses after which startups go demoing in front of angels and VC’s; which is a typical accelerator program cycle.
The program is open to companies that are based anywhere in the world and only requires physical presence on three occasions, the pitching, which takes place during the first week, the mentor day and finally the grande finale – demo day.
Since Eirikuva is out of the picture, Nestholma will start pushing their accelerator program and we are curious to see if they can make a dent in the already crowded accelerator market of Finland.
Ifolor on the other hand now has a strong position in the market and is going to be serving former Eirikuva customers from their Kerava facility.
