Top 100 Startups in Finland

    Having a flourishing startup ecosystem is great, but what is even cooler is to be able to see who are the most active participants. That’s basically what San Francisco, Hello.fi and Skyhood did when they introduced Startup100.net, a list of the “hottest” startups in Finland. The idea is to measure the social activity, mentions and visibility of companies and their products and mash it all together in an algorithm that will calculate and rank all startups.

    We were very curious as to how exactly the list is put together and we got some feedback from Juhani Polkko, startup marketer and co-founder at San Francisco Oy. He told us that the exact methods used for calculating the S100 index are a secret sauce, but he did shed some light on the procedure.

    The list is based on URL’s instead of keywords and measures attention received from media, bloggers, influencers and users. There are currently 250 startups that are tracked and Juhani believes that the list is at least 90% accurate. This is a very early beta and they preferred to launch it sooner rather than later and improve based on user feedback. So without further adieu, here are the TOP 25 companies in Finland from Startup100.net:

    1 Rovio Entertainment
    2 Dealdash
    3 Web of Trust (WOT)
    4 Tuxera
    5 Jolla
    6 Somia Dynamoid (IRC-Galleria)
    7 Supercell
    8 Scoopshot
    9 Nethit
    10 Thinglink
    11 Sports Tracker
    12 SkySQL
    13 Jongla
    14 Valkee
    15 Skyhood – Duunitori.fi
    16 Suomen Verkkomaksut
    17 Tinkercad
    18 Ekahau
    19 Rightware
    20 Multi Touch/Multitaction
    21 Secret Exit
    22 Koodiviidakko
    23 Audiodraft
    24 Cognitive Maps / Hitlantis
    25 BT Wood

    Since the list is mainly automatically generated and is in early beta, there are some concerns such as B2C companies that are very active socially vs. B2B companies that are not so outspoken. Also there is the issue of what exactly is a startup and which companies are a part of the industry. Not to mention the fact that many companies have a large number of products but the list can currently measure just one. With all that in mind, we still think that the list is an excellent effort and can give you a very quick and reasonable overview of the startup ecosystem in Finland.

    We will let you be the judge of the accuracy, but it was striking to us immediately that Finland does not have too many big social and B2C companies at the top of the list, unless they are in the gaming industry.

    Speaking of the gaming industry, given that there is only one product that is analyzed for each company, that might be an issue for companies such as Supercell, with two massive titles. Moreover in case of Supercell, the company name is not quite as popular and known as the two games: Hay Day and Clash of Clans.

    It was also surprising to see some companies such as BT Wood to be so high on the list, after all they are in a niche B2B market and basically require zero social presence. Other companies, we feel deserve a higher ranking. For instance: Kiosked, Transfluent, Zen Robotics. But at the end of the day it is not really a list of the best startups but a great indication of how well represented the companies are on the web.

    Basically, it could be said that the list measures the success of marketing activites of the companies and unlike tools that measure individual success, this list benchmarks it against others in the industry.

    In addition to the automated ranking, the list is also partially manually curated in an effort to improve accuracy. So your feedback is very important to Startup100.net and we will also try to help them make the list more accurate and reliable.

    Of course it remains to be seen how well this “buzz” ranking correlates with revenues, growth, exits and bankruptcies. We will be keeping a close eye of the list to see what changes are happening there and will let you know if we notice something of interest.

    What do you think of the list? Was your startup on it? How can the list be improved and how accurate is it? Let us know what you think in the comments.

    To see the full list, go to Startup100.net