Nordic Tech Tour 2010 Kicked Off Today

The European Tech Tour Association sails to Nordic countries again. This time there are 70 delegates (including leading local corporations, international VCs and policy makers) and 30 presenting companies on board. The event started today in Helsinki with the first company presentations. The program will continue later tonight with the Gala Dinner. There are more company presentations tomorrow in Finland until afternoon, when the event will cross the Baltic to Tallinn. Thursday is spent in Stockholm.

This year’s event has a special focus in Finland: “Partly because the 2009 event was held in Southern Sweden and Denmark, but mostly because the thriving startup ecosystem we have currently here!” boasts Jarkko Virtanen, President of Nordic TT 2010. Indeed, out of the 30 companies pitching during the event, 12 are Finnish. Here’s the list of the 30 participating companies:

Choosing the final companies was a challenging task – 5 country committees started with over 500 applications from various companies willing to participate. Total of 125 was brought to the final selection committee, which consists of Tech Tour organizers and selected international VCs. Finally, Top 100 Nordic list and the 30 presenting companies were chosen. The mix of 30 were chosen by their stage and by industry. The goal was to have companies covering the ecosystem as widely as possible, which can be seen in following table:

What can be seen in the table and overall in the current Nordic ecosystem, is the march of Cleantech companies. “Cleantech is now big thing in Finland and Norway. Sweden has generally profiled as land of new media and Internet companies, whereas Estonia is a lot about embedded solutions” recites Jussi Harvela, General Partner of Veturi,  differences between Nordic countries. He also notes the trend in Finland has been that VCs are generally interested in later stage companies, while earlier stage companies are more dependent on public funding.

To finalise the post, here are the lists of Nordic Tech Tour participants of 2000 and 2005. You can probably find some really interesting names among them: