Startup Failures in Finland

Finland's SAR satellite pioneer hit by commercial market slowdown and deep restructuring

Pax Dei launched with a16z backing and lost 90% of players in weeks.

Finland's high-end VR headset maker for enterprise cut half its staff as the metaverse hype cycle collapsed

Europe's quantum darling hit the commercialization wall as the funding winter arrived.

Built the world's sharpest VR headset and priced it for a market that didn't exist.

Finland's iGaming personalization pioneer was squeezed out by enterprise giants and niche specialists alike.

Built a PSD2 aggregator in a market where Visa just spent $2 billion on the competition.

The Finnish startup that invented Mobility-as-a-Service — and discovered cities aren't ready to pay for it.

Finnish workforce health and absence-management SaaS listed on Nasdaq First North in 2019—then delisted in 2023 as revenues stagnated and the product failed to expand beyond the Nordic public sector.

Finnish AI waste-sorting robot pioneer shut down after fifteen years without reaching commercial-scale economics.

Finland's post-Rovio mobile gaming IPO dream ended as a Netflix bargain-bin acquisition.

Using Earth's magnetic field to navigate malls was ingenious — until malls emptied out.

Finland's puzzle RPG hit studio was swallowed by Zynga and lost its creative soul in the process.

Nokia's music platform survived the Microsoft acquisition — then Line Corporation killed it

Mapping shoppers' every move was a great idea retailers just refused to pay for.

Europe's best freelancer bank — absorbed and neutralized by a Spanish banking giant.

Microsoft paid $7.2B for Nokia's phones — then wrote down $7.6B eighteen months later

Nokia built an app store 1 year before Apple — and made it so bad users preferred nothing.

The Twitter rival Google acquired and then open-sourced into irrelevance

Nokia tried to beat Game Boy with a phone that required removing the battery to change games.

Finland's computer vision retail startup acqui-hired before the category matured

Finnish crypto bank that ICO'd $14.5M and couldn't survive the crypto winter

Finnish AI-powered networking app for events and conferences that matched attendees and scheduled meetings using algorithms

Finnish AI beauty personalization startup that raised $5M and could not convert free quizzes to paid subscriptions.

Finnish consumer lending startup was killed by EU consumer credit directive tightening

Finland's neobank competing against OP Group's cooperative banking with 5 million members