Maddy Savage
BBC News, Helsinki
Bbc
Jose Barrientos builds helmets for military training
Wearing a laboratory coat and slim silver gloves, the production specialist Jose Barrientos carefully assembles a helmet of white frame glasses.
It includes several cameras, eye tracking technologies and electronics that work together to simulate scenarios of high challenges with high issues.
“Everything must be perfect,” explains the production specialist. “So many different things can affect other things that can affect the final product in such a massive and massive way.”
Mr. Barrientos works for Varjo, one of the growing businesses of companies in Finland which develop innovations that can help military forces and governments to prepare or react to conflicts.
The Nordic nation, with a population of five million inhabitants, has 368 technological defense companies, according to Research for Tesi, a venture capital company funded by the State, published last September.
About 40% of them are start-ups and scales, with a lot of growth at rates of 30% to 40% if their tools are double-use technologies that can also be used in other industries.
Helsinki is now among the top five cities in Europe for defense, security and resilience, according to a separate report published in February by Tech Data Platform Dealroom, in collaboration with the NATO innovation fund, an independent venture capital fund launched in 2023 with funding from 24 NATO allies.
Varjo says that its helmets are used to provide 80 NATO forces simulation programs in the United States and Europe.
In simple terms, its products are more advanced versions of virtual reality headsets used in games.
But they combine synthetic artificial content with views in real environments.
This “mixed reality” “experience tightens the continuum of training” for fighter pilots, explains the CEO of the company Timo Toikkanen, because they no longer have to travel long distances to complete war simulations in giant aircraft hangers, which are dear to power and race. “You can do 99% of the same (training) inside the helmet.”
The start-up had already attracted intensive investments before Ukraine’s invasion by Russia and began to work with medical research companies and car manufacturers.
But toikkanen said the start of the conflict and the admission of Finland to NATO a year later “just put everything on steroids” in terms of interest in his defense offer.
Since March 2022, the company has raised more than 50 million euros (42 million pounds sterling; $ 54 million) in additional funding.
The war in Ukraine put Timo Toikkanen’s defense company “on steroids”
Mr. Toikkanen says that before war technologies, which could be used by military forces, were “a kind of red flag” for investors concerned about social and environmental responsibilities, and Varjo leaders “on tiptoe” around “on this side of the company during the search for funding.
Now the opposite is now true.
“Investors are looking for companies that are active in the field of defense technology and is no longer disapproved,” he explains.
After the return of President Trump in January in January, Mr. Toikkanen said that there was a renewed interest in his products from European soldiers in the wake of increasing geopolitical tensions.
“Suddenly, there is a new understanding that we must prepare, and we cannot only count on NATO and the United States for our defense.”
Listen: Business Daily – Finland’s defense technology
Other Finnish start-ups expanding in the defense and double-use sectors include Iceye, which has developed imaging and data services based on fine resolution microsatellites, and reorbe that provides satellite software.
Distance technologies, a start-up supported by Google creates immersive technologies without headphones. In March, he announced a collaboration with Patria, an inherited Finnish defense company, which will test technology on its armored vehicles.
Getty images
Finland has a long border with Russia
Finland shares approximately 1,340 km (830 miles) from its border with Russia, and the Finnish government has spent a greater proportion of its defense budget than many other European countries even before the war in Ukraine.
“There is a sentence that I like to take advantage of, which is” the tyranny of geography “- the closer you are to a threat, the more likely you are to perceive it as more apparent and indeed more existential,” explains Nicholas Nelson, a technological defense investor based in the United Kingdom and a visit to the University of Oxford.
“They also have a memory of the winter war, which happened during the Second World War, where they were invaded by the Soviet Union.”
The Duty of Finns to defend their country is registered in the Finnish Constitution, and there is a compulsory military service for men.
Nelson believes that this exhibition may also have encouraged talented citizens to become founders or investors in defense technology, rather than other fast growing industries in Europe such as renewable energies or financial technologies.
In Maria 01, a former hospital who has become a startup campus in Helsinki, the entrepreneur Janne Heitela opens her laptop to scroll through images of unmanned managers collecting data above the Arctic forests covered with snow.
He is the CEO of Kelluu, a company that expected its technology to be used by climate researchers, but has pivoted to become a surveillance platform for cities, governments and research institutions in 2022.
“It was a very concrete personal feeling that we must also do something for the security situation,” said Heitela.
It highlights national surveys that suggest that at least 80% of the Finnish population is ready to fight for their country, and agrees with Mr. Nelson that this “spirit to defend” has burst into start -up and commercial strategies and is likely to fuel the continuous growth of the sector.
Float
Kelluu airships are now marketed as a surveillance platforms
Defense technological companies that launch in Finland have also been stimulated by a strong general technological scene in the country.
Many former technological students from the country – including Mr. Toikkanen in Varjo – have perfected their skills in Nokia, the former world mobile telephony giant that has its roots in Finland.
He encountered financial difficulties after the launch of Apple’s iPhone in the mid -2000s, but this encouraged a significant number of former employees to launch or invest in new businesses.
Although it is not as mature as other European start-up centers such as Sweden and the United Kingdom, Helsinki has caused a handful of unicorn companies, worth one billion dollars or more, including the ringtone and the follow-up of the Fitness Oura and the Developer of the Supercell Games.
There is also a strong state support for the technological scene of the defense. Last year, Business Finland, a government agency that promotes investment and innovation, launched a new digital defense and resilience program that leads 120 million euros to support for research and development initiatives for small businesses and startups.
“Our current government … They really apply this type of public-private collaboration,” said program director Kirsi Kokko. “I think they understand the urgency.”
Despite the rapid growth of defense technology in Finland, the sector faces a range of local and European challenges.
Mr. Heitela, the founder of the Kelluu airship technological platform, describes something about a “cultural confrontation” between agile start-ups and large defense companies and governments that have generally required years of experimentation and prototyping before acquiring new technologies.
“It is really on the other side of the spectrum for start-ups, in which DNA is that we will fail quickly and quickly, and that you do not have every start-up.”
In Business Finland, Ms. Kokko said that the Nordic nation is also affected by strong global competition for software talents to develop defense technology and double -use companies.
But while Finland’s compact size and long dark winters could repel certain potential recruitments, it hopes that the country’s reputation for innovation, stable work hierarchies and low crime levels can attract employees with good skills sets – as well as its success in the sector.
“We have to have a good story,” says Kokko. “And I think we do it.”
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