These two are great success stories, but they’re also the only Finnish unicorn exits in the post-Nokia era.
The exits were somewhat less exciting to founders than these numbers suggest. Supercell sold 51% to SoftBank already in 2013 for 1.1B EUR. And Wolt’s purchase price was paid entirely in DoorDash stock which was down 75% by the time the lockups expired.
Startups generating low-hundreds of millions in annual revenue just aren’t unicorns anymore, unless they happen to be AI.
Both Supercell and Wolt have their headquarters steadily in Finland. The founders and Finnish early investors have gained hundreds of millions or billions of euros wealth for themselves which they have further spended and invested in Finland. They have paid huge amounts of taxes and keep on doing all of these since they are still located in Finland. It's hard to downplay the value of those IMO. Overall Rovio wasn't a complete disaster either. First made billions of euros for many years and was later sold to Sega for >$700 million. Still has HQ in Finland.
There's plenty of interesting and fast growing startups still left here. For example Supermetrics, Varjo, Smartly, Iceye, Aiven to name a few. IMO you are being pessimistic.
In any case, I agree in that the acquisition is great news and the economy is in a depression. :) Huge part of it is because Finnish mortgages are mostly straight tied to Euribor unlike in other Euro countries and since post covid the interest rates went up, Finns got f*cked. Hopefully the Euribor interest rate will be going down and the mortgages will start to become smaller, at least when they are being paid off.
- Supercell sold 81.4% stake to Tencent in 2018 with a valuation of $10.2 billion.
- Wolt was acquired by DoorDash in 2021 with a valuation of $8.1 billion.
The list is much longer with startups that currently generate revenues of tens or hundreds of millions in a year that have not been sold.