Superhero leads $1.8m round for Valohai

Other backers in the round included Finnish VC firm Reaktor Ventures and Business Finland, the Finnish funding agency for innovation.

Valohai started raising capital at the end of last year, meeting primarily with European investors and a handful of US investors, CEO and co-founder Eero Laaksonen told Unquote. In the end, the team decided on local Finnish investors to invest in the company, with Superhero able to offer a better understanding of the market.

With the fresh capital, Valohai has two main goals: to accelerate machine learning development and scale its model deployment. From April, the company will be present in the US, seen as a core growth market in machine learning. Currently the European customer base is around 60% and the US makes up 40%.

For now, Valohai is looking to stay in the Nordic countries with a presence in the US, but could potentially move headquarters if the latter ends up being the firm's centre of business, Laaksonen added.

The Superhero Venture Fund 2015 was announced in November 2015 with a target of €20m.

Company
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Turku, Valohai is a machine-learning platform-as-a-service company. It automates machine learning training and deployment infrastructure for companies looking to increase their business efficiency through machine learning.

The company has customers in Europe, Asia and the US, and plans to further scale the team and accelerate product development.

People
Superhero Capital – Juha Ruohonen (founding partner).
Reaktor Ventures – Marko Sibakov (business development director).
Valohai – Eero Laaksonen (CEO, co-founder).

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Early-stage
• Nordics
• Technology
• Finland
• Venture