15.06.2022 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – TAMPERE, FINLAND
Platform6, the organiser of the Silicon Vikings New Nordics Pitch Competition 2022 in Finland, is excited to announce that StemSight has been selected a winner in the Regional Finals on 15 June 2022 at Arctic15 x Tampere Startup Conference, part of DigITre and Tampere Smart City Week Conference & Expo.
StemSight is a cell therapy startup developing novel treatments for blindness operating in Tampere, Finland. It is all female founded and a member of Platform6 startup house. StemSight’s aim is to develop off-the-shelf human spare parts to replace corneal donor tissue using human pluripotent stem cells. The team compliments the scientific excellence in stem cells and tissue engineering of the founder team with experience from clinical ophthalmology and pharma industry in their board of directors.
“There is a huge lack of cornea donor tissue with 12.7 million people worldwide waiting for a corneal transplant. We can use human stem cells to manufacture new corneal cells in a scalable way to provide solutions for different types of corneal blindness”, explains Laura Koivusalo, co-founder and CEO of StemSight.
StemSight will represent Finland in the New Nordics Grand Final during the SLUSH week this November going up against startups from Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and the Baltics to become the New Nordic Grand Champion 2022. All regional winners will be invited to join the Silicon Vikings for a bootcamp trip to Silicon Valley in 2023. Also meetings will be set up with investors from all the countries that took part in the competition.
The New Nordics Pitch Competition is a pan-Nordic and Baltic pitch competition that gathers the best startups/scaleups of the New Nordics. The winners have been selected based on the idea, ability to scale, business plan, traction, competitive advantage, market needs, presentation, team, and the ability to solve real world problems.
About the jury
Ville Heikkinen
Partner at Butterfly Ventures
Hands-on transaction and fund management specialist with 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship, VC financing, M&A and technology management, L.LM and M.Sc. in Economics, Partner of Butterfly Ventures since 2014. His knowledge of all sorts of business related agreements is extraordinary and an enormous help to any startup. He’s social, has a great contact network and has an almost magical ability to connect the right people. In addition he’s a creative thinker, deep in the startup scene and truly fun to work with.
Timo Felin
Investment Director at Vendep Capital
Timo has a strong background in managing VC and corporate VC networks and deal flow from Finland. In addition, Timo has been a founding partner at Helsinki Ventures, an early stage venture development company and an accelerator focused on helping teams from former CIS-countries in developing their customers and entering the markets in the West. Timo is especially strong in getting companies ready for raising their A rounds.
About Silicon Vikings
Silicon Vikings is a 45,000+ network that connects Nordic and Baltic Innovation with Silicon Valley and vice versa. We are a non-profit organisation that has been headquartered in Silicon Valley since 1997 with nodes throughout the Nordic and Baltic region and we act as a bridge between regions. We organise approximately 20-25 events in the Bay Area each year in addition to cross-border events with our nodes and partners in the New Nordics to better connect the two regions. We organise networking events and pitching competitions in the Nordics/Baltics & in Silicon Valley. For more information visit www.siliconvikings.com/home
Media contact: Alexandra Santos, alexandra@platform6.fi, 040 824 36 35.
