Midinvest Management is a Finnish private equity firm specialized in ownership arrangements for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Midinvest Management

Business Finland (formerly Tekes) is a Finnish funding agency specialized in research communities, industry, and service sectors. Business Finland promotes a broad-based view on innovation: besides funding technological breakthroughs, Tekes emphasizes the significance of service-related, design, business, and social innovations. The company does not derive any financial profit from its activities, nor claim any intellectual proprietary rights.

Business Finland

Inventure is a venture fund that specializes in helping its portfolio companies with talent and expansion. Since 2005, the team has been in venture with over 70 companies ranging from deep tech to consumer internet brands, including Wolt, Detectify, Blueprint Genetics, Swappie, and Insurello. With its €230 million assets under management, Inventure focuses on Seed and Series A investments across Nordics and Baltics, with offices in Helsinki and Stockholm.

Inventure

Forestay Capital is dedicated to investing in the tech sector and reflects Waypoint’s focus on innovative, forward-looking industries in which it can leverage its entrepreneurial heritage and long-track record in helping businesses to realize their ambitions for growth. It is passionate about technologies that transform conventional models with software and data to make an impact on business, practices, and people. It invests in revenue-generating technology companies in Europe, Israel, and in the US, and favors software and data-driven businesses that challenge established models. Forestay Capital was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Geneve, Switzerland.

Forestay Capital

Howspace

Howspace is a digital facilitation platform that helps you deliver powerful organizational change initiatives, learning programs, and workshops. Howspace adapts to your way of working. You can build the workspaces to match your tried and tested processes. Edit the looks of your workspace, manage the participants access levels, move content around, and add new pages as you go along.

Howspace is a digital collaboration platform that enables organizations to create virtual workspaces for managing various processes, initiatives, and development programs.&nbsp;

The tools that power remote work are define the next generation of enterprise software.

Remote Work Tools

Howspace CEO: Old-school management is in crisis – all organizations require in-house facilitators to enable transformation

Howspace is a digital collaboration platform that enables organizations to create virtual workspaces for managing various processes, initiatives, and development programs.&nbsp;The core offering of Howspace is an AI-powered online platform where users can build noiseless and aim-oriented workspaces tailored to specific goals or tasks. These workspaces allow participants to focus solely on the matter at hand without distractions. Workspace managers can create different pages, categorize them, separate users into groups, and utilize drag-and-drop features to add widgets like chat, meeting bookings, polls, videos, and more. The platform is highly user-friendly, enabling even non-technical users to build customized experiences.Howspace's technology incorporates AI capabilities that aid in sense-making and decision-making. Features like AI Summaries, Word Clouds, Theme Clustering, and Sentiment Analysis help analyze discussions, identify key topics, and understand participant sentiments, supporting data-driven decision-making.Key customers and partnershipsAs of June 2024, the company has a network of more than 180 partner organizations across almost 35 countries.Funding and financialsIn <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/953">May 2021</a>, the company raised EUR 12 million (approximately USD 15 million) in a Series A funding round led by Forestay Capital and Inventure. The fresh funds were funneled toward its expansion efforts in North America and Central Europe. This includes scaling its core business and hiring new talent.&nbsp;

Hive is a productivity platform for project management and collaboration. The platform provides automated workflows, project planning layouts, and action templates to assign and keep track of project tasks. Hive focuses on improving task execution with instant feedback cycles for editing and approvals. Additional features include note taking (Hive Note), instant messaging, online meetings, and file sharing.Hive offers a variety of ways for teams to organize their projects, including Gantt charts, Kanban boards, tables, and calendars, with updates made in one view automatically reflected in all others. The platform allows team members to create action cards with files, sub-actions, dependencies, and comments to stay on top of their objectives, and have access to a personal to-do list that compiles all assigned tasks from all projects. Managers can use Hive to assign approvals, share proofs, provide feedback, and collect project forms from clients and customers. Hive also uses AI and machine learning to provide insights on team productivity and identify potential risks, and to optimize resource allocation and client billing.Key customers and partnershipsThe company’s customer base includes Google, Toyota, Comcast, and Starbucks. Hive offers integrations with over 1,000 SaaS platforms, including Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and Smartsheet, allowing users to import tasks from these platforms.Funding and financialsIn <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/5208">August 2021</a>, Hive raised USD 10 million in a funding round led by Rembrandt Venture Partners with participation from Zoom, and existing investors Tribeca Venture Partners and Angelpad. Hive is one of the first startups to receive an investment from Zoom’s “Zoom Apps Fund” (a USD 100 million global venture fund). The fresh funds were allocated toward platform development.&nbsp;

Hive

Grain’s software allows users to record, highlight, transcribe, and share online meeting content from tools such as Zoom in an effective manner. It automatically records and transcribes meetings, allowing users to create shareable video clips from highlighted transcript sections. Grain leverages AI to generate customizable meeting notes and answer questions about the transcript. It supports coaching and collaboration through comments and training content creation. The platform offers deal analytics and insights, tracking key account activities and integrating with tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, and Slack. &nbsp;The company’s products focus on distributed teams, sales, product and user research, and hiring teams.In April 2022, the company acquired Ping Pong, a video messaging platform.Funding and financialsIn <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9759">April 2022</a>, Grain raised USD 16 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global Management. The funds were raised to expand operations and develop its ​​video meeting system of record for content, which allows employees to collaborate around insights, topics, relationships, or teams.

Grain

Air is a creative operations platform designed for creative teams to streamline their workflows and collaborate more effectively. It offers a comprehensive solution that goes beyond basic cloud storage systems, catering specifically to the needs of the creative process. Air allows users to collect content, approve assets, share versions for feedback, and organize their work seamlessly, eliminating the need for additional organizational efforts.Air provides a centralized hub for content collaboration, approval, and versioning. Air's technology streamlines various aspects of the creative workflow, including content collection, asset approval, version control, and feedback sharing. Unlike traditional cloud storage solutions, Air's platform is tailored to the specific requirements of creative teams, enabling them to work more efficiently and effectively.Key customers and PartnershipsThe company’s customer base includes notable firms such as Native, Together, Spindrift, and Univision.&nbsp;Funding and financialsIn <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8139">January 2022</a>, Air raised USD 10 million in an “Operator Round” led by Headline with participation from Tiger Global, Lere Hippeau, and 50+ strategic founders and marketing executives including Peter Rahal (Co-Founder, RXBAR), Kipp Bodnar (CMO, HubSpot), and Joe Thomas (CEO, Loom), valuing the company at USD 110 million. The funds were used to accelerate Air’s go-to-market activities and growth.

Acapela was co-founded by Roland Grenke, founder of Dubsmash, a video sharing social media app. Acapela facilitates online meetings without real-time interaction between participants; instead, members contribute to meetings over time.Acapela provides voice and video messages integrated with popular productivity tools such as Asana, Google Workspace, Notion, and Atlassian. Additionally, meetings will generate tasks and meeting summaries automatically. The company identified distributed tech teams as its initial target segment and plans to shift focus toward small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and larger enterprises eventually. The product is currently in invite-only beta.In October 2020, the company exited stealth mode with a USD 3 million seed funding round led by Visionaries Club. The round included Entrepreneur First and other notable individual investors, such as Christian Reber (founder of presentation software Pitch) and Taavet Hinrikus (founder of online money transfer service TransferWise).

Acapela

iObeya is a cloud-based enterprise visual management platform that enables organizations to digitize their Lean, Agile, and Industry 4.0 practices. The platform provides virtual "Oobeyas" (Japanese for "big room"), which are digital collaborative workspaces where teams can align, synchronize, and visualize their work using digital boards, sticky notes, and other visual tools. iObeya's platform allows teams to recreate the in-person experience of paper-based visual management practices with real-time collaboration, enhancing team efficiency, creativity, and problem-solving.iObeya's technology supports a wide range of enterprise use cases, including industrial product lifecycle management, manufacturing operational excellence, product development, and continuous improvement for business performance and agility. It integrates with various systems like ERP, MES, BI, and Application lifecycle Management (ALM) tools such as Atlassian Jira and Microsoft Azure DevOps Server.Key customers and partnershipsiObeya's customer base includes global enterprises such as Airbus, Thales, Volvo, Philips, Cartier, Axa, Eli Lilly and Company, Western Digital, General Electric, Kimberly-Clark, Danaher, and Sanofi.Funding and FinancialsIn July 2020, iObeya raised USD 17 million in a series A funding round led by Red River West with participation from Atlantic Bridge Capital and Fortino Capital Partners. The funds were allocated to develop its platform further and accelerate the company’s expansion in the US.

iObeya

Platforms that provide virtual workspaces using spatial technology to combine a variety of productivity and collaboration tools in a single space.

Platforms that provide standalone presentation software, prototyping and web development software, templates, and design workspaces.

Platforms that facilitate task delegation and tracking with board, timeline, and kanban style views.

Platforms that provide standalone video communication tools and complementary products such as interactive interfaces, presentation features, and transcription software.

Platforms that offer chat and email-based collaborative tools.

Solutions in this industry hub are predominantly offered under a B2B SaaS model

Some solutions in the virtual office and video conferencing segments are based on AR/VR

Facilitates hybrid workforces by offering tools for employees to collaborate regardless of location

Meeting transcription and note-taking apps, design, and project management tools use AI/ML for product development

Howspace

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