Finland in 2026: a €10B decacorn, two new unicorns and a quantum IPO

The largest VC rounds are getting bigger

Finland is on course for roughly the same number of venture rounds as in 2025. What has changed is the size of the biggest ones. ICEYE’s €1B Series F alone accounts for 62% of this year’s total. Without it, Finnish startups have raised $724M so far. The other large rounds include a €163M Series B for Verda and two growth rounds for IQM. Dealroom classifies a company as deep tech when its technology needs years of development and large amounts of capital before it reaches the market, which is what rounds of this size pay for. Valuations tell the same story. Finland has now produced 13 unicorns: companies headquartered in the country that have reached a $1B valuation or exited for $1B or more. Three of them, Supercell, ŌURA and ICEYE, have been valued at $10B or more. Four of the 13 have since been acquired (Supercell, Small Giant Games, Wolt, Rovio) and IQM is listed.

Deep tech is driving investment

Of Finland’s 110 venture rounds this year, 33 went to companies Dealroom classifies as deep tech. Those rounds account for 74% of the money raised, or 33% if ICEYE’s round is left out. Seven of the rounds went to quantum technology companies, including IQM’s two growth rounds, Algorithmiq’s €18M Series B and Qutwo’s $25M.

In AI infrastructure, Verda raised €213M of equity in 2026 to add GPU capacity in Finnish data centres, which it says benefit from renewable power and a climate that lowers cooling costs. In defence, SensoFusion, whose Airfence system detects unauthorised drones and takes control of them, raised a €45M Series B in January, and Kelluu, which builds autonomous surveillance airships, raised a €15M Series A in April led by the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF). Steady Energy, a VTT spinout building a heat-only small modular reactor for district heating, agreed a convertible loan of up to €40M with the European Investment Bank in September, ahead of a planned listing in Helsinki.

Aalto University’s spinouts

Three of the companies in this story started as research at Aalto University in Espoo. ICEYE was spun out in 2015 and IQM in 2018, together with VTT, Finland’s state research centre. Bluefors came out of the Low Temperature Laboratory in 2008, two years before Helsinki University of Technology merged with two other schools to form Aalto. Steady Energy and Granarium Technologies, both of which raised money this year, are VTT spinouts. Dealroom records 1,253 founders who studied at Aalto, and 241 university spinouts across Finland.

How Finland compares with 13 European countries

In 2025 Finland raised $395 of venture capital per person: more than Sweden ($347), Denmark ($305) or Norway ($140). Only Switzerland ($480) and the United Kingdom ($400) raised more per person. Finland ranks seventh of the 14 on unicorns per million people, with 2.3. The top three are Switzerland (4.8), Sweden (4.5) and Ireland (4.3). Among the Nordic countries, Finland is behind Sweden and Denmark (2.5) and ahead of Norway (2.0). For a country of 5.6 million, Finland raises as much venture capital per person as much larger European markets, and five of its 13 unicorns have arrived since 2025.

Across Europe, 57 companies reached a $1B valuation or exit between January and 30 September 2026, compared with 61 in the whole of 2025 and 30 in 2024. Bluefors and Verda are the two from Finland this year.

What this means

Finland’s strong 2026 comes from a handful of companies reaching scale at the same time. ICEYE, IQM, Bluefors and Verda build hardware and computing infrastructure that took years to bring to market, and three of the four started as research at Aalto University. Between July and September they produced a €1B round, a Nasdaq listing and two new $1B valuations. Finland’s unicorn count now stands at 13, up from eight at the end of 2024. Deep tech companies received 74% of this year’s venture capital, most of it in a single round.