Insights

In late spring 2022, the European Commission presented the REPowerEU to accelerate clean energy transition and increase Europe’s strategic autonomy in energy as a response for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In short, the plan proposes actions to save energy, produce European clean energy and diversify EU’s energy supplies. With Member States having agreed on their position, the plan takes a major step forward towards its approval and implementation.

Evolver Fund I has on 30 September 2022 acquired a controlling interest in Finnish innovation funding consultancy Spinverse Oy. Evolver joins Spinverse as growth partner and will continue to pursue international growth together with Spinverse management and personnel. Founder Pekka Koponen and CEO Laura Koponen remain significant shareholders, while Laura Koponen continues to lead the company as CEO and Pekka Koponen takes up the position as Vice-Chair. The management team together with senior personnel also make equity investments in the company. Spinverse is the Fund’s fifth investment. 

Spinverse team recently got together to meet up at the office for an afterwork get-together. There were quite a few reasons to celebrate, but one of them was to raise a toast to our Bioeconomy team leader and Director Kaisu Leppänen, who reached a milestone of 10 years with Spinverse this autumn.

AGRIVI is an AgriTech company from Croatia, whose approach to solving the global food problem is through the digitalization of agriculture. The company was recently awarded by the European Innovation Council (EIC) with a grant of 1.15 M€, which will help them build an AI-driven agronomic adviser to support farms in meeting the EU compliance requirements for crop protection and food safety. Spinverse funding experts successfully supported the company in the highly competitive funding application process.

Make sure that your business model is as sharp as business model as possible by keeping it up-to-date and relevant. "We are living in very changeable times, and a regular review of business models is perhaps more important than ever," says Jonas Norrman, business model expert and Change Manager at IMCG, says.    

In response to an increased need for project financing know-how required by our industry clients and the public funding programs, Spinverse has set up a new Industrial investments team led by Jani Peurakoski. The team consists of five professionals with diverse competences to serve the industry clients seeking to implement and grow their industrial projects. The newly established team is capable of supporting customers across different financing instruments including investment grants and loans e.g. from Innovation Fund, export credit agencies or multilateral finance institutions such as European Investment Bank and Nordic Investment Bank.

September started by celebrating our inspirational colleagues. Warmest congratulations to our colleagues for their well-deserved promotions.

CH-Bioforce is a Finnish start-up known for one of the world's leading technologies to gently extract all the main components of biomass in one process. As the end result are pure biomaterials that provide new alternatives as sustainable feedstocks for industries developing for example chemical, textile and packaging applications. In summer 2022 CH-Bioforce secured a significant funding decision of up to 15 M€ from the EIC Accelerator to build a biomass processing plant in Raisio in 2024. Spinverse supported the company in their successful funding application process.

August at Spinverse was off to a great start by welcoming new colleagues to the team. Happy to introduce Panos Chronis, Simona Dell’Angelo and Laura Hänninen who will provide support to our clients in the health sector and ICT & electronics. We are also extending our warm welcome to Rahul Ashok and Samuel Nash who joined the Bioeconomy team and the Defence & Security team, respectively.

Finnish innovation consulting company Spinverse Oy and Impact Management Consulting Group International AB (IMCG) from Sweden have today announced the merging of their operational activities. Joining forces with IMCG enables Spinverse to further strengthen their presence in the Nordics and beyond to help clients in building sustainable businesses for a better Europe. At the same time, the company will have almost 100 employees.