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This page is a guide to how Finnish B2B centaurs have been built from idea to scale. It is a cross-company synthesis: the goal is to give you a model of the journey, not to list everything every company did.
Everything here is synthesised from interviews with the founders of M-Files, Aiven, AlphaSense, RELEX Solutions, Smartly, ICEYE, Epassi, and Framery.
How to use this page: Read it once, from top to bottom, to get the model. After that, treat it as a reference:
For individual company playbooks, check out the pages below. 👇 These include the in-depth story of each company we interviewed.
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How to choose a market that plays into your strengths, which also has enough growth potential.
Across very different categories (infrastructure, payments, retail optimisation, physical products, deep technology), the early-stage decision-making follows a similar logic. These companies began by identifying a specific, unfair starting position, then choosing an arena where that advantage could compound into a global business.
That unfair starting position usually came from one (or more) of the following:
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Proximity to a real workflow pain (often from doing the work themselves)
Founders started from problems they had lived inside: repeating the same operational work, seeing where it breaks, and deciding the scalable answer is a product or service rather than more manual effort.
A structural reason incumbents cannot move fast
Some wedges were not about incremental user experience improvements. They were created by incentives where the “obvious upgrade” would force incumbents to disrupt their own economics, operating model, or product architecture. That delay creates room for a new entrant.
Being early to a platform or market shift from the inside
In other cases, the wedge came from being close to a change in the ecosystem (a distribution channel, a platform capability, or a stack shift). Timing matters because it creates a window where customers feel urgency, but the “default” solution does not exist yet.
A clear stance on what the company will not become
Especially in infrastructure and software, founders framed the arena choice as avoiding “feature status” inside a larger platform. The wedge must have a path to standing as a company, not just a plugin.
Global repeatability as a starting constraint
“Global” shows up early as a design constraint: either because the customer base is inherently international, or because the Finnish market is not representative enough to build the company you want to become.
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