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This page is about one specific thing: how Finnish centaurs actually get built.
By “centaur,” we mean a startup that grows from 0 to €100M+ in annual recurring revenue (ARR). To reach centaur status, a company doesn’t necessarily have to be a unicorn, but will need to be a durable business with serious revenue underneath.
To understand how this happens in practice, we sat down with 21 founders from 15 different Finnish B2B and B2C centaurs. Our goal was to understand exactly how they built their companies and what went into each step from idea to scale.
While there were many different opinions on how to build a centaur, one thing they all agreed on was that there are no silver bullets. As Miki Kuusi from Wolt put it, company building isn’t one magic trick; it’s “hundreds and hundreds of small things” that compound over the years. At the same time, these founders were not building side hustles as they were deliberately aiming for something big. This ambition was a defining factor on their journeys showing up in many of the choices they made along the way.
This page covers the overarching themes that apply to all companies we interviewed. For more specific learnings and to find out how they actually did what they did, make sure to check out the B2B and B2C pages linked below. Within those you’ll also be able to read a mini centaur playbook on each of the companies we interviewed!
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When we asked each founder to name the top three things that helped them get from €0 to €100M+ in ARR, their answers sounded very different on the surface, but the same ingredients would reappear across industries and business models.
To sum it up, the most important factors were:
Team & culture
When mentioning team as one of their top 3, the main focus here was having a high bar for hiring, and a specific way of operating. They prioritised hiring exceptional operators, did not compromise on this when scaling, and optimised for learning speed and ownership. When it comes to building, team ultimately beats tools. Most companies have access to the same cloud and laptops, so the difference comes from the people you bring in, and what you reward in day-to-day work.
Market & timing
When it comes to market, most centaurs were built on top of a wave that was already forming. Not markets that were filled with incumbents but those where the way of doing things was clearly moving in a certain direction, and the potential for growth was global. Timing in this process was seen as partly down to luck, but also something you can influence by being close to the change, and staying alive long enough to catch it. One thing was clear that even world-class execution struggles if you’re pushing uphill in a stagnant market.
Customer & product
Deep customer understanding and being able to build a product often meant being obsessed with a specific customer and a concrete problem, and then iterating until the product clears a real bar. In games, this meant being audience-first and deeply understanding what makes players come back. In consumer products and operational businesses, it meant trust, quality, and getting the end-to-end experience right so the second purchase becomes natural. In B2B, it meant solving a painful recurring workflow well enough that customers would actually rely on it, and pull the product further into their organisation.
Execution & resilience
Reaching €100M+ ARR is a long road, and most of it is not glamorous. Resilience showed up as the one factor that matters across every stage, from €0 to €100M+. The practical version of this was discipline, which meant running experiments, being brutally honest about what works, and killing what does not move the needle. Many also emphasised tight financial and operational control as the company scales, because if you lose grip of quality, unit economics, or reliability, growth stops compounding and turns into firefighting.
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If you are missing one of these, everything else becomes harder.
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If you’re interested in checking out what each founder mentioned as part of their top 3, check out the toggle below!