The Startup Sauna has just finished touring Finland, finding two promising teams in the process to participate in its seed accelerator program. The second leg of the program starts will take place this week in Russia, from the 4-6th of April. This is the first time a Nordic accelerator makes an appearance in the country! We have received 80 applications from teams from St-Petersburg and Moscow.

“In our 2 previous programs, we have had 2 Russians teams participating” says Juha Ruohonen, the head coach of the Startup Sauna. “The first team, called Videolla, would drive almost daily from St Petersburg to Helsinki to participate.”

The second team, Titan BGA, was from Murmansk in Northern Russia. They moved to Finland during the duration of the program. We believe Russian teams can greatly benefit from experience in Finland: they can learn and receive feedback from our coaches, all of which have experience abroad. In addition, setting up and running a company in EU is easier and enables easier access to the Western markets.

The coaches who will be travelling are Juha Ruohonen (head coach), Pekka Roine (advisor to the Aalto Venture Garage), Micki Honkavaara (Senior Director at Nvidia) and Ville ‘Wili’ Miettinen (CEO at Microtask).

We will hold our kick-off event in St Petersburg on April 4th, with the help of local accelerator Ingria Technopark. We’ll be streaming live video from the event ( UTC/GMT +3 hours).

Next is Moscow, on April 6th, in collaboration with the Higher School of Economics of Moscow.

Out of 80 applications received, 12 teams from each city  were selected. They will do a 3 minute pitch and have one-on-one meetings with each coach. The best teams will be selected and invited to the Startup Sauna Intensive program at the Aalto Venture Garage in Helsinki.

Once our Russian adventures are over, we’ll be headed to the country of Abba and Ikea (that’s Sweden), on April 8th!