Failup Ventures

The firm is run by a partnership of three operators. Jesse leads US operations from San Francisco, having previously served as a technical founder and led product development at Playtomic. In Helsinki, partners Oscar and Topias Soininen share decision-making responsibilities; Oscar brings institutional incubation experience, while Soininen manages a portfolio of over 30 startups and sits on multiple boards (per firm website, 2026).

Failup's sourcing leverages its dual-hemisphere structure and operator network. With partners on the ground in San Francisco and Helsinki, the firm taps into both the Nordic technical-engineering ecosystem and the US market for AI-native companies. The team's own startup backgrounds—specifically in SaaS, sports marketplaces, and product development—provide a proprietary filter for evaluating early-stage technical founders.

Yes. Failup explicitly structures its entire investment thesis around artificial intelligence, targeting three specific categories: AI agents that augment human productivity, infrastructure and data services that enable next-generation model development, and consumer applications that use AI to solve practical daily problems. Its public portfolio bears this out, with positions ranging from model-training data provider AfterQuery to AI hardware startup Zettascale.

Failup operates as a pre-seed and seed-stage investor and does not publicly disclose a formal co-investment program. Its portfolio construction suggests a willingness to invest alongside top-tier funds and corporate venture arms, as seen with portfolio company Paradigm, whose early adopters include EY and Cognition, and FounderNest, which counts Novo Nordisk and Roche as clients. Direct inquiries to the firm would clarify its posture on pro-rata rights and follow-on syndication.

Failup Ventures is not a family office. It is structured as a venture capital firm managing an early-stage fund, run by a partnership of three operators. It does not manage a single family's wealth or operate as a multi-family office; it deploys institutional and/or pooled capital into pre-seed and seed-stage startups in the US and Nordics.

Failup does not publish a formal exclusion list. However, its stated thesis is strictly confined to AI applications in productivity, infrastructure, and consumer tools. Sectors consistently absent from its public portfolio and thesis materials include traditional industrials outside of tech, hard manufacturing, natural resources, and non-AI-enabled biotech or pharmaceuticals.

Two of Failup's partners, Jesse and Topias Soininen, have direct ties to Playtomic through founding or scaling predecessor companies. Jesse was the technical founder of a SaaS management software and marketplace for racket sports that operated in the US and merged with the Spanish company Playtomic. At Playtomic, he led product development and was involved in M&A. Topias Soininen founded Playven, a sports-related SaaS company that was acquired by Playtomic.io. These exits form the operating track record behind the partnership.