Kiilto Ventures

Matti Rönkkö leads Kiilto Ventures as its head and managing director. He operates within the broader governance structure of Kiilto Group, where family board members Ville Solja (Vice Chair and Chief Business Development Officer) and Eeva Solja (Board Member) represent the fourth generation of the founding family. Investment decisions are made in close coordination with Kiilto's four business divisions to ensure strategic alignment.

Kiilto Ventures is a fully integrated corporate venture capital arm of Kiilto Group, a family-owned industrial chemicals and solutions provider. The venture unit scouts and invests in startups whose technologies can be commercially adopted across Kiilto's four operating areas: construction, industrial fastening and hygiene solutions, cleaning and hygiene, and consumer products. Unlike an independent fund, the venture arm can offer portfolio companies access to Kiilto's R&D infrastructure and distribution channels.

Kiilto Ventures focuses on early-stage companies, typically seed through Series A, where its corporate backing can materially accelerate technology validation and commercial scaling. The firm seeks meaningful minority stakes that give Kiilto a window into emerging materials science, circular-economy processes, and digital tools relevant to the built environment and industrial hygiene. Later-stage checks are considered when the strategic fit with Kiilto's core businesses is particularly strong.

The firm's investment thesis centers on the built environment and industrial sustainability. Priority sectors include novel construction materials, circular-economy and waste-stream valorization technologies, energy-efficient building systems, bio-based cleaning and hygiene solutions, and digital platforms that improve industrial workflow efficiency. The common thread across all investments is a credible pathway to deployment inside Kiilto's existing business lines.

Kiilto Ventures operates primarily as a direct investor, taking equity stakes in individual startups. There is no public evidence of the firm making fund commitments to external venture capital managers. Its relationship with the broader Nordic VC ecosystem takes the form of co-investment alongside specialized early-stage investors such as Nidoco, as observed in the Betolar position.

The structural difference is its corporate parentage. A typical independent Nordic VC fund must exit within a fund lifecycle and rely purely on financial returns. Kiilto Ventures can hold positions with a strategic time horizon and provide non-financial value that no independent fund can match — pilot projects inside Kiilto's factories, formulation expertise from its chemists, and a direct route to commercial offtake agreements. For startups in construction materials or industrial hygiene, that industrial backing is a differentiated form of syndication partner.

Kiilto is a fourth-generation family business owned by the Solja family. The wealth originates from a chemicals company founded in Finland that expanded organically from adhesives and industrial fastening solutions into hygiene products, cleaning chemicals, and consumer goods. Today the group operates across the Nordic region and the Baltics, with the founding family retaining full ownership and active board representation.