Maki.vc

Maki.vc

Maki.vc emerged from Helsinki's tight-knit startup ecosystem in 2017, co-founded by Pirkka Palomäki, Ilkka Kivimäki, and early Maki operator Paavo Räisänen. Palomäki had been Chairman of Slush, the Helsinki-born startup conference that became international, giving him and his partners a direct line to Northern Europe's most ambitious early-stage founders. The firm structured its first fund with the explicit backing of Tesi, the Finnish state-owned investment company, anchoring a vehicle that was, at the time, among the largest first-time VC raises in the country (per the firm). Maki.vc deploys into pre-seed and seed rounds, reserving capital for follow-on through Series A. The team concentrates on startups solving hard engineering problems — enterprise software, industrial technology, climate tech, and frontier sectors like space and quantum computing. Its portfolio reflects this technical bent. Confirmed positions include ICEYE, the Finnish satellite-imaging company that builds and operates its own synthetic aperture radar constellation (per Reuters, 2019), and IQM, the Helsinki-based quantum computing hardware company (per TechCrunch, 2020). Geographic focus is Northern Europe but stretches to other European hubs when founders fit the deep-tech mandate. Maki leans toward direct equity, occasionally taking board seats, and positions itself as a concentrated, high-conviction partner rather than a broad-index seed fund. By 2021, Maki had closed a €100 million second fund, again anchored by Tesi alongside other Nordic and European institutional investors (per the firm, 2021). The firm invested in companies like VTT-backed infinited Fiber Company, which turns textile waste into new fiber, and Varjo, the Helsinki-headquartered maker of ultra-high-resolution VR and XR headsets used in defense and enterprise simulation (per Varjo's public communications). Maki's team remains Helsinki-based, and the partnership is small enough that every portfolio interaction filters through a named partner — a structure that echoes the hands-on model of pre-2010 venture firms, applied to a thesis where technological risk, not market risk, dominates the underwriting. In early 2024, Maki.vc publicly disclosed the first close of its third fund, targeting €100 million with a final close expected later in the year (per Sifted, January 2024). Maki's structural distinction is its operator DNA embedded at the partner level and its proximity, via Slush's global network, to founders who often bypass traditional financing corridors. Rather than a multi-stage platform or a family-office hybrid, the firm stays deliberately narrow: an early-stage deep-tech vehicle run by people who have spent their careers inside the ecosystem they fund. That narrowness — single geography-adjacent, single stage, single conviction bracket — means Maki's performance hinges entirely on its ability to pick and support technical founders before institutional Series A investors arrive. It is a concentrated bet on Helsinki's continued output of hard-tech spinouts from Aalto University, VTT, and the surrounding defense-tech and quantum clusters.