For Finnish startup Taito.ai, it all started at Slush 2023 when entrepreneur Kristo Ovaska told his former teammate Juho Eräste that he was thinking of starting a company focusing on employee performance management, a pain point they had experienced at their previous company, Smartly.io. “Let’s do it,” was the conclusion. During the event, Ovaska also caught up with Accel partner Sonali de Rycker — more on this later.
Fast forward 365 days and Ovaska was back at Slush, this time on stage, being interviewed about his first year as Taito.ai’s founder — and what a year.
On the first day of Slush, Taito.ai announced that it had raised a €2.5 million seed funding round led by Accel — more precisely, by de Rycker, who Ovaska said regretted not investing in Smartly. Presumably, these feelings only grew when Providence Equity Partners acquired a majority stake of the adtech startup for €200 million in 2019.
However, Accel previously made a very successful investment into a Finnish company: Supercell whose CEO Ilkka Paananen now invested in Taito’s seed round alongside Wolt CEO and former Slush CEO Miki Kuusi, as well as other founders such as Eléonore Crespo (Pigment) and Robert Gentz (Zalando).
Becoming Accel’s second investment in Finland means Taito.ai has big shoes to fill, but de Rycker said in a statement that she and her team were “inspired by Kristo’s strong track record of building enduring, valuable businesses and his motivation to change the status quo given his first-hand experience in leading large teams.“
Improving employee performance management with AI
Eräste and Ovaska both share the motivation to improve employee performance management, but might not have teamed up if it weren’t for that chance meeting at Slush 2023 after losing touch for a couple of years. This was “true Slush magic happening,” Ovaska said. They were soon joined by their former Smartly pal Mikko Kivelä, who became Taito’s third co-founder and its chief product officer.
Through customer interviews, the trio soon found out that many other companies experienced the pain point that they had as Smartly was scaling. “Taito.ai’s platform is one we wish we’d had at Smartly.io — a scalable, AI-powered solution that enables continuous feedback and coaching,” Ovaska said in a statement.
Taito, whose name translates to “skill” in Finnish, is now in close beta with clients including Supermetrics, another Finnish rising star, and plans a public launch in 2025.
Watch Taito.ai CEO Kristo Ovaska interviewed on the Builder Stage at Slush 2024 on his first 365 days as a founder by none other than Slush CEO Aino Bergius:
