We’ve been asked quite often how much SPARK alumni have raised private funding and R&D grants after their journey in the program? Or what kind of commercial deals they have made?

The answer is that we don’t know exactly. The fact is that when their journey ends at the program due they start operating and/or raise a relevant amount of angel or VC funding. Then we lose some of the visibility of what is going on with financing of the startups. And even if we know something in detail, it is up to the companies and other parties to disclose when appropriate.

But what is really cool, every once and while there is information which is publicly available.

For example, NADMED made a public release in August 22, 2024, that they have secured a €3.5 million funding for their entry into the U.S. and other international markets with their proprietary nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) measurement technology. On October 8th, MONCYTE Health, a startup focusing on diagnostics and developing proprietary technology to optimize treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease, announced that it has closed an EUR 1 million seed round to fund its go-to-market strategy. And on October 22, Avenue Biosciences, a transatlantic biotechnology company specializing in novel protein engineering technologies, announced the successful closing of their $2.5M seed financing round.

The same situation is with different contracts and other business activities related to alumni companies. For example, on September 18, MoniCardi and Suunto announced their partnership regarding that Suunto will utilize MoniCardi’s computational algorithms in their consumer products. The first published product is the Suunto ZoneSense technology – a pioneering advancement in endurance training. ZoneSense utilizes novel features in heart rate variability (HRV) to accurately detect the intensity of exercise sessions, providing athletes real-time insights into their training.

All these examples are telling that a lot is happening in Finnish health tech and life science business ecosystem. All these companies are spinouts from Finnish universities and hospitals. We, at SPARK Finland, are proud and excited that scientists, students and health care professionals that have been participating in our program, have found their way in increasing maturity of their ideas towards practical and value creating solutions and businesses.

The best way to find out what is happening to those alumni (companies and licensing cases) is to go and check from our website section PROJECTS and from there ALUMNI. You can find there what kind of projects have turned into alumni companies, licensing cases and/or new products to research institutions. You can then start following those on LinkedIn and on their websites. And not only those which were used here as examples… But, you should not only follow the alumni; project teams are developing constantly really cool solutions and new startups are bubbling under.

So… Don’t miss your chance. Stay tuned!