Feedback from startup founders who have used HippoMeter
“It has been rewarding to see HippoMeter concretely indicate the progress we’ve made.”
Markus Silfverberg, Founder & CEO, Block Solutions
“HippoMeter prepares you for fund raising. The questions are spot-on. Practically all are asked by investors in DD at latest.”
Marcel van Heist, Founder & CEO, Spark
“Easy to use, interesting concept, makes you really think about things. Something you wish you had at the start of your journey.”
Vicente Calvo Alonso, Founder & CEO, Comptek Solutions
“HippoMeter provides an efficient learning journey to people with no business study background or startup experience. A 360-degree framework for what all it takes to create a healthy startup and to scale up.”
Hideaki Miyaji, PhD Student & Post-Quantum Cryptography Scholar, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University
“HippoMeter revealed and helped sort out differences in how we had interpreted our status and development needs.”
Tuomo Isokivijärvi, Co-Founder & CEO, StepOne Tech
“Having worked much remotely, due to the pandemic, HippoMeter helped us align our views and insights on all key scaleup issues before pitching for a next round of funding.”
Aija Pope, Co-Founder & CEO, TerraWaste
“HippoMeter provides a practical basis for shared views on future steps for the team and the board.”
Jouni Jääskeläinen, Founder & CEO, EPSE
“HippoMeter divides the scaleup challenge into 35 manageable sections, provides concrete scoring on each key asset, discloses blind spots, and helps align team on all the core issues. By means of in-depth and wisely selected questions, the team gets to unveil and understand numerous fresh angles of the business case logic, and approach them in the next phases of the innovation advancement.”
Wilhelm Hollerbach, Founder & CEO, IGNI Global Protection
“As a majority-owning entrepreneur it is really challenging to establish and communicate to investors the value of the assets your company owns. HippoMeter integrates the independent judgements of all those who know the assets best and produces transparent and tangible rating on them all. The internal value is in how you can quickly learn to what extent the key people are on the same page. In result, you have a to-do list to make sure everyone communicates similarly, not differently, to all key stakeholders.”
Marko Kauppinen, Founder & CEO, Health4Travel
Case Medified Solutions
“It pays off to build DD readiness from the beginning. This is our core message. The technical, legal, and commercial foundation of a startup must be rock-solid all the time. Even if business hasn’t taken off yet, it’s possible to systematically assess and improve investment readiness. HippoMeter played a truly significant role in this for us. It helped us learn already at get-go what all scaling up requires. A follow-up measurement revealed how we had improved, and which topics and issues should be focused on next.
According to a news headline on Medified’s trade sale, ‘again a company was sold to Sweden’, even if this was above all us wanting to enable sustainable growth for our technical solution as part of solving a big global problem – access to efficient mental health services. Thanks to HippoMeter we had already before pondered among co-founders which kind of ownership would yield the fastest growth instead of us only trying how far we could get on our own. Our decision to merge with Mindler was obvious partly because of this.”
Valtteri Korkiakoski, Founder & CEO of Medified Solutions, today Chief Product and Technology Officer of Mindler
The founder team of Medified Solutions were among the first users of HippoMeter prototype. This entrepreneurial growth story exemplifies the proof-of-concept on which Hippo Enabler Service was developed.
Case Medified Solutions
The founder team of Medified Solutions were among the first users of HippoMeter prototype. This entrepreneurial growth story exemplifies the proof-of-concept on which Hippo Enabler Service was developed. The story and the testimonials that follow also exemplify how HippoMeter helps Good People build Great Companies.
“It pays off to build DD readiness from the beginning. This is our core message. The technical, legal, and commercial foundation of a startup must be rock-solid all the time. Even if business hasn’t taken off yet, it’s possible to systematically assess and improve investment readiness. HippoMeter played a truly significant role in this for us. It helped us learn already at get-go what all scaling up requires. A follow-up measurement revealed how we had improved, and which topics and issues should be focused on next.
According to a news headline on Medified’s trade sale, ‘again a company was sold to Sweden’, even if this was above all us wanting to enable sustainable growth for our technical solution as part of solving a big global problem – access to efficient mental health services. Thanks to HippoMeter we had already before pondered among co-founders which kind of ownership would yield the fastest growth instead of us only trying how far we could get on our own. Our decision to merge with Mindler was obvious partly because of this.”
Valtteri Korkiakoski, Founder & CEO of Medified Solutions, today Chief Product and Technology Officer of Mindler
Feedback from enabler organisations who have used HippoMeter with a portfolio of startups
Draper Startup House Vietnam
“Business creation wisdom is traditionally hard-to-find, slow-to-emerge, exclusive, and expensive. The mission of Draper Startup House is to help One Million Entrepreneurs access it by 2030, and we actively search for new tools, methods, and approaches to get there.
Marko helped my team build Hatch Ventures in Vietnam in 2015-2018, and I’ve actively worked with him to test, probe, and pilot HippoMeter since my merger with DSH in 2021. I’m impressed how Marko and his team have managed to compress the hard-earned wisdom of many into an easy-to-use digital tool. Based on user feedback, HippoMeter makes powerful knowledge creation instantly available – and affordable – to everyone online.”
Aaron Everhart, Founding Country Lead
FCA Investments Ltd
“Entrepreneurs are expected to put up their best song and a dance when they pitch for funding. It’s the investors who are responsible to judge whether the stories hold water. In Due Diligence, sometimes later, it becomes painfully evident to both parties what all is missing. This doesn’t help if you want a thriving startup ecosystem or a healthy SME sector.
Based on pilots in Africa, in 2021-2023, HippoMeter enables founders to reliably audit and communicate their company’s investment readiness, scaleup assets, and resource needs. HippoMeter enables a fast lane to DD and helps allocate funding and support. We’ve invited Hippo Enabler along to develop with us new tools, methods, and approaches for Missing Middle Opportunity Facility. Starting with HippoMeter based MMOF Meter, our goal is to unlock the full potential of sustainable businesses and help SMEs, in the Global South, to grow into impactful and investable companies.”
Jukka-Pekka (Junnu) Kärkkäinen, CEO of FCA Investments Ltd
Business Tampere
“Business Tampere is the economic development agency of the Tampere region. With a population base close to half a million, this is the second biggest city region in Finland. In terms of innovation and industry, we are historically world class. The birth nest of Nokia, host of major global enterprises, and home of the most active startup community in Finland: Creators of globally leading solutions in, e.g., intelligent machines, imaging, circular economy, and creative industries.
For startups, we facilitate shared workspaces, product development, scaleup coaching, and investments. To grow and prosper, a startup needs to build a well-rounded team, crystallise value proposition, choose the right market, and raise sufficient funding. Founders can be coached to pitch to investors, but this goes in vain unless Due Diligence readiness is built systematically in parallel. We have actively scouted tools to this effect, both nationally and internationally, and pilot-used HippoMeter with the startups in our portfolio since July 2021.
Based on pilots in 2021-2023 led by our startup-to-scaleup experts Tero Kyckling and Tapio Siik, feedback from startups, and evidence over time, HippoMeter can radically improve efficiency in diagnosing scaleup readiness, resource needs, and improvements of ambitious startups. HippoMeter enables the shifting of resources from screening to value adding. Going forward, HippoMeter is a core tool in our startup-to-scaleup service offering.”
Harri Airaksinen, CEO of Business Tampere
www.businesstampere.com/business-environment/business-ecosystems/startup-tampere
