It’s great news for the Finnish tech scene and its deep-tech hub, Oulu, where it’s quite possible we first met the founders in a hole in the ice at Polar Bear Pitching 2014. At that classic “this could only happen in Finland” pitching event, founders pitched their startups for as long as they could stay the freezing water to a VC and media panel standing on the ice, including Inventure’s own Sami Lampinen.
But that was nearly a decade ago. Since then, Haltian’s device and IoT skills allow them to power custom solutions for a fantastic list customers they can name, and even bigger names they can’t. Their end-to-end IoT tech powers Finland’s postal lockers, allowing you to pick up your packages with a code. Their Empathic Building technology allows employees to thrive in a desk sharing office as well as office managers to efficiently optimize in the post-COVID world by tracking deck usage, monitor air quality and people counting. Haltian’s small, wireless devices also are perfect fits for asset tracking.
How did Haltian get here? Here’s our conversation with Inventure’s Sami Lampinen and Haltian Cofounder and CEO, Pasi Leipälä.
Meeting Haltian
Sami Lampinen, Partner at Inventure: We love deep technology and crazy entrepreneurs coming from up north. And of course, I remember very well visiting Polar Bear Pitching week meeting Haltian at some activities in Oulu.
Haltian has been running for a decade now, right? So we certainly met Pasi and Ville and other people probably already 8 or 9 years ago. And then we did the first investment five years ago.
Pasi Leipälä, Cofounder and CEO of Haltian: Yeah, it was the end of 2018 when we did the first investment — I just checked the press release. We had been meeting each other for a few years but we actually didn’t actually ask for an investment. But then when we realized that we wanted to go a bit bigger with our funding round, I remember calling Sami from the car to say we are looking for ‘some millions’ in a funding round, and we agreed to have a meeting in Helsinki. So when the funding round was discussed, it had been warmed up.
When you invested we have been just getting the first deals with Lindström with their paper tower dispenser. So that was the first case and we started to roll out that in early 2019. This large scale IOT deployment kind of started exactly when Inventure started to invest in us.
After that, we started to get customers like Tieto Empathic Building [solution for office resource monitoring and desk usage, allowing for a smooth transition to shared desks] — which we later acquired. And then the Finnish post office, Posti, and then started the rollout with international customers like EY, CBRE and last year, Prologis.
But before the investment, we had already made the Thingsee One IoT developer device and then the Snowfox Trackerphone. And based on those learnings, we found out that what is really needed in the IoT market: precise measurement with low cost and high scalability and flexibility.
We created the Thingsee platform, which utilized a combination of a couple of wireless connectivities, and then found out it can be very easily modified to multiple use cases.
Growing nearly 50% per year over the last 3 years
Sami: We had always been super convinced on the level of the technology and your clearly unique engineering stack. But earlier I think we were still a little bit hesitant on some of the consumer products.
But we really believed that industrial IoT will take off across multiple sectors. We never saw Haltian as a one-vertical “we only go into the hospitality sector” company, although we had some big opportunities with ISS, Lindström, and a few others. We saw that there is tremendous demand across many industries for digitalizing data capture and really getting deeper into the value chain and and operations across several sectors.
Pasi: Right. Exactly. And that has been a strength also for Haltian. For example in the cleaning sector — during the pandemic they went totally dead for one and a half years, but since our technology is fit for many kinds of buildings: like offices and warehouses we were keeping up and going forward.
Sami: …And to that point it’s been a quite amazing success that during the corona times, most of the growth has come from international clients.
Pasi: Yeah– since 2019 we have been growing on average almost 50% per year. So we have been growing from €6 million to €20 million level, and we are targeting our 30% growth per year from now on. Which are nice numbers for a company with hardware element in our business.
Sami: Consider that with no travels taking place over two years. So it’s been a remarkable story if you look at that from today’s point of view.
From paper towel sensors to incredibly secure IoT solutions
Sami: …But looking into why, Haltian is clearly a proven vendor in extremely demanding data, data and IOT applications. And I believe the real success factor is that Haltian doesn’t just put discrete sensors together. But you are the one supplier for a large scale deployments on a scalable way.
And this is relevant for us, because many venture capitalists are hesitant to invest in hardware because anyone can buy batteries, antennas, all kinds of devices from here and there. But building a bulletproof, fault tolerant, 100% secure system from the semiconductor up to the dashboard is something that you guys can do… but not everyone.
Pasi: That’s the reason we have been able to create these systems– because we are going to end to end design and control the whole stack. So, for example of a secure and reliable system, as a customer we have Posti Smart Lockers. It’s very important to the Finnish public that the post office is secure and takes care of their deliveries!
And then the Haltian solutions are used in many of the biggest offices with the highest security requirements. For example, some banks in USA are using Haltian, along many others high profile cases. And actually last week we achieved this ISO 27001 standard on the security. So that’s one of the proof points we are operating top notch also in security point of view.
On Haltian’s new €22 million investment
Sami: So what’s next?
Pasi: With the new funding we are continuing to expand internationally and acquire more customers. We have now recently established sites in the Netherlands and also in California, and we are expanding those to serve our current customers and expand our customer base. We’ll also have two major new product launches during this year. There are a few well-funded competitors in this space, so this investment enables us to play in the Champions League globally.
I just read the 2018 press release when Inventure invested, and it says herethat Inventure believes that we will be globally remarkable IoT company. And that’s where we are already are in some criteria!
We’re plugging into three trends. First it’s sustainability in buildings. 29% of the global emissions are related to operating buildings, and then about 10% more is related to the construction phase. So about 39% of order emissions is coming from the building industry. We have great possibilities to reduce the emissions by measuring how the buildings are used and by optimizing the space usage. With Haltian you can make them more energy efficient.
The second remarkable trend is remote monitoring items in warehouses and others buildings — for example monitoring buildings technical premises and bringing visibility to supply chain to reduce needed manual work and travels.
Finally there is the big change in working culture after the pandemic. We support the change where people are now working in a hybrid working mode in desk sharing office or remotely, helping office workers daily life. So from desk sharing, to assets, to buildings, we are tapping all of those.
Those are the three trends we see and we are sure have the right offering for them. By increasing the efficiency in companies everyday operations and providing clear savings for them, we’ll continue to grow!
