Howspace gears up international growth with 1.6 million euro bridge funding

The Finnish SaaS company Howspace gears up international growth with 1.6 million euro bridge funding. The sum is earmarked among others to develop dialogue-supporting AI solutions further, establishing in North-American headquarters in Toronto and accelerating growth in the Nordics. All investors from the seed round in 2017 are onboard with further investments.

Howspace is a dialogue-driven learning and organizational development platform which has around 200 000 active users. The clients span from consulting firms to enterprises and unions, as well as city administrations and governmental offices. The total bridge funding amount is over 1.6 million.

CEO Ilkka Mäkitalo has worked in the field of change consulting and organizational learning for over 20 years and is familiar with the challenges their clients face. “Change is happening all the time, and organizations experience an increased need to be able to co-create knowledge, engage employees, and co-operate digitally in meaningful ways. Howspace is aligned with all the megatrends changing the way we work and learn today. We are humbled about how well our product has been received in North-America. The demand is there, and these investments will help us answer it even more effectively in the U.S. and Canada markets.”

The equity investments come from a group of investors, who all participated in the seed round in 2017. On the new bridge funding round, there are Business Finland, Midinvest, Unifund, and ten business angels. Angel investors are well known as digital professionals. Among them Tomi Hilvo, Markko Vaarnas, and serial entrepreneurs Lennu Keinänen and Juha Harju.

“We’ve seen a great response from various client segments and keep discovering new use cases for the product. The company has found effective patterns to approach clients, and we can already see some network virality. That’s why we are happily investing in Howspace’s growth and believe that the timing is right to speed up the growth internationally, especially in Noth-America and Canada” comments board member and investor Jukka-Pekka Nikula from Midinvest.

“Our very dedicated team has worked hard to develop a world-class facilitation product and brand. Getting this additional funding from our current investors supports the acknowledgment that we’ve been doing things right. The amount of clients is growing both in Finland and internationally. At the same time, we’re constantly developing the AI-powered features that set us apart from other tools now and in the future. We have the building blocks in place for international growth at scale”, Ilkka Mäkitalo summarizes.