Paramount Year of Craft

"Paramount year of craft."

That's how we kicked things off at Aalto Entrepreneurship Society. It began with the Computer Vision Hackathon, pulling together some of the best technical people in Finland. 48 hours, €10,000 cash prize, and the projects that came out honestly set a high bar for everything after. Same day, we ran Vaalilöylyt with MIMIR, basically got all the major political parties in a room to talk startups and innovation policy.

Few months later we were in Japan looking into their ecosystem. The way they think about robotics and hardware, plus their whole long-term approach — it definitely shifted how we thought about what's possible. Also got to rep Aaltoes at one of the bigger global tech conferences.

Then we hosted Beijing's mayor at Startup Sauna. Yeah, that got some reactions. "Oh, should we do this?". Yes! It led to Silkway — essentially a Finland-China bridge for startups. Flew to Beijing, opened some doors for Finnish companies, and they ended up gifting us a humanoid robot. Pretty amazing, really amazing actually.

Ignite Summer Accelerator ran again and proved why early experimentation works. Some teams got funded, but more importantly people got to test if this is actually what they want to do. That low-stakes exploration phase is kind of underrated.

Robotics Nation became real this fall. Brought hands-on robotics to Finnish high schools, ran multiple hackathons, started building out a Physical AI Lab. Every school should have a robotics program. Every kid who wants to build should be able to.

End of year we hit Boston, New York, SF. The density of labs and founders there was on another level. Got support from Guillermo Rauch at Vercel for our lab, connected with some great people including Y Combinator and Aaltoes alumni.

Looking back — it was a year of building infrastructure, making unexpected connections, and pushing what Finland can do in robotics and AI. Lot more happened, these were the big ones. Really big year.