Founding Design Engineer

Four of the current hottest early-stage Nordic fintechs tell Tech.eu their 2025 plans, fears, and changes they would like to see in the startup ecosystem. Tech.eu spoke to VCs, and experts in the region to tell us their nominations for the hottest early-stage fintechs across the Nordics right now.Jacob Houlberg, co-founder, Signal, an intelligence platform for data-driven investors, said:"Throughout 2024, Nordic fintechs have seen a surge in early-stage funding activity, with seed and Series A rounds drawing increased attention, with former VC backed operators and second time founders heading some of the most hyped cases."The four that came out on top, according to our experts, were Oslo-based SaaS subscription startup Cardboard; Copenhagen-based automated ledger startup Light; Helsinki-based B2B SaaS startup Inven and Stockholm-based bank-to bank payments fintech Atlar.On the agendaSo, first up, what is on their agenda for 2025? Expansion, expansion, expansion in short. Jonathan Sanders, founder and CEO Light, says its focus is on expanding its commercial efforts and scaling the Light team globally.Likewise, Vidhi Kumar, co-founder and CGO, Cardboard, says its focus is on growing its existing market share as well as entering new European territories this year.Cut from the same cloth is Atlar, whose marketing director Louis Emmerson, said its 2025 plans are to grow its bank integrations and expand its products set with more tools to help businesses manage money. Not to be outdone, Niilo Pirttijärvi, CEO & co-founder, Inven, says its 2025 goal is to expand into new markets and gobble up more customers.Biggest fear for 2025And what are the biggest fears of our quartet of startups for 2025? For Sanders, Light’s biggest challenge is being able to grow the team while maintaining the “speed and quality our customers expect”.Meanwhile, economic fears are on the radar of the other three. Kumar says Cardboard is cautious about how the broader European economic outlook might impact future fundraising and client acquisitions.Emmerson cites economic uncertainty as something that can make it harder for startups to “to move fast and focus on building” while Pirttijärvi cites economic concerns impacting the stability of the financial sector on its client growth.What is to change?And finally, we asked our startups what one change they would like to see in the startup ecosystem. Kumar says Cardboard, which is Norway-headquartered and is not part of the EU, would like to see the government adopt more startup-friendly policies.He said:As a Norway-based company, we’ve faced challenges due to proposed exit taxes and the taxation of working capital

Oslo-based startup Cardboard has secured a seed investment of €1.9M to assist management of SaaS subscriptions across Europe.