Building for The Next Decade at Maki.vc with Pauliina Martikainen-Rahnu as Managing Partner
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When Maki.vc was founded in late 2017, the world looked surprisingly different.
The Nordic startup scene was smaller. While we had some great tech success stories and promising unicorns per capita, there was less capital, fewer repeat founders, and fewer companies thinking global from day one.
Pre-seed rounds were just a few hundred thousand euros. Now, first rounds come in all shapes and sizes – but a €2M pre-seed is increasingly the standard rather than the outlier.
Wolt was live in six markets and was only making its way to Central Europe. Spotify hadn’t gone public yet, and Supercell had just released Clash Royale.
As an ecosystem, we were on the right path but still finding our footing.
Even then, we already had a group of entrepreneurs who had built and scaled successful companies (some with notable exits) helping shape the region’s early momentum. Their experience didn’t just influence the companies being built at the time; it also became an important foundation for the broader ecosystem, including Maki.vc.
Our co-founding partners, Ilkka Kivimäki and Pirkka Palomäki, had both scaled tech companies across Europe and the US. Having experienced firsthand what it takes to build globally, they believed Nordic tech would continue to rise and compound.
The idea behind Maki was simple: what the region needed was a world-class VC firm with entrepreneurial DNA to back the most ambitious founders in their first rounds. This in turn would help push the ecosystem forward and enable the next generation of breakout companies.
When the opportunity arose to build that firm, they brought their network and experience with them. That’s how the founders of Skype, Wise, Supercell, Small Giant Games, and Smartly became some of the first limited partners in our fund.
Fast-forward to today: there’s never been a better time to build in the Nordics if you care about tech. Together, we haven’t just caught up with Europe’s historical hubs – we’ve built the foundation to produce the next generation of breakout companies over the coming decade.
Top-tier global funds fly into Nordic capitals to host founder dinners weekly, if not daily. The depth of ambition and talent isn’t a just spike but a sustained shift. Founders are thinking bigger, executing at a higher level, and moving faster than ever.
Alongside the region’s homegrown talent, the Nordics are increasingly attracting top global engineering and go-to-market leaders. The quality of companies continues to rise, and new success stories keep setting new benchmarks.
The momentum is real, and we’ve seen it firsthand in the companies our founders and team backed early, including Wolt, IQM, Ultimate.ai, IXI, Enfuce, Distance Technologies, Riff, and Ever Cars.
But like the ecosystem and the teams we back, we have to constantly evolve, too. Each VC fund is a 10-year commitment, and the best firms think about succession early to prepare for the decades ahead.
Our own succession plan started forming a few years back as we were putting together Fund III and dreaming of future funds to follow after that. And over the past year, we’ve been carrying the plan out in the background while keeping the day-to-day running smoothly.
In concrete terms, this is what we’ve been up to:
- Pauliina Martikainen-Rahnu was named as Managing Partner: Pauliina hopped into the new role late 2024 and has been leading the transition. She joined Maki in 2019, and has since worked closely with our team, founders in and outside our portfolio, LPs, and other key stakeholders from the pan-Nordic ecosystem.
- Ilkka stepped into an advisory role, Pirkka and Paavo continue in current roles: Ilkka keeps working closely with Maki’s existing portfolio companies across funds I, II and III and supporting them as they push for category leadership. General Partners Pirkka and Paavo continue in their current roles.
- Maki’s vision and strategy: The short version is tokeep being true to investing at first rounds (i.e. no such thing as too early), to non-consensus decision-making (i.e. no investment committees voting), sector-agnostic mentality (i.e. next Nordic success story could come from any field) and technical expertise (i.e. ability to back teams working on highly technical cases). Optimizing for more Nordic success stories to drive up Europe.
+ plenty of handovers, adjusting roles and processes, and some hiring – among other things.
Finally: We’re psyched about what’s ahead and can’t wait to support more groundbreaking ideas across the Nordics.
Europe and the Nordics have a lot to offer to founders and we’re well-positioned to become the number one region for building tech companies.
The next generation success stories also deserve VCs with world-class operations, and we want to keep being there for the first steps – not investing duringa spike but out of deep commitment to the region and love for the craft.
Got a bold idea and need backing? Drop us a line.