New to Finland and building a startup: how to find a Finnish cofounder when you have no network here

You are in Finland. You have an idea, or a prototype, or a company that is one person too small. The people who would normally be your first call are in Lagos, Lahore, London or Lyon, and the people around you here are polite, busy and hard to read. This post is for that situation. It is not about whether to move to Finland. It assumes you already did.

Who is actually here and looking

Start with the fact that changes the problem. There is a public, English-first directory of people in Finland who are looking for someone to build with, and it is free. Right now it lists 149 founders and cofounders listed today. Of those, 81 people in Oulu listed today, 24 people in Helsinki listed today and 5 people in Tampere listed today have set their city, and the rest are spread across smaller towns or have not said.

Every profile is a page you can read without an account: a name or a role, a city, and a "Looking for" section written by the person themselves, between 30 and 1,500 characters. Some are founders with an idea who need a builder. Some are builders who want an idea worth their evenings. Some are commercial people who are done with quota and want equity instead. You can filter by role and city, open a profile, and write to the person. If they accept, a conversation opens with your message already in it.

The directory does not run a questionnaire or an algorithm. It is a catalogue. That matters for you specifically, because a newcomer's problem is not a shortage of compatible people. It is a shortage of introductions. A catalogue removes the introduction.

Why your network is empty here, and how Finnish founders actually meet

Nothing is wrong with you. Three things are true about Finland at once, and together they explain the silence.

Finnish professional networks are built slowly and through institutions. People here meet their future cofounders at university, in a first job, in the army for many men, and in the handful of programmes and coworking spaces that a city has. If you did not go through any of those, you are not in the graph yet. This is not exclusion. It is the absence of a shared history, and it can be built.

Cold outreach is treated with more suspicion than in most countries. A LinkedIn message from a stranger proposing a company is, to many Finns, roughly as welcome as a stranger sitting next to you on an empty bus. The reply rate is low, and the low reply rate is not a judgement of your idea. The same message inside a context where both of you are supposed to be talking about startups gets read.

Finns say less and mean it more. A short reply is not a brush-off. "Interesting, send me more" is a real request. Silence after a meeting usually means nothing was decided, not that the answer is no. If you come from a culture where enthusiasm is the default register, you will systematically misread the temperature here for your first year. Calibrate down on words and up on follow-through: a Finn who shows up to the second meeting is more committed than one who was effusive in the first.

What follows from these three is a simple rule. Put yourself in the rooms where talking to strangers about startups is the point, and put yourself in the one place online where being read by strangers is the point. Then let people come to you at their own speed.

Which institutions actually help an international founder

Finland has a lot of ecosystem organisations. Most of them are for companies, not for people who do not yet have a company. The ones below are the ones a newcomer without a team can use tomorrow. Each link is to the organisation itself.

Startup Express (Oulu). A free, 14-week pre-incubator run by the city's business agency, open to anyone with an idea or anyone who wants to join an existing team. It runs at Startup Station in the city centre and is taught in English. Its real product is not the workshops but the cohort: previous participants are now the people running pitch nights and answering messages in the local community. BusinessOulu: Startup Express. Read one international founder's account of going through it in From Startup Express to first pilot.

Founder's Corner and Business Corner (Oulu). A hands-on workshop series for people at the very start, held at the universities' Business Corner on the Linnanmaa campus. One honest caveat: the autumn 2026 round is run in Finnish, so it is a place for someone who can already follow a workshop in Finnish or who has a Finnish-speaking teammate. Startup Oulu: Founder's Corner.

Business Kitchen (Oulu). The two Oulu universities' shared entrepreneurship hub, with a membership programme that includes mentoring and walk-in mentor mornings. It is student-leaning, which is exactly where a technical cofounder in their final year is standing. Business Kitchen, and the guide to what Business Kitchen is and is not.

International House Helsinki. The one-stop authority service for newcomers in the capital region: personal identity code, tax card, registration. For founders it also runs a Startup Soft Landing service and publishes a startup entrepreneur's checklist. It will not find you a cofounder, but it removes the administrative fog that eats a newcomer's first three months. International House Helsinki and its Startup Entrepreneur's Checklist.

Maria 01 (Helsinki). The Nordics' largest startup campus, a not-for-profit co-owned by the City of Helsinki, in the old Maria hospital. It is a campus for startups that already exist, so you cannot simply join as an individual, but its public events are the densest concentration of early-stage founders in the country on any given evening. Maria 01, and the guide to what Maria 01 can and cannot do for a cofounder search.

Aaltoes (Espoo). Aalto University's student-run entrepreneurship society, founded in 2009, the organisation that turned Slush from a student event into what it is. Open to anyone who shows up. If your future cofounder is 24 and studying at Aalto, this is where they are. Aaltoes, and the guide to finding a cofounder around Aalto.

Talent Boost. A national programme coordinated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment for attracting and retaining international talent, with Business Finland coordinating the business-facing services under the Work in Finland umbrella. It is policy infrastructure rather than a room you can walk into, but it is why several of the city services above exist and are in English. Talent Boost, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment.

Slush (Helsinki, 18 to 19 November 2026). The founder-focused event that fills Helsinki for a week each November, with hundreds of side events across the city. The main venue is expensive and crowded; the side events are free and where the conversations are. Go for the week, not the ticket. Slush, and what to do after Slush when the badges come off and everyone goes quiet.

Two more that are not programmes: the city pages for Helsinki and Tampere as an international founder, and, if you arrived as a student, the international student guide to the Finnish startup ecosystem.

Do you need Finnish to find a Finnish cofounder

No. This is worth saying plainly because it is the most common unspoken worry.

The evidence from the directory: the profiles are overwhelmingly written in English, the interface defaults to English, and as of 2026-09-24 only 4 of the 188 accounts ever created had switched it to Finnish. Founders in Finland work in English by default the moment one person on the team is not Finnish, and the startup vocabulary itself is English even in Finnish sentences. The Finnish startup scene's own glossary post on this site exists because Finns google "co-founder" in English.

Two situations where Finnish helps, so you can plan around them rather than be surprised:

• Municipal and regional programmes aimed at first-time founders are sometimes run in Finnish, as Founder's Corner above is. A Finnish-speaking cofounder opens those doors, which is one more reason to want one.
• Selling to Finnish SMEs and the public sector. If your customer is a municipality or a family-owned company in Seinäjoki, someone on the team needs to hold the meeting in Finnish. That someone can be the cofounder you are looking for, and "I bring the product, you bring the market and the language" is a legitimate and common division.

For finding the person, English is enough. For the company you build together, a bilingual team is an asset, and the directory lets you filter for a city and read who is there.

The legal basics, in one screen

You do not need a company to look for a cofounder, and you should not form one alone in a hurry so that a cofounder can be "added later". The order is: find the person, agree how you will work, then form the company together. The paperwork is light.

• Forming an Oy (private limited company). Since 1 July 2019 there is no minimum share capital for a Finnish private limited company; it used to be 2,500 euros. Waselius: minimum share capital requirement removed. Registration is done online in the YTJ service; from 1 January 2026 the Patent and Registration Office's handling fee is 300 euros for the guided electronic package and 400 euros for a standard notification. PRH: handling fee changes from 1 January 2026 and PRH: limited liability companies.
• The shareholders' agreement (osakassopimus). The private contract between founders about how you actually work together: vesting, what happens when someone leaves, who decides what, how disputes are settled. It matters more than the articles of association and it is the document to have a lawyer look at. Osakassopimus: a guide for startup founders covers what goes in it.
• Equity between founders. Do not default to 50/50 because it is polite, and do not refuse to discuss it because it is awkward. The cofounder equity split guide for Finland walks through the reasoning, and every sensible split comes with vesting.

That is the whole list for the cofounder stage. Everything else, from VAT registration to the employer obligations, comes after there is a company with two people in it.

If you are not in Finland yet. This post is written for people already in the country. If you are still abroad and considering it, Finland has a residence permit for startup entrepreneurs that starts with an eligibility statement from Business Finland and is then applied for through the Finnish Immigration Service. Read the official pages, not this post: Business Finland: Finnish Startup Permit and Migri: residence permit for a start-up entrepreneur.

Oulu, Helsinki or Tampere: where an international founder should look

You live where you live, and a cofounder in the same city is easier than one three hundred kilometres away, but Finland is small and remote-first teams are normal here. Knowing what each pool looks like helps you decide how wide to look.

Oulu has the largest pool in the directory by a distance: 81 people in Oulu listed today right now, roughly half founders and half people who want to join one. It is the legacy of a city that lost a very large number of engineering jobs when Nokia's phone business shrank, and turned that into hardware, wireless, health tech and a dense, small startup community where everyone knows everyone within a year. For a technical founder it is unusually rich. For a founder selling to consumers or to large enterprises, the customers are elsewhere. Browse the Oulu directory.

Helsinki, with the Espoo campus next door, is where the money, the corporate customers and the largest events are: 24 people in Helsinki listed today in the directory today, more of them on the business and product side. It is also the most international city in the country and the easiest place to live without Finnish. The trade-off is noise: more founders, more competition for the same technical people, and a scene that is easy to attend and hard to enter. Browse the Helsinki directory and the guide for international founders in Helsinki.

Tampere is the quiet third: 5 people in Tampere listed today listed, a strong engineering university, an industrial-tech and gaming bent, and a community that is smaller than Helsinki's and more open than its size suggests. Browse the Tampere directory and the international founder's guide to Tampere.

If you are in Turku, Jyväskylä, Kuopio or Vaasa, set your city anyway. A founder there who finds another founder there is the exact thing the smaller cities are short of, and the directory shows the city page for every Finnish city with anyone in it.

Writing a profile that reads as "here and building"

A newcomer's profile has to do one extra job that a local's does not: it has to make clear, in the first line, that you are physically in Finland and staying. Founders here have learned to skim past profiles from people abroad who want a Finnish partner for a company that will never be in Finland. Do not get skimmed past.

Set your city. The location question offers the Finnish cities as one-tap choices, plus "Elsewhere in Finland" and "Outside Finland". Pick your city. A profile with a Finnish city appears on that city's page and is the first filter most founders apply.

Say where you are and why, in the first sentence of "Looking for". Something in the shape of: "Based in Tampere since 2024, building a B2B tool for logistics planners, looking for a technical cofounder who wants to own the product." City, what, who. The rest of the text can be as long as 1,500 characters, but that first sentence is what gets read.

Use a real photo. The directory assigns everyone a placeholder illustration at signup. Replacing it is the single largest signal that a human is behind the profile, and it moves you up the page, because profiles with no photo, no description and no detail are deliberately sorted to the bottom.

Name what you bring, not just what you need. Newcomers underplay this. Ten years in supply chain software in another country is not less valuable in Finland; it is rarer. A founder reading your profile is asking "what would I get", and the answer should be specific.

Then write to people. A profile is passive. Open the directory, filter for your city and the role you are missing, read the "Looking for" texts, and write to the three people whose text you could answer specifically. Look at the "last active" label first: someone active this week will read you this week. Your message should say which line of their text you are answering. That is the whole technique, and it works better here than anywhere else precisely because so few people do it.

Questions internationals ask

Is the directory free, and is there a catch? Free, no premium tier, no expiry, no commercial outreach. It is run by one person. You can read every profile without an account; you need one to write to someone.

Do I need a Finnish personal identity code or a company to sign up? No. A profile is a person, not a company. Get the identity code anyway through International House Helsinki or your local DVV office, because you will need it for everything else.

Will Finnish founders take a cofounder who does not speak Finnish? Yes, and it happens constantly. The teams that need a Finnish speaker need one for selling, not for building, and they will say so in their profile.

How long does it take? Longer than you want and shorter than doing nothing. The people who find someone are the ones who write specific messages to active profiles every week, go to two or three of the rooms above, and keep their own profile current. Give it a season, not a weekend.

Should I wait until I have Finnish funding or a permit sorted? No. The cofounder search and the paperwork are independent, and the search is the slow one. Start it now.

Where do I start today? Add your profile with your city set and a specific first sentence, then read how to find a cofounder in Finland, which ranks every channel in the country, including the ones above, by how often it actually produces a cofounder.