Slush has appointed Eerika Savolainen as the new CEO of the company. The former COO of Slush, Savolainen will succeed Miika Huttunen after him being in charge of Slush for two years. Mikko Mäntylä continues as President of the company, leading Slush’s content, core audiences, and digital products.

Savolainen joined the Slush team in 2019 to work with strategic partnerships. In 2020, she led Slush’s response to the pandemic and the online platform Node by Slush. In 2021, she was appointed as Chief Operating Officer.

Savolainen is in charge of the main event held from November 17th to 18th in Helsinki.

The most recent Slush event in December 2021 was a gathering of 8,800 people, with over half of the audience belonging to Slush’s core customer groups: startup founders and operators, and investors. Slush 2021 is said to be the most customer-focused Slush event of the past decade, which made the team rethink its fundamentals and what the future of a world-class event will look like.

“It is now clear that a smaller and even more curated event works. In the 2010s Slush focused on expansion and created a base for us to build on. Now, we see the 2020s as an era of concentration – we focus on serving our core audiences in the best way possible. We focus on
bringing together Europe’s most promising startups and the world’s most prestigious investors,” Savolainen says.

Slush was established in 2008 to bridge the gap between European startup founders and investors. Today, this is less often the key bottleneck that founders encounter. “As the ecosystem evolves, the challenges have moved into the later stages of a company’s life cycle. We can help by curating the best advice around themes like recruitment, international expansion, or product
strategy.”

At the same time, the European startup ecosystem has created a number of success stories on an international scale. Savolainen mentions that she is excited about the effects these companies will have in the future. “For example, the Wolt acquisition will create dozens of new
Finns in the next few years with existing networks, know-how, and capital to set up businesses.
Moreover, these second-generation founders are able to tackle even bigger problems – we are seeing an increasing number of companies working on climate and health tech, for example. Slush is working to accelerate this transformation.”

AVING special report : Jihun Joseph Choe, DongKwan Kim, MokKyung Lee