Like venture capital that is accessible even earlier by the year (just ask our rockstar Aaro who raised 550K€ for his new startup after 3 short months of moving on from Kiuas), Kiuas also has ventured to help earlier-stage startups. Ever since the introduction of Kiuas Inside and Starting Up, Instead of only accelerating startups, we now play an active role in creating them. As we are the ones who read their applications later on when they apply to our programs, the natural question to ask ourselves is, what kind of teams do we want to see in the future?

As the aggregate number of teams that have ever applied to Kiuas currently soars somewhere in the thousands, we have gained insights about the problems, products, and ambitions of those startups. However, we've noticed that many teams already take a wrong turn with their problem. A few months back we decided that from that point onwards, Kiuas teams accepted to any of our programs (Start, Accelerator) would have to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals*.

Hence, to follow-up on that decision we should educate pre-founders & founders about meaningful problems to solve.

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Enter Kiuas Trends

The main idea of Kiuas Trends is to bring problems worth solving to pre-founders and founders (after all, many founders are also pre-founders as well) in the Kiuas Community. Our first take on this is a virtual event on the 15th of December with the topic of sustainability. We have a roster of top-level speakers from large Finnish and international organizations giving short presentations about the problems and trends related to sustainability in their respective industries. Participants will be able to address the challenges and opportunities presented, as each speech is followed-up with spicy Q&A. In order to keep the event interactive, we have limited the number of virtual seats to 100, and the event will be available to Kiuas Inside members and Kiuas Alumni only.

For more info about the event check out the event website.

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*Measuring a startup's impact on them is a whole other thing itself - but that deserves a future post for itself.

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