As some of you may know, Kiuas was founded in 2017 on the legacy of Summer of Startups and Team Up, organized by Aaltoes. The reason behind founding Kiuas was to help people to take concrete steps towards starting a company and to bring the old and new programs under one brand. During the past few years, many things have been tried, new programs have been founded and Kiuas has started to find its own way.

But just like any other project, Kiuas wants to keep growing, getting better and helping even more startups to reach their fullest potential. And that’s why we wanted to make a couple of changes this year:
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• We want to help startups in varied stages and answer better to the needs of entrepreneurs. To be able to do that even better than before, we are dedicating our focus on the two main programs: Kiuas Start and Kiuas Accelerator. Kiuas Start will be organized twice this year and Kiuas Accelerator will continue as our flagship program, taking place each summer.
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• As the year changed, it was time also for Kiuas as an organization to take a leap: we said goodbyes to our awesome friends at Aaltoes and started to operate as a separate entity while still remaining student-run, non-profit and tightly within the startup community. This allows us to operate at full capacity and maintain continuity in the years to come.

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The team: something old and something new‍

Niklas (in the middle) will run the operations at Kiuas. He has experience in consulting, supporting portfolio companies and working at a cleantech startup. His background is from Aalto Information Networks and he is at the moment finishing his Master’s in IEM.
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Mari will be in charge of marketing and communications. Her background is in event communications and marketing, but she has also worked in startups. At the moment she’s studying media and communication studies at the University of Helsinki.
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Aaro (left) will start as the CEO of Kiuas after co-organizing the Accelerator program in 2018 and working in the Investor Ops team of Slush. Aaro is studying IEM at Aalto University.

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One thing is for sure: we have super exciting plans for this year and we can’t wait to share them with you all soon.‍

Get ready – things are about to heat up.