Specialities:
Advisory and Board Services, Strategy, Sales and Marketing, Fundraising, Leadership
Aki Soudunsaari
Advisor
Energetic serial entrepreneur on a mission to improve people’s health, happiness & performance in a planet-positive way. +12 years of experience on three continents in the B2B built environment business, creating novel and world’s leading solutions to impact health & sustainability in and around buildings.
Aki has been awarded national innovation awards and shortlisted as Entrepreneur of the Year multiple times by EY and PWC. Aki has been speaking, for example, at London Design Week, TATA Global CEO Summit, and Kauppalehti events. Aki has been featured in +500 media articles, including Bloomberg, CNN, Monocle, Korean Forbes. Aki writes regularly for Forbes US.
Aki took Naava as the co-founder and CEO to a world’s leader in tech green walls and biological indoor air purification. Naava was listed as Financial Times’ Fastest Growing Companies in Europe 2020, the hottest startup in Finland 2018 by WIRED, and received +10 sustainability, innovation and design awards. Aki led Naava from 0 to +1000 B2B customers incl. Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Four Seasons, Lamborghini, Coca-Cola, Finnair, SEB, Nespresso, Samsung, Spotify etc. Aki raised +20 M€ in VC funding for Naava and the company is on the road to IPO.
Aki has a multidisciplinary background: MSc Sports & Health (behavioral sciences), MSc Economics (entrepreneurship), PhD Candidate (Growth Venture Teams and Growth Venturing), Head of School (learning). Mixed studies at Cheung Kong School of Business (China), UCLA & Silicon Valley School of Entrepreneurship (USA). During his academia career, Aki has worked in five faculties, led “scalable business models” research project, taught eg. Leadership, Project Management, Business Design, and Productization courses at the Business School, and was a Visiting Scholar at Silicon Valley School of Entrepreneurship, SJSU. In addition, Aki is an LP at the Nordic Web Ventures and a Mentor/coach at Kiuas and Kasvu Open.
Aki knows the international growth venturing world and has access to an extensive network of leading entrepreneurs and experts.