Still doubting Europe? Go to Hell(sinki) - Slush '25 has opened its gates

Over 6,000 start-up founders and fund managers with more than €4 trillion of funds directed exclusively to start-ups. That's what this year's Slush 2025 innovation festival has achieved.

Such a goal seemed an impossible task in 2008, when Aalto University alumni decided to create a space where innovative ideas that answer humanity's most critical challenges would be born and developed.

This year, the number of participants exceeds 13,000 and they come from every corner of the world.

At the opening ceremony — after greetings from the organisers — Anton Osika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable, was the first to take the stage. Lovable is a Swedish company that is redefining programming with "vibe-coding", allowing non-programmers to build natural language applications.

"When I joined Slush last year, there were only 8 people at the company working in a co-working building," Osika said. "Now, more than 100,000 new projects are built on our platform every day. There are more than five million people using apps built by Lava Bow every day... Everyone kept telling me that to be successful I had to move to Silicon Valley. I resisted that and we kept the company in Stockholm, bringing talent from the US to work for us...Europe is in many ways a better place for AI development and especially for building a product company."

The geographical makeup of Slush 2025 is telling. Over 80% of the participants are from European countries, mainly northern Europe, Germany, France, but also central and southern Europe.

"We know that Europe needs more founders, more people ready to tackle the world's toughest problems through entrepreneurship. Among the volunteers, you will find some of the brightest young talent in the world, many of whom will become founders after failure. And nothing makes our work seem more meaningful," said Aino Bergius, CEO of Slush at the opening ceremony of the festival.

In the Slush 100 competition, the most promising start-ups can apply for funding directly from leading European VCs such as General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.

The themes cover dozens of areas from deep-tech and AI, to fintech, health, defence and sustainable energy, highlighting that Europe's technological leadership is not one-dimensional.

Entrepreneurship injection for Finland

Slush has played a key role in strengthening Finland's economy by acting as a gateway for foreign investment in the domestic tech scene.

Thanks to the attraction of international investors to the Helsinki ecosystem, the city and the Finnish economy more broadly benefit from significant revenues. Each international visitor spends on average almost €946 during Slush.

"Slush is getting bigger and bigger, even though it started from something very small. Today it is more effective and has a bigger share in our economy and in our economic growth," Elina Pylkkanen, Finland's deputy finance minister, told Euronews.

"International competition is so tough. It comes from everywhere. But, on the other hand, we in Europe have a long tradition, ancient culture, ancient knowledge, and all this is passed on in our high-quality products, in our thinking and in our creativity."

At the same time, the culture of entrepreneurship has grown radically. Through the participation of students, volunteers and young founders at Slush, a generation of young entrepreneurs has been built: about 15% of former Slush employees found their own start-ups.

This "leverage" of ideas, people and capital is turning Finland into a major hub of technological innovation in Europe.