Our Q&A series is an opportunity for our Nordic team, headed by Sanna Walfridsson to discuss all things PropTech, Start-ups, and Career with different founders from across the region. Each week we will ask PropTech innovators burning questions and quiz them about their product, we hope you find it insightful and enjoy getting to know the founders as much as we have.
This week we have been in touch with Aki Böök, CEO of Wiiste.
Wiiste Oy is a Finnish company specialising in humidity measurement systems for construction and real estate industry. Main products being developed for demanding humidity and temperature measurements in concrete, screed and mass timber. The company was founded in 2012 and has since gained a market leader position on the home market and is now focusing on scaling the international business. In addition to their product development, they also manufacture their products in Finland.
Wiiste in numbers:
Finnish proptech cluster has been (and is) really active and there is lot of great players on the field. There is many factors that contribute on this, not least the fact that as a heritage of Nokia we have lot of competent people around wireless technologies.
To me it seems that at the moment we have reached one more step in terms of maturity. I can see signs that not viable players are forced to quit in increasing numbers and at the same time the strong ones are getting funded and accelerated bigger than before. This is of course a natural thing to happen.
Investors have seemed to be a bit hesitant to buy the Finnish proptech sales speeches of scalability and going international. But as the maturity has reached new levels also this has changed to positive direction.
As one can expect there has been more challenges than expected… Some of the challenges have been directly related to technical details and product development while others have been more related to the construction industry’s general capability to adapt new technologies and operational models. We have also been focusing on highly demanding sensor solutions and it means quite often that the development-testing-piloting iteration takes months or years before having market ready solution in hands. This has asked some extra patience (and money) but on the other hand gives us a strong competitive position on the market as we have been able to survive through it.
Not that much opportunities that are anymore related to the COVID but there is multiple other trends/topics that support the transformation from Wiiste and proptech point of view….sustainability, carbon footprint, high energy prices and remote work.
We have a strong foothold on the Finnish market and for us the next step is to establish similar position in the Nordics and other selected markets. We build our expansion plan around international partnerships and channel sales. In 2021 we received around one fifth of our turnover from international sales. We are proud to have Saint Gobain Weber, Stora Enso and Corroventa among our partners.
If we don´t focus on the details I would say that we will have lot of consolidation ahead of us. This will probably happen through M&A activities and on the other hand by creating more and more ecosystems where different niche players are able to provide added value to end customers by combining their services. I see multiple drivers for this:
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