Yousician teaches instruments and singing with its popular interactive app. Image: Yousician

Daily Brief

DAILY BRIEF: Music learning, funding, awards, sports watches, travel, airports and 3D-printing

All the daily Finnish business news that works: Ultimate.ai, Suunto, Visit Jyväskylä, Yousician, Airport College International and VTT make headlines.

Rasmus Hetemäki

07.12.2020

Ultimate.ai raises series-A funding, Suunto upgrades its sports watches, Visit Jyväskylä is awarded for a campaign, Yousician is named the top digital service in 2020, Airport College provides training in Japan, and VTT innovates with 3D-printing. Click on the headlines for more in-depth information about each piece of news.

Ultimate.ai raises EUR 20 million

Three people sit and smile under a ultimate.ai sign — Ultimate.ai has raised 20 million euros in a series-A funding round led by OMERS Ventures, with participation from Felicis Ventures and existing investors HV Capital and Maki.vc. The Helsinki and Berlin-based startup builds advanced virtual customer service agents that automate up to 80 per cent of support interactions, freeing human support agents from repetitive requests. Its AI-powered language-agnostic technology is currently available in 20 languages and has been integrated with leading customer relationship management providers such as Salesforce and Zendesk.

Suunto fits sports watches with MyRadar’s weather data

Sports watch with weather information — Finnish company Suunto has integrated MyRadar weather data and forecasting technologies to its collection of sports watches through a partnership with ACME AtronOmatic. Some of the key features made possible by the partnership are a real-time radar view of the wearer’s location and summary of current weather conditions and forecasts. The wrist-accessible data covers temperature, wind and precipitation probability, with hyper-local rain alerts. Suunto 7 is the latest watch in the range, which combines features powered by Google Wear OS with Suunto’s outdoor sports expertise.

Visit Jyväskylä campaign wins at World RT Awards

An aerial image of a lake town. — Visit Jyväskylä has been awarded for its #supportlocals campaign at the World Responsible Tourism (RT) Awards. The campaign was carried out in Jyväskylä in Finnish Lakeland at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. In the first stage of the campaign, information was gathered on the local companies that managed to keep their businesses open, and, in the second, locals were strongly encouraged to use these services.

Yousician picked as 2020’s top digital service

Man in hoodie holding an award — Finnish music learning service Yousician has been named the digital service of the year by the Finnish Software and E-business Association. Offering interactive music lessons in multiple instruments and singing, the Yousician app has millions of users worldwide. The company made its breakthrough at the Finnish startup event Slush and has enjoyed rapid growth in recent years. The award highlighted digitalisation in culture this year, and the Yousician app was the obvious winner, according to the organiser.

Airport College lands new deal in Japan

A groundhandling agent standing next to a airplane — Airport College International is providing its pharmaceutical handling online training to personnel at the International Air Cargo Terminal (IACT) of Narita International Airport in Japan. Enabling safe and high-quality pharmaceutical transport, the training helped IACT to gain the CEIV Pharma certification in November 2020. Airport College International is a Finnish online educator with a complete training offering for airlines, airport ground handling agents and logistics.

Finnish research to reduce mass of motor magnets

An electric car loading its battery — 3DREMAG, a European consortium led by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, has embarked on a mission to develop a fully 3D-printable electric motor weighing less than three-quarters of contemporary motors. The first step in the project is to develop a material suitable for the 3D-printing of permanent magnets that are used in the motors of hybrid and electric vehicles. Click the headline to read more about the project.

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