September is shaping up to be quite the month for three-year-old SaaS startup Vainu. The company, with European headquarters in Helsinki and a U.S. branch in New York, received major praise from influential tech communities across Europe this month for the company’s innovation and growth trajectory.
Wired U.K. includes Vainu on its 2017 list of “Europe’s 100 Hottest Startups” – Vainu is one of 10 Finnish companies featured on the just-released list.
Separately, the Nordic Startup Awards recognized Vainu at its annual ceremony on Sept. 7. The company received not one but two awards, winning the “Best Bootstrapped Startup” in Finland as well as the “People’s Choice Award” for Finnish startups. The company was also a runner up for Startup of the Year and co-founder Mikko Honkanen was a nominee for Founder of the Year. The Nordic tech awards recognize startups across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. With the win, Vainu moves on to compete against other nations in October, potentially moving toward a global award for top bootstrapped business.
Since launching in 2014, Vainu has grown from three guys and an idea to a team of 130 people, $1 million in monthly revenue and bookings, more than 1,000 customers, thousands of users, and 100 million-plus tracked companies worldwide in its big data-powered database. It recently launched a New York office and has four other locations across Europe. Operating as a bootstrapped business, Vainu has achieved all this growth without any outside investments.
“The recognition across the Nordics has been really special for our entire team,” said Mikko Honkanen, co-founder of Vainu. “That coupled with the inclusion on such a prestigious list across Europe validates everything we’ve worked so hard to accomplish together for the past three years. It comes on the heels of our launch in the U.S. and we couldn’t be carrying more momentum into the last quarter of this year.”
Vainu’s mission is to collect, read and understand all the information ever written about every company in the world and make this information available and comprehensible for everyone. The Vainu platform provides key insights on more than 100 million companies and helps sales professionals find the right time and method to contact them. Used by companies like FedEx, UPS, Manpower, Dell and Microsoft, business development leaders in countless industries capitalize on the ever-increasing amount of big data through Vainu. The user-friendly platform integrates with many major sales tools including Gmail, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Slack, Pipedrive and Microsoft Dynamics, among others. Vainu recently launched an app to provide its same customized sales and prospecting solution to users on the go.
Vainu currently has databases across six countries – the United States, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands. Three more are in development for the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia.