It all started back in 1993…
In the far away land of Finnland 🇫🇮 , the two young boys of the name Reetu Kainulainen and Markus Rautio met at kindergarten 👶🏼 👶🏼… They did not really found any start-up just yet, but they will…
Fast forward to 2014…
another young boy joined them during college👦🏻 👦🏻 👦🏻, his name is Jaakko Panasen. The three were the best of friends during and upon graduation, they decided to found their own company called Culinar Oy with the dream of offering an online portal for online ordering for restaurants. Two years went by and there were many ups and down, laughs and tears and our three young boys came to many realisations:
Finland was probably not the best place to start a for-restaurant software.
The business of running a company in the restaurant realm was over their heads.
And most importantly,
Jaakkowas bored and needed a new challenge.
In the summer of 2016…
Determined not to let their buddy down, Reetu and Markus acted upon it! Culinar Oy was put in auto-pilot mode and the three boys started iterating new ideas. A lot of new ideas were being thrown on the table, from neural sound transfer to an app that connects dog owners for dog play-dates…
Then came the call of faith from an Hackathon organizer, which was the largest exhibition centre in Finnland, whereby one team has dropped out and Culinar Oy was called to be a replacement. Since Jaako and Markus were determined to spend their weekends in a work-free manner, Reetu packed his pack and traveled to Helsinki, since he had nothing to do that weekend and was tempted by the free food at the event.
Instead of submitting Culinar Oy product, he talked to the organizer to figure out their need. It turned out that one of the problems they had is planning staff support for their events due to the lack of information about the volume of event attendees. An idea popped up on Reetu’s mind and he got to creating a demo of a conversational chatbot which could assist the attendees through out the event.
And guess what, they won! 🎉
But it was not just a one-hit-wonder kinda thing… The organizer reached out to them again ask them to actually bring their Hackathon idea to life! The boys asked Jaakko :” Can you build this? 🤨 ” and Jaakko said :” Yes, sure! 🤓 ” and that how it began…
👦🏻👦🏻👦🏻
It was then, in November 2016…
that they decided to not just focus on chatbot, but on Customer Service, and that is how ultimate.ai was born. The shift of focus was a leap of faith after a visit at a customer service centre of the client. It is here that they observed how unorganised the centre was and how humans mostly spent time working on mundane tasks.
The team created a neural network architecture that learns a pattern in texts and produces similar results. The model was trained with Kalevala, the Finnish epic and a Twitter Bot was created to post the machine-made Kelevala. It got big overnight (it even landed on the Hot page of Reddit Finland, which objectively remains the company’s proudest achievement to date! 😌 ). Words started to spread around and the first customers started to knock on the door…
In the spring of 2017…
SAP showed the interest in integrating ultimate.ai chatbots to their contact center solution’s APIs. In the same year’s Mobile World Congress, SAP was demoing the solution of ultimate.ai in front of an audience of a hundred thousand people.
This is where they got recommended to apply to Techstar Accelerator program with SAP. The consensus was not to join the program. However, 2 hours before the deadline, our boy Reetu Kainulainen went rogue again and applied just for fun 😌 And guess what, they got in 🎉 and they packed their pack and made their way to the Silicon Alley of Europe…
Sarah and Loki 🐶
The Techstar program was an awesome learning experience about company- and product-building, but the biggest gem of them all was getting to know Sarah Al-Hussaini 🧒🏻.
Sarah was a finance associate for Techstar at that moment and was helping ultimate.ai in building a financial and business model. The three musketeers begged Sarah to join the company as a COO to bring order to the start-up early days.
Another big decision to move away from their nest in Finland and settle in Berlin was also made…
… in December 2017.
In June 2018…
after an intense sprint of funding, ultimate.ai completed Seed round of 1 Mil. With the funding, the team focused intensely on hiring, growing and improving the product.
“A second Seed round” happened just a year later,
in the summer of 2019…
with the existing investor HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and Maki doubled down. The Horizont Grant for AI research further fuelled our AI machine going forward.
The early ultimate.ai team
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In September 2020…
the official Series A round happened and closed down very quickly. The round was led by OMERS Ventures with participation from Felicis Ventures and existing investors HV Capital, and Maki.vc.
Going from 4 founding members, we are now at the happy number of over 80 ultiMATEs but that number will change drastically in just a few months…
But the journey is far from over….
Will you be the one helping us get to the top? 🔥🔥🔥