We’re happy to welcome Isa Kaipainen to Vendep’s investment team as our new Investment Associate. Isa spent the last six years building startups from the inside as an early hire, and she brings something every first-time founder can use: firsthand knowledge of what it takes to grow a company.
Isa didn’t start out in the startup world. After studying social sciences and economics at the University of Helsinki, she led country sales for an international sports brand. She then moved into consulting, working on public relations and communications, but soon found herself improving sales processes and calculating project profitability. The business side interested her far more than the consulting. A senior colleague nudged her towards business development, and since Isa had always worked in small organisations, a startup felt like the natural place for it. The one person she knew in that world was Juhani Mykkänen, co-founder of Wolt. His take was that she was exactly the kind of doer who should be the first hire at an early-stage company. The rest is history.
Isa was the first business hire at Hemby, where she helped scale the company from almost zero to over €4M ARR. She built and hired the entire growth team, created the go-to-market playbook and led the expansion from Helsinki across Finland, then on to Berlin and Hamburg. Most recently, she was right hand to the founders at Synergi, a B2B software company, where she focused on building the business model and operations.
One was an operations-heavy platform business, the other a pure software product company. In both, Isa worked with a broad mandate covering strategy, marketing, operations, customer service, recruiting and data. If a function exists in an early-stage startup, chances are she has built it.
“Founders know their core business better than anyone,” Isa says. “But hiring, growth and expansion are full of mistakes that others have already made. If I can help them skip even a few of them, that’s a huge win.”
Her interest in venture capital started when Hemby raised its first round. Working with those early investors showed her how much a good VC can add beyond the money, and the best of them became her benchmark. She had always been curious about what makes some companies win, and moving from operator to investor meant she could study that question across many companies instead of just one. Vendep’s clear thesis and the strong track record of its earlier funds brought her here, along with the chance to watch AI reshape software from the front row.
Partner Timo Felin describes Isa as an operator at heart who fits the team like a glove. “She knows what it really takes to find traction and scale, and she meets founders as someone who has been in the trenches herself,” Timo says. “Combined with her relentless nature and strong roots in the Helsinki startup ecosystem, she’s a great fit for how we work with early-stage B2B founders.”
Outside work Isa will always be a gymnast at heart, but these days you’ll find her competing in tennis and sailing.
Building B2B software in the Nordics or Baltics? Isa would love to hear from you.
.webp)
%20(1).webp)
