Our second Fund IV announcement: Test of Things, a Finnish startup building an AI-powered platform to automate cybersecurity compliance testing for connected devices.
Think about how many devices around you are connected to the internet right now. Your phone, a thermostat, a fitness tracker, the industrial sensors in a factory nearby. Now ask yourself: how secure are they?
For most of them, the honest answer is not very. And the people building these devices know it. So do regulators.
Test of Things is tackling this head on. Founded by Rauli Kaksonen and Marko Kaasila, the company is building a platform that automates cybersecurity compliance testing end-to-end for IoT and OT device manufacturers. Instead of senior security experts spending weeks on manual testing and documentation, their AI-powered software handles the heavy lifting: running tests continuously, flagging issues early, and generating the compliance documentation that regulators increasingly demand.
The €1.2M pre-seed round was led by us, with participation from industry veterans Aapo Oksman, Zach Shelby, Neil Costigan, and ScanABC, along with Business Finland innovation funding.
Sami Ahvenniemi, Partner at Vendep, had known Marko since his days at Bitbar. They had stayed loosely in touch, and when Test of Things started taking shape, they reconnected over a couple of our SaaS Afterwork events in Helsinki. As Fund IV came together, so did the deal. Sami has spent time in his career selling compliance-driven products, so when Test of Things walked him through their go-to-market thinking, something clicked. "I started checking market sizes and realised how big this can truly become," he recalls.
"I started checking market sizes and realised how big this can truly become."
What built conviction
Three things stood out. First, the team. Rauli brings deep cybersecurity expertise; Marko brings deep test automation experience. That combination of domain credibility and product execution instinct, pointed at exactly the same problem, is rare.
Second, the market dynamics. IoT and OT security compliance is not a niche. Industrial systems are being connected to cloud environments at pace, while regulators are tightening requirements around critical infrastructure, manufacturing, and energy. Legislation is intensifying across markets just as AI-assisted attacks make the risk environment materially worse. Those forces converging create a significant growth window.
Third, customer and market due diligence confirmed that no comprehensive modern platform exists yet. The space is still being served by manual work and fragmented tooling. That is the kind of gap a well-timed software product can fill.
This is also a team that has lived inside this industry for years and still finds the problem genuinely interesting to solve. Marko turned out to be a serious car enthusiast, something Sami shares. These things do not determine investment decisions, but they do tell you something about how a founder approaches the world: with genuine enthusiasm and an eye for how things perform.
Where the product is headed
The honest answer: the first step is to actually launch. Over the next 12 to 24 months, the focus will be on getting the platform in front of manufacturers and scaling the number of customers, products, and tests running through the system.
Rauli and Marko are not learning an industry from scratch. They are domain experts who have identified a structural inefficiency and are building software to fix it. Sami brings relevant experience beyond typical SaaS pattern matching: time as Interim CEO at Bluegiga, as an investor and board member in Sensinode, and hands-on experience scaling security and compliance products across Europe and the US. That background means he can engage with where this business is headed in a meaningful way.
Welcome to the Vendep community, Test of Things!
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