eEquity and Finnish Industry Investment invest $6 million in Vaadin, the Finnish open source company whose user-interface tools are used in 40% of Fortune-100 companies and by over 150 000 developers worldwide.
Vaadin’s business is building components and tools for web application developers. Its products enable businesses to replace most of their desktop applications with standard based web applications that run on all major mobile and desktop browsers. By hiding the underlying complexity of the web standards, Vaadin’s technology speeds up the development process, increases security and allows developers to focus on building business value.
With the new investment, the Turku-based company intends to boost its R&D and ecosystem development to expand its unique set of developer tools.
“The web development ecosystem is going through rapid changes due to emerging web component standards at the same time as both JavaScript and Java as programming languages are taking inspiration from each other.” says CEO Joonas Lehtinen. He continues: “With the current product portfolio, Vaadin has a unique opportunity to develop its tooling into the direction future web apps need. With 100+ employees, a solid customer base and being profitable with a turnover of $10M, the company is well set to change the developer experience in the coming years.”
“We’ve been following growing Nordic success stories and got Vaadin on our radar early on after our portfolio companies had been using Vaadin to increase productivity among their developers” says Patrik Hedelin, partner at eEquity and previous co-founder of boo.com.
Earlier investors in Vaadin include Aboa Venture Management and Finnish Industry Investment. The company, which was founded in 2000, intends to keep on rapidly hiring more people into its Turku, Helsinki, Berlin and San Jose offices during 2016.
