NEW Ranking: 25 and Under in Northern Europe

Nordic Business Report is proud to present the 25 and Under in Northern Europe

We’re eager to announce that the annual Nordic Business Report ranking of the most influential people in business has been released! This year, we take a look at some of Europe’s brightest young entrepreneurs, innovators, and game-changers – all of whom are 25 years or younger.

The 25 and Under list encompass some of northern Europe’s young adults who have risen to extraordinary heights in a short amount of time to challenge traditions and unapologetically stand up for their professional passions (and create positive change). Finland is represented by Niklas Nukari (#5), Perttu Pölönen (#14), and Andreas Saari (#21) for their relentless entrepreneurial spirit and proven track record of success. Other countries represented in this ranking are Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia.

Russian entrepreneur Vitalik Buterin (#1) tops the list for his groundbreaking work with cryptocurrencies and blockchain innovations. Second place is awarded to Estonian businessman Markus Villig (#2), the founder and CEO of the fastest growing European ride-hailing platform Taxify. As of April 2018, Taxify has approximately 10 million customers globally and some 500,000 drivers on the road. He is followed by Danish entrepreneur Camilla Hessellund Lastein (#3) for her efforts to improve access to educational textbooks through her company Lix Technologies – a sort of Spotify for digital student textbooks. Since its establishment, Lix has grown to a valuation of more than DKK 90m.

25 and Under in Northern Europe

The new generation entering the workforce may seem crowded and confusing but hidden in the fray are some of Europe’s brightest young entrepreneurs, innovators, and game-changers. The defining factors of those 25 and under include a drive to innovate on tradition, a determination to champion their professional passions, and a hunger to reinvent the world — but only a few individuals actually embody these ideals. Despite a multitude of external pressures and demands, a dedicated group of people is stepping up to challenge the status quo and create new solutions that improve lives and create positive change.

1. Vitalik Buterin

24, Founder, Ethereum and Bitcoin Magazine

Few entrepreneurs can boast of crafting a legacy with lasting disruptive impact in today’s era of exponential change. Yet that is precisely what Russian-born math and programming prodigy Vitalik Buterin has done with his blockchain innovation. A young adult with a keen sense of social accountability, Vitalik is the co-founder of Ethereum, a blockchain-based decentralized network that could serve as the basis for the next generation of peer-to-peer apps. He is also the co-founder and chief scientist of the Ethereum Foundation, the Swiss non-profit behind Ethereum’s core technology and its proprietary cryptocurrency, Ether, the second-highest-valued digital currency after Bitcoin.

In 2012, Buterin co-founded and launched Bitcoin Magazine, which focuses exclusively on Bitcoin and other digital currencies. One of the early thinkers to shape the crypto-funding mechanism concept, Buterin is highly regarded in Russia as a young entrepreneur and thought leader. A gifted student in Canada where his parents had emigrated for work, Buterin wrote a white paper outlining the Ethereum concept when he was just 19. He started studying at the University of Waterloo but dropped out in 2014 after receiving a Thiel Fellowship Award for USD 100,000 – a fortuitous turn of events that allowed him to devote his energies full-time to developing Ethereum. The young innovator defies the current stereotype of the cash-flush crypto-millionaire partying on a yacht, preferring to channel some of his estimated USD 400m net worth toward helping the less fortunate.

In early 2018, he donated USD 2.4million in Ether to SENS Research Foundation, a Silicon Valley non-profit that researches age-related diseases. Later, in April, he bankrolled an African NGO that helps refugees to the tune of USD 1m. Buterin’s work with Ethereum was recognized in 2014 when he received the World Technology Award in the IT category. In 2016, Fortune Magazine ranked him on its “40 under 40” list of the world’s most influential young people. And, in 2018, Forbes Magazine rated Buterin in fourth position on its list of “30 under 30” individuals influencing global money flows – a ringing endorsement of Buterin’s standing as one of today’s foremost disruptive talents.

2. Markus Villig

24, CEO & Founder, Taxify

Taxify co-founder Markus Villig launched a bold challenge to ride-hailing market leader Uber when he was just 19. As of April 2018, Taxify had approximately 10 million customers globally and some 500,000 drivers and was the fastest growing European ride-hailing platform operating in 28 cities and 20 countries across Europe and Africa. When he was still a teen in 2013, Villig saw an opportunity to introduce competition in markets where there was a ride-sharing monopoly while at the same time offering drivers a higher commission. China’s Didi Chuxing — a major Chinese ride-sharing, AI, and autonomous technology conglomerate — made a strategic investment in the ride-hailing app, which has raised over EUR 50m to date. Other backers include the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and its Chinese counterpart, Tencent.

In 2014, Taxify received an award for the best mobile app in Estonia. The company was nominated as “The Breakthrough of the Year 2014” for having the strongest impact on the Estonian ICT sector and was 2017’s Company of the Year. In 2018, Forbes Magazine named Villig among Europe’s 30 Under 30 creative disruptors in the Technology category.

3. Camilla Hessellund Lastein

25, Founder and CEO, Lix

Why should young adults who’ve grown up with smart devices still lug around heavy textbooks? That’s the challenge Camilla Hessellund Lastein set out to address in 2012 when she set up the education startup Lix Technologies, a sort of Spotify for digital student textbooks. The e-learning platform is taking on the academic publishing industry by offering a service that is safe from piracy. The startup aims to help students lighten the load – and the cost — of learning by relieving them of heavy textbooks, some of which they never fully use. According to some estimates, students using the platform can get books between 20 and 60% cheaper than the price of traditional hard copies. The proposition has proven to be a siren call to investors who have so far forked out USD 7.5million in funding. Although investors are keen to follow Lix on its journey, publishers were initially cool on the venture.

In an industry where e-book platforms compete fiercely for rights from publishers of academic texts, it took two years for the company to sign its first publisher. But when the UK publisher SAGE came onboard in 2015, it paved the way for others to join the roster. Lix now boasts more than 7,000 publishers, including behemoths like Pearson and McGraw-Hill. In some cases, it stands alongside tech titans such as Apple and VitalSource as the only other platform to acquire the rights to certain material. Since its establishment, Lix has grown to a valuation of more than DKK 90m.

4. Laurynas Jokubaitis

25, Co-Founder, Monetha

With co-founder Justas Pikelis, Laurynas Jokubaitis developed Monetha, a startup in the global payments market looking to compete directly against major established payment services such as Paypal. The visionary team aims to revolutionize global commerce with a simple, trust-based payment solution that allows consumers to buy products from any country in the world, using any Ethereum-based cryptocurrency. Jokubaitis sees speed and ease as Monetha’s advantages – the service uses the Ethereum blockchain to process transactions up to 1,000 times faster than traditional alternatives, with low fixed fees of 1.5%. The platform converts the buyer’s cryptocurrency of choice into a fiat currency, with a QR code designed to be scanned by crypto-wallets ready for transactions. By contrast, traditional online payment systems involve as many as 16 steps within a single transaction, often carrying large fees.

Monetha’s unique proposition has so far proved to be – well internet gold. An Initial Coin Offering (or ICO) designed to raise financing for a crypto venture rounded up USD 37m in just 18 minutes, signaling strong confidence in the enterprise. Forbes Magazine listed the duo in the finance category of its 2018 “30 under 30” in Europe, a compilation of young movers and shakers shaping global markets in 2018.

5. Niklas Nukari

25 CEO Takuullecom Oy (Autolle.com)

The idea for Niklas Nukari’s multi-million-dollar business germinated during a sales career that involved endless hours on the road. By the time the young entrepreneur launched the online used-car enterprise Autolle.com, he knew it had to challenge the existing model in which customers visited dealerships and literally kicked tires before making a purchase. Nukari’s game-changing approach focuses on providing digital services for buyers and sellers – and for the most part, delivers cars directly to the customer’s front door. Close cooperation with car inspection firms, who provide the product for the business, ensures that Nukari can avoid the cost of standing stock, unlike traditional second-hand car dealers. The young businessman established the company in 2014 at the tender age of 21. Two years later at the end of 2016, the firm had already stacked up revenues of over EUR 24m, a remarkable achievement in a market dominated by big used-car players as well as authorized dealers for major global vehicle brands.

Since its inception, Autolle.com has gone on to serve customers in Russia and Estonia in addition to Finland. However, Nukari’s goal is to operate across Europe by the 2020s. It’s no wonder that the Federation of Finnish Enterprises named Nukari Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017.

6. Marcus Smith

24, Founder & CEO, SocialView

Young Swedish entrepreneur Marcus Smith has grown up in the age of social media. It’s, therefore, no surprise that Smith and the startup he helms, SocialView, are tackling the mission of helping firms get hip to marketing on social media channels. Launched in 2014, SocialView quickly moved to establish itself as an expert at navigating the unpredictable minefield that brands face as they attempt to connect with and influence consumers on social media. The small but rapidly-expanding firm now counts many of Sweden’s leading private- and public-sector companies among its roster of clients.

Smith quickly established himself as an upstart looking to challenge traditional marketing approaches and in 2016, he was named the country’s “Most Promising Young Entrepreneur”. He consolidated his position as a youngster to watch by nabbing the award for 2017 Rocket of the Year, conferred by the Young Entrepreneurs of Sweden.

7. Filip Stamenkovic

24, CEO and owner, Lestra Entreprenad Sverige AB

Aged just 22, Filip Stamenkovic made his mark in the competitive business world when in 2015, he was named Managing Director of the construction and maintenance company Lestra Entreprenad. The firm differentiates itself from competitors by emphasizing sustainability, efficiency, quality, and the environment in its work with public sector clients. The strategic focus has seen the firm grow to post revenues of over EUR 9m between 2017 and 2018. Stamenkovic currently sits on six corporate boards and, in 2016 at the age of 23, he was named Entrepreneur of the Year in the Botkyrka municipality, just south of the Swedish capital Stockholm. In 2017, Sweden’s largest entrepreneur association awarded Stamenkovic third prize in the Young Entrepreneurs of the Year category, describing him as a “visionary entrepreneur” who also works to integrate foreign-born persons into Swedish life through work and language development.

8. Elviss Straupenieks

19, Founder and CEO, AirBoard

19-year-old innovator-entrepreneur Elviss Straupenieks has parlayed his impeccable academic credentials and passion for flight into a California-based startup that aims to upend the world of aviation and personal movement as we know it. Billed by its creator as the world’s smallest manned aircraft, AirBoard aims to make science fiction into science fact. Essentially a personal aircraft (picture a mashup between a Segway and a hoverboard), AirBoard seeks to unravel the accepted norms of air transportation by putting flight into the hands of individuals and opening up vast new potential for personal and corporate use. Inspired by the dream of flying like a bird when he was even younger – just 12 years old — the young inventor originally planned to get into business at the ripe old age of 25. However, at 16, he began working toward his dream of entrepreneurship by setting up a website and attempting to raise capital on the Indiegogo platform. He then went on to persuade a Latvian court to recognize him as legally capable of setting up a business, although he was still under the legal age of majority,18. In 2017, AirBoard was named a member of the Boost VC Tribe 9 community, a startup incubator that invests in early-stage growth companies.

AirBoard was listed as one of the Top 10 Latvian Startups to Watch in 2018 by the ArcticStartup technology blog.

9. Simonas Žilinskas

CEO and co-founder, Yellow Hammock

As co-founder of the whimsically-named startup Yellow Hammock, Simonas Žilinskas has fearlessly harnessed the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create online voices and personas to help brands interact directly with consumers. The chatbots represent the faces and voices of firms hoping to make – or increase – their impact in increasingly crowded markets. With more commerce taking place online than ever before, Žilinskas’ vision has placed his young company on the crest of a new wave of business activity. Perhaps fittingly, the young startup emerged from the Rise and Hack hackathon that took place in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius in 2016. In barely two years since then, the fledgling firm has gone on to amass clients in seven countries.

In 2016, Yellow Hammock was named the year’s Best Technology Startup during Lithuania’s BZN Startup Awards ceremony. The accomplishment earned the young firm a two-hour consultation with investors.

10. Adam Vikström

22, CEO and co-founder, Deligate AB

Established in 2016, Adam Vikström’s startup Deligate moved rapidly to cement the young entrepreneur’s reputation as a powerful force in sustainability. Since inception, the firm has seen 150 food stores in Sweden and Norway sign up to use its digital application that helps prevent food waste. Vikström and two of his co-founders are alumni of ICA, a leading Swedish food retailer, and were intimately familiar with the challenges of managing fresh produce. The software developed by the young firm flags food that is approaching its use-by date, allowing grocers to ensure that fresh produce is always in stock, reduce food waste, and minimize extra working hours and paperwork.

The ambitious young sustainability crusader is looking to push the envelope for the company and plans to expand the customer base to 5,000 outlets. After re-investing revenues to fund growth, in 2017 the firm received an injection of capital totaling roughly EUR 75,000 from Håkan Svanberg, a well-known Swedish IT entrepreneur, to help finance expansion.

11. Elin Nørve

23, Founder and Impact Director, Executive Board, Future Leaders Global

A poster child for the new era, Elin Nørve is the face of a bold new approach to management and corporate operations that emphasizes sustainability, as well as a social, environmental, and financial impact, also known as the “triple bottom line”. In 2014, Nørve co-founded Future Leaders, a vehicle for syndicating an ambitious vision of leadership based on empathy and ethics. The program recruits and trains young leaders with a view to making them agents of global change via projects, startups, and corporations that allow them to build their careers. It also develops an ecosystem in which participants can draw inspiration, insights, and ideas to help fuel their mission to create a more sustainable world.

Since its inception, the program has scaled up to reach young people in five major cities across four countries: Norway, Sweden, Spain, and Denmark.

12. Maiuran Loganathan

20, CEO, Meracio

Maiuran Loganathan’s entrepreneurial vision occupies the space where sustainability and youth development and leadership coincide. Loganathan’s relationship with entrepreneurship began at an early age: at 15, he collaborated with classmates to set up Ediphy, a social platform for education, but the project did not outlive the team’s secondary school years. Loganathan’s current endeavors include Meracio, a venture that matches talented students worldwide with global enterprises in a work scholarship program.

He is also the front man for YSI (Young Sustainable Impact), an organization aiming to inspire young people from around the world to create startups that work towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since YSI’s launch in 2016, it has grown rapidly, and by 2017 it had received 10,000 applicants from 171 countries eager to join the program.

13. Nökkvi Fjalar Orrason

24, CEO of Áttan, and Sales Manager of CAI-Social Media

If content is king, then Icelandic media trendsetter Nökkvi Fjalar Orrason is its crown prince. Orrason cut his teeth on media the way many young adults do: by creating and posting comic videos to Facebook and YouTube. He built on his playful beginnings and co-established the precursor to media firm Áttan in 2014 when he was just 20 years old. By 2016, he struck out on his own and took his offering entirely online, earning all of its income from social media. Áttan consists of three divisions, a radio station, a video content production company, and attan.is, which focuses on branding output.

Never shy to venture into new territory, Orrason has also tried his hand at acting and in 2018, he debuted on the silver screen in an action-packed Icelandic feature-length production, Fullir vasar. As Áttan CEO and owner of CAI – Social Media, Orrason has cemented his position as Iceland’s premier content innovator.

14. Perttu Pölönen

23, Keynote Speaker, Inventor, Startup CEO MusiClock

Perttu Pölönen operates at the intersection of technology, the arts, and the future and has parlayed his interest in all three areas to become one of Finland’s most influential thinkers and speakers at a young age. While still in his mid-teens, Pölönen – then a music student at Helsinki’s prestigious Sibelius Academy — had a eureka moment that saw the creation of MusiClock, a tool – later an app — that disrupts traditional approaches to teaching music and helps beginners to learn music theory as well as musical scales, chords, and even composing. In 2013, he was named one of the winners of the European Union Contest for Young Scientists in the Social Sciences category.

That level of recognition opened the doors for Pölönen to attend the Nobel awards in Sweden the same year. In 2014, he appeared at Slush, Helsinki’s annual startup carnival, where he was dubbed the Most Creative Young Finn of the year. Pölönen joined 80 other gifted participants at NASA’s Singularity University program at Silicon Valley in 2016, the only Finn in his year. The MusiClock app went on to win the main prize in the Expressing category of the Interaction Awards in 2017, for enabling self-expression and creativity.

15. Marija Ručevska

25, Co-founder at Helve & TechChill Foundation

At just 25, Marija Ručevska has already left an indelible handprint on the local and regional startup scene in Latvia and the Baltics. She is the force of nature behind the Latvian tech conference TechChill and has been instrumental in driving the growth of the gathering to reach 2,000 participants in 2018. As co-founder, board member and former chief executive of TechChill, Ručevska ensured that her passion as an evangelist for Latvia as a startup-friendly location was translated into concrete policy. TechChill is now the leading forum in the Baltic for matching startup entrepreneurs, disruptors, investors, and others with an interest in the sector.

Ručevska is also emblematic of female millennial entrepreneurs, who are better represented in the corporate and startup world than their older sisters. As an alumnus of Techhub Riga, the oldest community supporting Latvian startups, she is one of the 53% of women in Latvia who occupy leadership positions in industry.

16. Gustav Magnar Witzøe

25

Heir to one of the world’s largest salmon producing companies SalMar, Gustav Magnar Witzøe has sought to strike off on his own path and escape the shadow of the family business. Witzøe emerged into the spotlight at the age of 19 when his father transferred 47% of the company’s shares to him, making him the world’s third-youngest billionaire with an estimated net worth of some USD 2.9billion in 2018, according to Forbes Magazine. Witzøe has nevertheless quietly built up a track record as an angel investor in the technology sector, having provided financial backing for startups such as Gobi, a Snapchat challenger developed by students. He has also plowed capital into another startup, Key Butler, which targets the AirBnB rentrepreneur crowd in Scandinavia by helping them get a handle on the many moving parts involved in managing the short-term rentals. In 2017, Witzøe and a business partner invested in Solsiden, a firm that manages bar and restaurant rentals in Trondheim, further diversifying his business interests away from the family’s salmon empire.

17. Kristoffer Lande

23, CEO & Co-Founder, Gobi

A passionate advocate for entrepreneurship policy in his native Norway, Kristoffer Lande is the CEO and founder of the startup Gobitech, the firm behind Gobi, an interactive platform for videos displayed in the story format popularized by Snapchat, a social app popular with millennials. Launched in 2015, Gobi is, in fact, a Snapchat challenger and was the brainchild of Lande and 4 other students of the Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology. Originally developed so the group could send snaps or (mini videos or images) into shared streams, by 2017 Gobi had amassed 70,000 users in 100 countries worldwide, had seen more than 40 million image and video downloads and was growing at the rate of between 3,000 and 7,000 new users each month. The young startup’s prospects inspired investors such as Gustav Magnar Witzøe to offer up a total of USD 500,000 in capital in 2017, giving it a market valuation of USD 15m.

The company has offices in Silicon Valley, ground zero for high-growth tech startups, as well as in Trondheim, Norway.

18. Antanas Bakšys

21, CEO & Co-Founder, SearchNode

A precocious entrepreneur, Antanas Bakšys’ first foray into business as a young teen in 2013 saw him set up an e-commerce firm, Getpower.lt, which he sold one year later to an angel investor from the Baltic States. Having whet his appetite for entrepreneurship, Bakšys then established an intelligent search startup, SearchNode, when he was just 16 years old as part of his alma mater Kauna University of Technology’s “Startup Space” incubator program. Six years later, the firm, which specializes in search tech for e-commerce businesses, now has more than 100 clients in 13 countries and racks up annual six-digit sales. Listed by Forbes Magazine as one of the Top 30 Baltic Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2017, Bakšys describes himself as committed to adding value for customers and developing solutions that challenge traditional ways of doing things.

Apart from devoting himself to improving his expertise in the field, Bakšys lists his main interests as education, the environment, human rights, politics, poverty alleviation, and science and technology.

19. Kaarel Kotkas

23, CEO & Founder, Veriff

Kaarel Kotkas cut his entrepreneurial teeth while still a teenager in school with the co-establishment in 2013 of Sants OU, an online temp firm that matched students looking to make extra money from odd jobs with potential employers. The firm was named 2014’s third best student company in the country by Junior Achievement Estonia. Kotkas then went on to set up a small electronics firm, Bevoke Estonia OU, in 2015, the same year he co-founded the breakthrough identity verification provider startup, Veriff. The firm operates in the fintech sector and allows websites and mobile applications to authenticate users’ ID documents.

At just three years old, Veriff has already established itself as a force to be reckoned with in the field. It uses a mashup of cutting-edge technologies such as facial recognition, optical character recognition, social ID and device ID to help reduce identity fraud. The company already has 20 clients, including major banks in Estonia. In 2018, Kotkas’ firm Bevoke Estonia, snapped up a 25.9% stake in Veriff from an early-stage investor, Inbank AS, increasing Kotkas’ influence in the fast-growing startup.

20. Christina Krzyrosiak Hansen

25, Mayor of Holbaek commune

The only politician to make it to this year’s list of rising millennial stars, Christina Krzyrosiak Hansen took office on January 1, 2018, as perhaps the youngest mayor ever elected in Denmark. Although Hansen’s ascension to the mayoral post was a negotiated outcome involving other political parties in the municipal election, she scored a major personal victory, having won nearly twice as many personal votes as the incumbent.

Hansen kicked off her political career at the age of 18 when she joined the youth arm of Denmark’s Social Democratic party (DSU) in 2010, progressing to become vice president that same year. In 2012, she became the local party chair in Holbæk. She was elected to the Holbæk municipal council in 2013 and was later voted in as mayor in the next election in 2017. Given that Denmark lags behind its Nordic neighbors in terms of women’s representation in politics, Hansen represents a ray of hope that the situation may finally be changing for the better.

21. Andreas Saari

24, CEO at Slush, Co-Founder at Wave Ventures

Barely in his mid-20s, wunderkind Andreas Saari is a veteran of his native Helsinki’s startup scene. He began his immersion in the sector in 2014 as a student volunteer handing out promotional bracelets and name tags at Slush, Finland’s startup extravaganza. He quickly progressed to become the Slush core team’s Head of Startup and Investor Operations as well as Program Development. In 2017, he consolidated everything he had learned about the startup ecosystem to co-found Wave Ventures, the first student-led venture capital fund in the Nordics. Backed by an EUR 1.2m fund, the company focuses on giving fledgling startups in the pre-seed stage a much-needed kick start, even before they can attract funding from angel investors.

In 2018, Saari continued his meteoric rise in Slush to become the tech forum’s CEO, announcing the ambitious but not improbable goal of using them to nurture Finland’s next global superstar. Saari is currently studying Industrial Engineering and Management at Helsinki’s prestigious Aalto University.

22. Timmu Tõke

25, Founder & CEO, Wolf3D

Love shopping but hate the hassle of trying on clothes? Timmu Tõke’s Wolf3D has you covered.

Tõke combined his passion for virtual reality and 3D technology with his business acumen to set up Wolf3D in 2014. The firm uses 3D scanning primarily to help develop life-like avatars of people for VR, AR and game applications. Over the years, the firm raised USD 1.2m in a secondary financing round to bankroll the creation of its consumer 3D avatar technology, that uses dedicated hardware self-contained pods – similar to photo booths – and smartphone apps to create realistic 3D avatars of people for VR/AR and games. It offers ordinary people an expressway toward creating their own realistic avatars by simply downloading an app for use on their smartphones.

In 2017, the New York Times named the firm’s USD 611,000 Seedinvest campaign as one of the top 10 most successful crowdfunding efforts of that year.

23. Joel Hellermark

21, Founder & CEO, Sana Labs

As a young adult, it comes as no surprise that Joel Hellermark has elected to ride the wave of artificial intelligence applications to develop a startup – Sana Labs — that aims to personalize education based on individuals’ aptitude and learning needs by delivering just what they need when they need it. Powered by the AI buzz and the startup’s potential for radically transforming education, Sana Labs was able to raise USD 1m in seed funding in 2017. Hellermark launched Sana Labs in his native Stockholm when he was just 19, an achievement that earned him the title of Entrepreneur of the Year from the business weekly Veckans Affärer. The publication also named the company one of the 15 Most Innovative Edtech Companies in Sweden.

Hellermark’s ambition and persistence led him to teach himself programming at the age of 13. He launched his first enterprise – based on an application for video recommendations – at the age of 16 and developed the early algorithm for Sana Labs while still a senior in high school.

24. Sophie Trelles-Tvede

25, CEO and Co-founder, invisibobble GmbH

The young Danish entrepreneur’s backstory follows the classic trope of “necessity being the mother of invention”. Sophie Trelles-Tvede tells the story of resorting to a phone cord to tie up her hair during her student days at Warwick Business School in the UK. Thus was born the Invisibobble, the nearly ubiquitous hair accessory preferred by young adults because it doesn’t cause tension headaches or that silly kink in the hair after being worn for hours. Following extensive testing of a prototype in 2012, Trelles-Tvede went on to co-launch the company of the same name in 2013 at the age of 19. By 2017, the young firm employed some 100 people and had sold close to 100 million units of the whimsical spiral-shaped hair tie in 70 countries worldwide.

In 2016, Forbes Magazine named Trelles-Tvede and her co-founder Felix Haffa on its list of 30 Under 30 Entrepreneurs in Europe in the Retail and E-Commerce category.

25. Linda Sinka

24, Co-Founder, Partnerships, Learn IT

Tech crusader meets social justice campaigner in the person of Linda Sinka, co-founder of Learn IT, an extra-curricular coding lab for school kids. Since its establishment in 2014, the program has expanded beyond the single school where it was initially available and now operates throughout Latvia. The program has exposed some 500 young students to the basics of coding so far. In addition to introducing youngsters to technology and programming, Learn IT also coaches teachers on how to incorporate tech and programming languages into their curriculum. Learn IT has also onboarded major IT and telecoms firms to sponsor numerous coding events, including 100 Scholarships for Girls in IT, which aims to encourage girls to pursue careers in STEM.

In May 2016, Forbes Magazine Riga nominated Sinka to its list of “30 Under 30” leaders likely to shape the future of Latvia over the next 50 years. Later that same year, the Swedish Embassy in Riga recognized her work by naming her Young Entrepreneur of the Year at its annual Swedish Business Awards event.

Criteria for the Ranking

There were 5 essential criteria for evaluating candidates:

• Profile: an active leader who is a founder, co-founder, or top executive of his/her business, an entrepreneur, business leader, author, blogger, or other thought leader who is remarkable in his/her field AND 25-years old or younger (as of 2018).
• Work: this was the driving criteria for our jury members to evaluate potential candidates. What is he/she working on? Why is it of interest? Factors include the originality, practicality, reach, and impact of his/her work.
• Responsibility: the individual must be intentionally creating a positive socio-cultural and/or industry and/or environmental impact. This can be a personal effort or a professional effort, depending on the individual.
• Results: the significance of his/her contribution to the world and/or industry so far. Factors include the development stage of a business or idea, the amount of press/media coverage, idea offshoots, his/her impact on the chosen field and/or on consumers.
• Future potential: the longevity of the individual’s idea/business/entrepreneurial spirit. Essentially, this criterion questions the likelihood of an individual to change his/her field over the next 50 years? Factors include financial viability, operational scope, internationalization plans, etc.

Candidates were submitted from nine countries – Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia – based on a national jury panel. From dozens of nominations, the final 25 candidates include entrepreneurs, business leaders, and activists that have made outstanding contributions to society by the age of 25 or less.

It is often said that youth is wasted on the young, but this list of 25 young adults proves that they are the ones with the drive and ingenuity to make real change happen. Encapsulated in these 25 people are individuals working to integrate technology into classrooms, to using computing programming to reduce food waste, to redefining the feminine voice in politics, to conquering the fashion accessory market. The world is going through a paradigm shift; our newest generation of leaders has grown up in a fast-paced world of technology and are integrating its lessons for survival into the new business models of the future, which has become an indicator of successful societies.

The final 25 candidates reflect those individuals who have made outstanding achievements at such a young age, as well as commendable efforts to challenge traditions and unapologetically stand up for their professional passions (and create positive change). The challenge for the selection committee was comparing the diverse industries and backgrounds of each individual; no two stories are the same, and no two people are equally comparable, so the whole picture needs to be taken into account.

Jury

Our distinguished jury panel has worked with Nordic Business Report since the beginning of 2018 to carefully craft this list of 25 young movers and shakers. They were recruited based on their networks connecting them to prominent young adults, and their engagement with the startup communities and similar organizations. Their tasks included compiling long lists from their national countries of youths fitting the criteria and then working together to create a shortlist base on conversations and consensus.

These were the members of our 2018 jury.

Finland

• Lauri Valtonen, National President, JCI Finland – Suomen Nuorkauppakamarit Ry
• Emilia Koikkalainen, EVP of Community, JCI Finland – Suomen Nuorkauppakamarit Ry
• Jan Ameri Partner, Chief Innovation Officer, ArcticStartup
• Maria Fodor, Country Manager, Valuer.ai
• Voitto Kangas, CEO, Maria 01

Denmark

• Lars Juhl, CEO, Presidents Institute
• Bjarke Wolmar, Vice President, City of Odense

Iceland

• Kristjan Ingi Mikaelsson, Managing Director, Icelandic Blockchain Foundation
• Alda Karen, CEO & owner, AK Consulting

Estonia

• Anu Oks, Managing Director, Estonian Business Angels Network
• Henry Arnhold, President, JCI Estonia
• Kersti Loor, CEO, Junior Achievement Estonia
• Tanel Rebane, Director of Trade Development Agency, Enterprise Estonia
• Katre Purga, Start-up Hub Manager, Tallinn University of Technology

Latvia

• Aiga Kabjonoka, Managing Director, Latvian Business Angels Network
• Jekaterina Šime, National President, JCI Latvia
• Janis Krievans, CEO, Junior Achievement Latvia
• Lina Marta Sarma, CEO, TechHub Riga

Lithuania

• Stepas Šafranauskas, 2018 President, JCI Lithuania
• Roberta Rudokiene, Head, Startup Lithuania
• Andzelika Rusteikiene, CEO, Junior Achievement Lithuania
• Marius Parescius‚ President, Lithuanian ICT Cluster

Sweden

• Fredric Tegebro, Coordinator, Young Entrepreneurs of Sweden
• Mathias Mellgren, Project Manager of the Young Entrepreneurs Network, Swedish Federation of Business Owners (Företagarna)
• Stefan FalkBoman, Co-founder, UngDrive / YoungDrive
• Niclas Carlsson, Founder & CEO, Founders Alliance

Norway

• Maja Adriaensen, CEO, Angel Challenge
• Christoffer Omberg, CEO & co-founder, Oslo Business Forum
• Marius Røed Wang, CMO & co-founder, Oslo Business Forum
• Yvonne Fosser, HR Director, Innovation Norway

Russia

• Andrey Sikorskiy, Marketing Director, RBC Group
• Yury R. Mitin, Managing Director, Startup Academy SKOLKOVO
• Mike Melanin, Project Director, BANKEX