We ran the workflows we now back.
One people analytics exit. One LMS scaled to 3M users. One NLP pipeline parsing 2M CVs a month. Sammalkko's investment thesis was written from inside enterprise HR, not from watching it.
Antti Virtanen
Managing Partner
Built and sold a Helsinki-based HR analytics SaaS (120 enterprise clients across the Nordics, acquired 2019). Previously Head of People Analytics at a Finnish telecoms operator with 4,000 employees. Founded Sammalkko in 2021.
Antti spent five years running the people analytics function at a 4,000-person Finnish telecoms company — which meant owning the gap between raw HRIS data and the workforce planning decisions the leadership team actually needed to make. He founded a workforce intelligence platform for Nordic enterprise HR in 2014, scaling it to 120 enterprise clients across Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway before a UK workforce management group acquired it in 2019. Sammalkko was founded in 2021 with a specific conviction: that the tools he'd spent a decade selling and building would look fundamentally different once ML replaced rule-based logic at the core.
Elina Korhonen
General Partner
9 years in enterprise HR software — product lead at a Finnish LMS scaled to 3M users, then VP Product at a Berlin-based talent marketplace. Joined Sammalkko in 2022.
Elina spent four years as product lead at a Helsinki-based learning management platform, scaling it from 400,000 to over three million users across Nordic educational institutions and enterprise L&D programs. She moved to Berlin to lead product at a talent marketplace, where she ran the GTM motion into German and Dutch enterprise HR buyers — and learned how different the procurement dynamic is when you're selling a hiring-adjacent product versus a learning tool. She joined Sammalkko in 2022 because the founders she most wanted to work with were building early-stage, not growing late-stage.
Jaakko Laine
Principal
ML engineer, 4 years building NLP pipelines for a Nordic job matching platform (2M CVs/month). Completed a venture fellowship at a Helsinki accelerator in 2023. Leads technical diligence at Sammalkko.
Jaakko spent four years as a machine learning engineer at a Nordic job matching platform, responsible for the NLP infrastructure that parsed and ranked over two million CVs per month. He led the shift from rule-based keyword extraction to embedding-based semantic retrieval — a migration that surfaced how much signal was being discarded by the old approach — and built the model evaluation pipeline that scored ranking quality against structured recruiter feedback. He completed a venture fellowship at a Helsinki accelerator in 2023, then joined Sammalkko full-time. At Sammalkko, he leads technical diligence and works directly with portfolio founders on ML architecture decisions, particularly matching models, inference cost, and the design of human feedback loops for HR applications.
For Founders
If you're a seed-stage founder in AI HR tech, here is what working with Sammalkko looks like past the term sheet.
- Direct enterprise introductions — Antti's network reaches CHRO and VP People contacts at 80+ Nordic and Central European companies
- Peer-level ML architecture reviews from Jaakko — NLP pipeline design, semantic matching tradeoffs, model evaluation at hiring-scale
- Enterprise product and GTM support from Elina — packaging, pricing model, procurement navigation, and the product surface decisions that determine whether IT security will sign off
- Structured senior hiring support before an agency is needed
- Growth-stage fundraising preparation: data room, investor narrative, and introductions to funds actively tracking the AI HR tech category