11 Sep 2024
One of EIC Scaling Club's most significant perquisites is the outstanding community of industry experts willing to share their knowledge and provide mentorship. The New Space Group President Tero Vauraste – a widely experienced professional from Finland eager to contribute to the growth of European deep tech scale-ups – is one of them.
From Arctic expert to global thinker
With a career spanning the military, academia, and industry, Tero brings a unique blend of expertise. Currently a PhD student at the National Defense University of Finland, he exemplifies how building knowledge is a lifelong journey.
About 15 years ago, after holding various leadership positions in logistics and aviation, Tero's work deeply intertwined with the Arctic and the technologies related to the field. This turning point led Tero into the dynamic world of startups and scale-ups, including the involvement with the Arctic Economic Council from its inception.
Tero also served a decade as the CEO of the Finnish icebreaker company Arctia. While at Arctia, he came up with the idea of offering full-service ice management, including satellite images and icebreaker services. This led to Tero's involvement in ICEYE, a fast-growing international New Space company, where he still serves as a Senior Business Development Advisor.
Add serving as a Director and Member of the Board for the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC), advising Europe's biggest quantum tech company, IQM, and several other roles, and you get almost the whole picture of just how incredibly vast Tero's experience and expertise are.
Tero's also a Global Fellow in a polar program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars – a non-partisan think tank supporting decision-makers in the U.S. And, this summer, he's been contributing to a soon-to-be-published book about developments of the Arctic security, politics, and policies regarding technology and logistics, primarily in the maritime domain. At this point, we had to ask him if he ever sleeps, to which he laughed and responded affirmatively.
Helping Europe stand on its own feet through innovations
Prior to becoming the President of the New Space Group, Tero was already involved with the EIC Scaling Club for several years as the main point of contact and liaison officer for ICEYE, which was a member of the Club and has received several EIC Scaling Club awards. While representing the company, Tero started to get involved in the Club's future endeavor discussions.
“It became apparent that there is a need for a New Space-related team, which is now in the making. And then I was honored to be invited to become a mentor and the president of the New Space Group, which I happily accepted.”
Tero shares concern that Europe’s investment power still lags behind that of the U.S. While this is a well-known issue, Tero emphasizes that Europe has to stand more on its own feet, building innovations, creating new businesses, and turning startups into unicorns through collective action.
Asked about things he wishes to offer EIC Scaling Club's scale-ups as a Group President, Tero names several. “Nokia's collapse in Finland is a great example of how crises can be turned into opportunities. Nokia's unemployed engineers started to act as entrepreneurs, and that resulted in a good number of tech companies we now see flourishing.” Tero adds that this Finnish entrepreneurial example is one thing that he'd be happy to bring to the EIC Scaling Club's table.
More potential gains for scale-ups include Tero's wide network of connections within the space industry as a former member of the board at the EARSC and extensive experience growing startups from the idea stage to flourishing companies with unicorn ambitions.
Scale-ups looking to find a coach in Tero are also in luck here: “I'm a former international basketball referee, and I'm coaching referees of the Finnish basketball league. Coaching is in many ways similar to mentoring, hence, this is also an experience that I can help the scale-ups with.”
Be brave and be bold
While one may think that an expert like Tero has nothing left to learn, he views the Group President role as an essential learning opportunity for himself.
“I look forward to expanding my network and getting to know investors, companies, and entrepreneurs I haven't met before. Also – learning from other Club members, both from investors and founders. Learning is a lifelong journey, and one is never ready.”
Tero ends our conversation by inspiring EIC Scaling Club’s scale-ups: “Believe in yourself, trust yourself, and get to know the experts. Have two ears and one mouth. And make Europe stand on its own feet by developing your ideas, creating tech innovations, and, most importantly, working hard to grow your companies.”
About the EIC Scaling Club
The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.
The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.
The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.
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