On the sidelines of the recent Tech Tour Growth 50 Europe event in Paris, we had a chance to sit down with Timo Toikkanen, an early investor in and advisor to, and these days chief executive officer of Finland-based professional mixed reality company Varjo.

Toikannen talks about the origins and early, R&D-focussed years of the deep tech scale-up, lessons learned on the road to commercialisation, and the ongoing transition into a period of finding solid product-market fit and scaling the business across various verticals.

Varjo's former President and COO turned CEO also talks about making contrarian technology and business choices that turned out to be the right ones, the heated competition with giants like Apple and Meta through focus and specialisation, and delivers more insights into the B2B  mixed/virtual reality space.

Keep listening after that, though, because Toikannen also talks about the potential of building global, category-leading deep tech companies from Europe today.

Spoiler alert: he is skeptical about it.

Enjoy the interview!

You can listen to it below, on our dedicated podcast page or your favourite streaming platform.

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 100+ 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 100+ 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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