Inven celebrates 1,000 M&A deal-sourcing customers with Finland’s AI Startup of the Year award

Inven, the award-winning Finnish AI startup reinvigorating global deal sourcing, is celebrating its journey from zero to 1,000 leading M&A customers by being named Finnish AI startup of the year. The announcement comes as Inven reports strong growth across the United States and Europe despite relatively flat M&A volumes.

Unusually, Inven is led by a Generation Z founding team and supported by a Helsinki-based workforce of 80+ employees with an average age of 28. The company attributes its pace of execution to an office-first culture aligned with U.S. business hours. The model enables real-time collaboration on-site, 30-minute meeting rules, and rapid decision-making — all contributing to Inven’s accelerated product and commercial development.

Inven also recently placed highly in the Sifted Future 50 (Top 10). Last spring, the company announced an €11M+ funding round to support its U.S. expansion and platform development. Inven’s 1000-strong customer base was reached just three years after the company was founded, a milestone that typically takes almost a decade in the deal-sourcing platform sector.

Inven market data shows that global M&A activity has remained largely stable over the past year. Yet the company’s rapid customer adoption highlights a shift in how investors are sourcing and evaluating opportunities.

Thomas Archer, Investment Analyst at Netherlands-based private equity firm Lexar Partners, notes that Inven has helped their team significantly increase sourcing speed and book more meetings:

“Before Inven, we’d pick a sector, manually compile lists, inspect websites, and use translation tools – anything we could to figure out if a company matched our thesis. It worked, but it wasn’t scalable. Now, within 30 minutes, we source and contact multiple targets. That just wasn’t achievable before.” 

“Our customers operate in increasingly global markets, and they need to identify and understand companies far beyond their home geography,” said Niilo Pirttijärvi, founder and CEO of Inven. “AI makes this possible at a fundamentally new speed. Crossing 1,000 customers shows that the market is ready for a different kind of deal-sourcing infrastructure — one that works across borders, in real time, and at the pace today’s investment teams require.”