Vaadin Raises $6 Million For Open Source Development


During this funding round of Vaadin, Finnish Industry Investment increases its stake in Vaadin by joining eEquity as investors. Photo: Vaadin.

Finnish Industry Investment and Swedish eEquity have invested $6 million in Vaadin, an open source company building components and tools for web application developers. With the new investment, the company having turnover of $10 million plans to boost its R&D activities and ecosystem development to expand their selection of developer tools.

Partner at eEquity and previous co-founder of boo.com, Patrik Hedelin, says they’ve had Vaadin under their radar for years, since their portfolio companies have been using the products to increase productivity among their developers.

“Vaadin is a market leading server side Java framework with a very strong technology offering which is now ready to be offered on a larger scale. The company has been growing 30% per annum historically under profitability. Vaadin has recently launched the sale of premium tools that has been really well received in the market where we expect the recurring revenues to grow quickly,” summarizes Hedelin.

The numbers are impressive – The company’s user-interface tools are used in 40% of Fortune 100 companies and by over 150 000 developers worldwide. Their products enable businesses to replace most of their desktop applications with standard based web applications that run on all major mobile and desktop browsers.

“The web development ecosystem is going through rapid changes due to emerging web component standards at the same time as both JavaScript and Java as programming languages are taking inspiration from each other,” says the CEO of Vaadin, Joonas Lehtinen.

Earlier investors in Turku-based Vaadin include Aboa Venture Management and Finnish Industry Investment. The company has already over 100 employees in offices located in Turku, Helsinki, Berlin and San Jose.