Individual Grants

The purpose of individual grants is to advance the foundation's mission by directly helping people wishing to become entrepreneurs in Finland.

Supporting first time entrepreneurs or early in entrepreneurial career.

Criteria

A personal grant can be granted to a person who is fully committed to working on their startup idea during the grant period. The grant is intended for those who have not yet founded their company and would need some time to further research e.g. the market and idea.

The grant is intended to support the grantee for three months totalling to 6000 euros (please note that this is likely taxable income). In addition to the money the grantee will receive support from the peer group as well as the foundation during the grant period.

In the evaluation of the grants projects with an impact focus will be prioritized.

Evaluation and Decision

The applications will first be evaluated by the grant working group. After the initial evaluation, some candidates will be called to an interview in which the idea, plans and motivation will be discussed in more detail. After this the grant working group will form their suggestion to the board of the Foundation which will then decide on the grants.

The applications for personal grants are open continuously and the applications will be processed quarterly.

The application deadlines for 2024 are as follows: 15.1., 1.3., 1.6., 1.9. and 1.12. The interviews for the best applicants will be held within a week of the application deadline and final decisions will be communicated within two weeks. The start date for the three months is expected to be about a month from the application deadline, unless otherwise explicitly stated in the application.

How to apply

The application must include:

  • Description of initial startup idea

    • Explain your idea or the industry you want to explore further

    • We expect to see ideas that are scalable or a mindset of finding a scalable idea in the space you want to explore further

    • When we talk about startups we mean companies that have the potential to grow to 100 million euros in revenues in under ten years

  • Why you started to work around this problem

    • Describe your motivation towards building a company around this idea or in this industry

  • 3 month plan

    • Tell us what you plan to do & achieve in the three months

    • The plan should have clear timelines for areas to accomplish or tasks

  • Time commitment

    • Explain your situation, do you have any other commitments? How do you plan to organize your working time?

  • Plan for future incl. funding

    • What are you going to do after the three months, is your plan to raise capital or are you planning to get your first customers before?

    • How do you plan to organize your time after the grant?

  • CV / Experience

    • Attach your CV or describe your experience in some other way

  • Budget

    • Outline your thoughts on how you are going to spend the grant money

    • Please note that you can use the grant for covering cost of living or testing your idea, but you cannot use it for company costs e.g. hiring someone

We will hold interviews with the most successful applicants before deciding on the grants.

Please review the FAQ below for most common questions. If something remains unclear, please send an email to grants@startup-saatio.fi.

If you would like to chat with someone about your idea or refine your process for idea validation etc. Kiuas labs can help you even before you send in your application. Read more & jump on a call here: https://www.kiuas.com/labs

For the Grantees

The grants will be paid beforehand or as negotiated, to the bank account assigned by the person / entity receiving the grant. The person / entity receiving the grant is not employed by the foundation. The payment of the grant can be stopped, withdrawn or charged back if the circumstances by which the grant was granted have changed.

The decisions on the grant applications will be communicated directly to the applicants. In addition the people and projects who received the grants will be published on the Startup Foundation website. The grantees will be required to deliver a report on the usage of the grant and what they have achieved with the help of the grant.

FAQ

  • For teams both have to fill in their own applications. Please name the applications the same. You can have the same three month plan, but don’t copy paste the time commitment, your motivation towards the idea or your budget. Please include a clear explanation of your roles / responsibilites of everyone applying.

    We’ll evaluate the applications together, unless we see a clear discrepancy with the time commitment.

  • We’ll try to keep everyone in the process up to date as well as we can. We’ll go through the applications once per quarter and will try to get the decisions out in a couple weeks after we start the processing.

  • The personal grants have a fixed amount, so unfortunately bigger or smaller grants are not currently possible.

  • We only fund projects and individuals supporting the Finnish startup ecosystem.

  • No, both are on the same level. We do see that it is often easier to write a good application with a clear idea as it's easier to think about a concrete 3 month plan. Our advice to those who don't have an idea yet is to think about the process of getting a scalable idea and including measurable goals like number of meetings you're aiming for to make it more concrete.

  • No, the grant is intended to cover your living costs. You may include some costs related to researching your idea, e.g. a form you use to collect data. You cannot cover company costs with the grant.