Northbound Scaleups helps Swedish, Finnish and Estonian companies enter new markets

The Northbound Scaleups growth programme (NBSCALE for short) has progressed to its third and final round. The initiative’s Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian organizers are once again looking for fifteen new company teams to join the programme.

NBSCALE provides tools, peer support and expert mentoring for selected companies to enhance their conditions for scaling up and successfully entering new international markets – all free of charge.

“If a growth-oriented company has already found a product-market fit in its home market, meaning it has found paying customers for its product or service, it is the perfect time to set your sights abroad. That’s where we can help,” says Business Turku’s Project Manager Johanna Puhtila.

Since the spring of 2023, thirty companies from three countries have had the opportunity to hone their internationalization strategies with the help of NBSCALE’s expert coaches and mentors.

The participating companies represent a wide variety of industries. They are all focused on their own specific product or service, and they all have their own goals and ambitions for going global. Thanks to the new collaborative effort, the programme partners have been able to pool their resources to help these companies take the next steps in preparing to enter new markets.

DevUp sets sights on going international

Swedish DevUp Solutions was accepted to the first round of NBSCALE back in 2023. The company develops a continuous review tool designed to improve developers’ insights into the security, compliance, and maintenance aspects of their applications. We sat down with DevUp founder and NBSCALE alumnus Mattias Lögdberg to discuss their journey towards new markets so far.

“We started the company in the early 2021,” Lögdberg begins. “We built the proof of concept, brought in customers and things started moving quickly. We got a lot of support from Movexum, an incubator based in Gävle. They saw our potential, and also that we were doing something different from everyone else – our competition was focused on more or less traditional analysis and review.”

DevUp secured a comfortable number of local Swedish customers early, but the drive to go international was always there. The customer base for a highly specialized software solution in a single country is always rather limited, but the universal problems solved by DevUp’s product are known to potential customers across the globe.

The company decided to set their sights on foreign markets as soon as possible. While the goal of going international was pushing the team forward, they did not yet have concrete plans on how to approach new markets. “We were thinking along the lines of ‘let’s just pick a country and then just do something there’,” Lögdberg says.

Northbound Scaleups combines the resources of three organizers

This is around the time when Sweden’s Movexum, alongside Business Turku in Finland and Tehnopol in Estonia, were gearing up for their new joint growth programme, Northbound Scaleups. Offering an informative journey of concrete steps towards growth and internationalization, the programme features practical guidance on market analysis and investment rounds, getting to know potential target markets firsthand, personalized growth mentoring and access to a pool of industry-specific expert mentors, and valuable opportunities for collaboration and networking.

DevUp’s contacts at Movexum encouraged them to apply for the programme and the opportunity immediately caught the team’s attention. Still, their expectations were set low: the team planned to pull through the agenda, maybe learn a thing or two along the way, and then move on.

Rather quickly, DevUp’s team realized that there are lot of quirks and unknowns in expanding to new market areas. “As soon as we started to actually talk a little bit more with our contacts in other countries, we realized that we needed to understand the bigger picture a bit better,” Lögdberg continues.

“We also gained a lot of knowledge about the confusing legal aspects, and how different it is to do business in another country and so on. We had a lot of discussions and realized that we need to look this through more thoroughly.”

Northbound Scaleups reinforced the team’s readiness for going international and helped them perfect their strategy. Especially the Market Discovery Mission, where participating companies can set foot in another country (with travel expenses covered by the organizers!) to meet potential clients, customers and collaborators was invaluable to DevUp.

Participating at the NBSCALE events and meetups in Gävle, Turku, and Tallinn were two founding members of the company. After each excursion, they then relayed their learnings to the rest of the team. Lögdberg appreciated the combination of approaches in the programme, from the expert talks to the workshop sessions and from mentoring meetings to the market discovery journeys. “In the end I think the most important part was getting out of the daily business, going somewhere, getting inspired, and talking to other companies.”

Face-to-face meetups facilitate knowledge sharing

A key element of the NBSCALE programme is that the events take place in-person in the three cities across the Central Baltic region. Project Manager Johanna Puhtila emphasizes the effect this has on learning and making new contacts; “in our feedback survey, the networking, exchange of ideas and peer support between participating companies, all taking place alongside the actual pre-planned agenda, really stood out. This kind of face-to-face approach is extremely effective, as similar contacts and ideas just don’t happen in remote meetings in front of a laptop,” says Puhtila.

DevUp’s Lögdberg echoes this sentiment. “If we would have had this information sharing remotely, you’d probably watch it halfway through and gain very, very little from it.”

In Lögdberg’s experience, the best part of the programme is the opportunity to share experiences. No matter what kind of product or service the participating companies are working on, they all share a similar goal. “It’s very beneficial to talk to others doing the same thing you are, because you do bump into the same issues even if you’re in completely different industries,” he says.

“My tip is to take the opportunity to just talk to the other companies, and also the organizers and the speakers. There’s so much knowledge to be shared.”

Going forward

To ensure no accumulated knowledge goes underutilized, the organizers invited first-round veteran Lögdberg to share his experiences with the second batch of companies taking part in the programme. While preparing his presentation, it became clearer just how much of an impact the programme had had on DevUp: “In the beginning we just had customers in Sweden, and a vague idea of going abroad. Then by the end of the journey, we were in talks with contacts in Germany, Belgium, and Norway.”

“I actually got goosebumps thinking about how far we’ve come. I didn’t believe that in the beginning.”

Currently still a four-person team, the company has now received invaluable support in perfecting its tailor-made strategy for expansion.

What does the future have in store for DevUp?

“Thanks in part to NBSCALE, we’ve now built a solid platform for being able to scale up, and right now we’re looking to hire dedicated sales people.”

Apply today

Interested in going global? Apply for the next round of the free-of-charge Northbound Scaleups internationalization program!