We support the next generation of builders.

Startuplifers enables Nordic talents to outgrow their potential

Startuplifers connects talented Nordic tech, design and business students and graduates with the best startups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Our story started in 2011 by a group of students from Aalto University’s entrepreneurial community.

They wanted to change the negative attitude towards entrepreneurship and make it more accessible to emerging talent.

With this mission in mind, we’ve sent over 250 ambitious students and graduates to fast-growing startups in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn from the world’s largest tech ecosystem. On their return back to the Nordics, many of the program’s 250+ alumni have played an essential role building fast-growing Nordic startups like Wolt, Smartly and many more.

The goal is to help them find the confidence to create world-changing innovations themselves. And that’s why we do it not-for-profit.

SINCE 2011

Our story began in 2011 at Aalto University in Finland.

250+ TALENT SENT

Over 250 talent sent to work at the world's most promising startups.

120+ STARTUPS

We have sent talent to over 120 startups in Silicon Valley and beyond

This is how we get you hired

1. Pick a position and apply

Choose a role (or as many as you like!) that interests you the most and send us a brief application.

3. Ace the company interview

It’s time to impress the company. We’ll provide you with resources to be the best version of yourself on paper and in person.

2. Have a chat with your recruiter

If there’s a match, we’ll do the initial interview to learn more about you and to make sure you’re well prepared before introducing you to the company.

4. Get the visa and start working!

Great job, the company wants to hire you! We’ll take care of the visa, flight ticket, and legal stuff, so you can start preparing for the experience of a lifetime.

Hear our alumni tell their stories

I worked at Petasense as a Business Development Manager. I managed our sales throughout the whole funnel and built it through emailing, calling, online webinars, face-to-face product presentations to potential customers. My tasks also included negotiating deals with customers and attending relevant conferences to build market and competitor knowledge. One of my favorite tasks was collaborating with product development and the engineering team on customer requests.

I worked at Coinbase as a Product Designer. Coinbase is a Y Combinator company that builds a platform for transacting digital currencies. At Coinbase I did UX design and web design for Coinbase’s consumer product and marketing website. I also spearheaded Coinbase’s user research initiative by organizing and conducting user testing for their web and mobile products. I ended up working for the company for almost two years. The learnings have had a massive impact on my career.

My first project at Notable Labs was to build a new backend service for storing data produced in our drug research. In parallel with this project, I also did both back- and frontend work on the internal web-based tools used by the scientists. Towards the end of my internship, I started researching machine learning models to automate a crucial bottleneck in the data analysis process, which was made possible by the data infrastructure I had already built.

Being a member of Metabase’s hyper-technical team was a fascinating experience. I deeply enjoyed the level of autonomy and social support I received during my internship. I worked on almost all aspects of our frontend and got my hands dirty with the Clojure backend as well! My proudest achievement was coming up with a novel way to do frontend testing which had a huge positive impact on the stability and reliability of our product.

I worked at Upbeat PR as a software engineer. Because of our small team, I had a large number of various tasks from machine learning to UX designing. However, my main tasks were under data science-oriented backend development. I improved data scraping from the web, implemented various backend interfaces, and created a logic to match journalists for the clients’ needs. I was surprised how free I was to select the next thing to work with.

I worked on the customer facing web application, and because of our small team, I had a major ownership on it. Basically, all OneSignal dashboard feature requests and bugfixes were assigned to me. It was thrilling to continuously ship code to over 110,000 clients as feedback quickly found its way back to me.

Miika Jokinen

Business Development Manager, Petasense

Satu Peltola

Product Designer, Coinbase

Oskari Mantere

Software Engineer, Notable Labs

Atte Keinänen

Software Developer, Metabase

Joel Huttunen

Software Engineer, Upbeat PR

Juuso Haavisto

Software Engineer, OneSignal

What our partners say

“When I first discovered Startuplifers, I thought it was too good to be true. The entire process has been straight-forward and efficient and the quality of candidates is very high."

"We care about quality, and with Startuplifers we’re able to get people who write higher quality code than the fresh graduates coming from the top universities here in California.”

“Their whole process was great! We had a 20-minute call to talk about our talent needs, and Startuplifers presented us the perfect candidate that they had hand-picked based on our chat."

"We’ve hosted two excellent interns in the past two years, and both have had a great impact on our company from day one. Startuplifers makes the whole process pain-free, which is a breath of fresh air after dealing with the visa issues.”

“I hope no other companies find out about this amazing program.”