Ralf Wahlsten

General Partner

,

Helsinki

Data Infrastructure
Open Source
What is best for the company?

Ralf is a co-founder and chairman of the board of OpenOcean, Ralf holds board memberships at RapidMiner, Nordic Telecom and HeavenHR. Before fate brought him together with the rest of the Swedish-speaking Finns in Helsinki to build OpenOcean, he had been an active angel investor, as well as a key advisor to the MySQL founders from the company’s inception, helping them develop their first business plan, strengthening the Board, and hiring the CEO – up until the exit to Sun Microsystems. With a Management Consulting background, Ralf has broad experience in areas like Corporate and Business Strategy Development, Business process reengineering and Marketing Strategy from top consulting firms like AT Kearney, Booz-Allen and Indevo. Ralf is also a co-founder of MariaDB. He holds a Master of Science degree in Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology (Aalto University).

News highlights

All news
4
min read

Hygraph Raises $30M Series B Funding Round for Federated Content Platform

OpenOcean portfolio company Hygraph, a leading federated content platform, announced the closure of a $30 million Series B funding round led by One Peak. OpenOcean is delighted to continue to be part of the journey since it led Hygraph’s Series A, and welcomes the participation of both existing and new investors, including Peak, SquareOne, and business angel Boris Lokschin, Co-Founder and CEO of Spryker Systems.
4
min read

"Despite a difficult market, LPs remain bullish on the opportunity” – A Q&A with OpenOcean’s Strategic Advisor Lisa Edgar

At the beginning of the year, Lisa Edgar joined our team as our Strategic Advisor. We sat down with Lisa for a Q&A to pick her brain and hear her unique perspective on various topics related to the startup ecosystem and venture capital industry. From her thoughts on the current state of the European venture capital market to her belief in the importance of ESG, Lisa offers invaluable insights for entrepreneurs and investors alike.
3
min read

How Supermetrics, a company with 40% annual growth, leads with two CEOs?

Our portfolio company Supermetrics, , announced in early 2023 that it is moving to a shared CEO model – a practice used by roaringly successful companies like Netflix, Atlassian and Workday. To introduce the model, Anssi and Supermetrics better, we asked him a few crisp questions on the topic.