News from our network

All news
What is best for the company?

Ralf Wahlsten

Chairman

,

Helsinki

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).

Investment theme coverage

Data Infrastructure
Open Source

Team

Investment Team

Portfolio

News highlights

All news
9
min read

What we’ve learned from the front lines of AI-enabled services

Last November, we laid out a vision for AI-native services: businesses rebuilt from the ground up to combine the margins of software with the resilience and depth of services markets. Since then, we have taken dozens of first meetings, explored more than 15 verticals, backed our first deals, and sharpened our thesis along the way.
7
min read

Enterprise automation market industry update: automation after GenAI

At OpenOcean, we’ve long believed in automation software’s potential. It’s been a core theme in our investment focus for years, giving us early and continued exposure to exciting developments in the field.
7
min read

How to manage high-performance individuals in 2025

Back in 2007, we held a short presentation while working at MySQL about a type of person we called a "Super Gold-Collar Worker." These were highly skilled individuals in growth companies who had become essential to business operations.