Taneli Tikka

Taneli Tikka (born 8 March 1978, Savitaipale, Finland) is a Finnish serial entrepreneur and IT influencer.

Tikka studied software engineering at a school which is now known as the Metropolia University of Applied Sciences.

While studying, he started to work for Nokia as a design engineer.

In 1999 he stopped his studies as he started his first company with his friends.

Taika Technologies Ltd. specialised in digital- and multimedia-based social networking solutions.

The company went bankrupt in 2002 and Tikka continued his studies at the Helsinki School of Economics, where he graduated First in Academic Standing of this class from the Executive MBA programme in 2004.

After Taika Technology's bankruptcy Tikka worked at WM-data (now CGI) and at Ruukki Group (now Afarak Group) from 2003 to 2006.

Then he was offered a task at unprofitable Magenta company.

Magenta Sites was the hosting and IT services company behind the global distribution of the Star Wreck movie, and also the long time hosting partner for Habbo Hotel). Tikka worked in Magenta over the period from 2003 to 2007.

In 2005, Tikka started at Dynamoid where he was responsible for IRC-Galleria's marketing and strategy, the following year he was appointed as Dynamoid's CEO.

In 2007 IRC-Galleria was sold for 12.5 million euros to Sulake Corporation, the company behind Habbo Hotel.

After that Tikka was hired as COO at Dopplr (2007 - 2009) with e.g. Lisa Sounio and Marko Ahtisaari who were among Dopplr founders.

The service's idea was to save the business travellers' network so that they know who of their friends are living in the area they are visiting or who of their contacts are travelling to the same destination at the same time as they are.

It also showed the local restaurants or shops recommended by other users.

From 2008 to 2009 Tikka was CEO at RunToShop, a social shopping startup.

Nokia acquired Dopplr in September 2009.

In 2009, Tikka started as a member of the Soprano Plc (NASDAQ OMX listed public company) Board of Directors and in 2011 he was appointed as company's Executive Vice President and was in charge of their web solutions division.

From 2010 to 2011 Tikka was Health Puzzle's CEO.

Tikka is one of the TLD Registry founders and was its chairman of the board from 2011 to 2014.

In early 2012 Tikka was promoted to Chief Operating Officer of Soprano Plc.

Tikka was working in Soprano until 2012.

Tikka was one of the co-founders of the Startup Sauna Foundation.

Its purpose is to help young promising companies.

Startup Sauna had a 1,500 square meter co-working space on Aalto University's campus in Otaniemi and it was the main-organizer of Slush, the largest startup conference in Northern Europe.

Tikka was acting as Startup Sauna and Summer of Startups programs' coach.

In 2012, Tikka assumed the position of CEO of Wunderkraut Finland, a company specialised in web and application development.

At the same time, he was appointed to the executive management team and Board of the Wunderkraut Group and became one of the private shareholders in the company.

Tikka worked at Wunderkraut until 2013.

In September 2013 Tikka announced that ICANN granted the company a global monopoly for two Chinese top-level domains.

The company sold exclusively two domains meaning ".online" and ".Chinese website", written in Chinese characters.

The domain names are used in the same way as, for example, extensions .com and .net.

The rights for selling were given by ICANN organization, which has the right to manage the Internet addresses worldwide.

Tikka was appointed Head of Industrial Internet at Tieto Corporation in May 2014, a position in which he was able to influence the establishment of the new unit.

It operated within the company very much like a startup.

The unit was organised according to the Lean Innovation model.

The unit had its own administrative system and enjoyed a high degree of autonomy.

Tieto's CEO hopes that the culture of the Industrial Internet unit will exercise a positive influence on Tieto's corporate culture in general.

Tikka started as a CEO of a Finnish stated-owned enterprise called Valtion kehitysyhtiö Vake Oy in June 2018.

Vake's purpose is to create Finnish Clusters of Innovation using new technology like Artificial intelligence.

His position as Vake's CEO ended in July 2019.