blyk

One of Finland's "super startups" www.blyk.com has just received an additional 40 million EUR of financing. You can read the story from their blog here:

http://about.blyk.com/2008/11/18/blyk-raises-e40m-and-paves-the-way-for-...

That has to be one of the heaviest financing rounds seen coming to a Finnish startup (as much as Blyk is a "startup" anymore) in a long while.

Congratz! It's always nice to get evidence that investors believe in you, and are betting big bucks on your success.

With 40 million you could fund a swarm of startups for some time ;) That kind of money starts to near the level where stuff gets done and moves fast when that is fully employed. Nice to see this coming in the middle of all the doom and gloom. Perhaps the "free telco for the youth" business is a lot better than it would initially sound, even in economic downturn conditions.

CC Attribution: pokeweedthecat@Flickr

My take on that is: if your customers are pretty much teenagers, then you have customers with fairly limited spending power to start with. In an economic downturn the "poor" cannot get much more poorer, since they are already near the bottom. The youth will keep on spending their weekly allowances and part time wages on skateboards, cool music, and what ever pretty much despite what phase the economy is in. I remember reading some societal research that stated that in high growth economical eras especially the men get more conservative and selective in their spending and style. While in a downturn it gets more liberal and mixed, people are willing to try out more new things etc. Might be an excellent time to be a media for the youth. And it's not like they are going to start SMS:ing less..