Asiakastieto invested in Hoodie Dude

Asiakastieto Group Plc has made an investment in the start-up surveying company Hoodie Dude (Hupparihörhö Oy). At the same time the companies will enter into business cooperation.

”Asiakastieto is highly experienced in the rating of established business operations. However, an ever growing part of business will in the future be conducted in young, small and agile startup enterprises, which cannot necessarily be assessed with the same statistical models and analytics. We want to truly understand this world to be able to assist our current customers and startup enterprises in the best possible way in growing their business operations profitably and with controlled risk, says CEO Jukka Ruuska from Asiakastieto Group Plc.

”The investment in Hoodie Dude and the related collaboration make this possible. We will ourselves learn the startup-minded development culture and, on the other hand, we will be able to utilise so-called unstructured data, in this case company data gathered from social media, in accordance with our objective”, Ruuska sums up.

For Hoodie Dude the investment is an indication that the company lives as it teaches.

“We have been preaching about the symbiotic benefit of large companies and startups to each other since 2013, so an investment of this kind is more than natural for us”, says Sami Kuusela, who is known as the founder of Hoodie Dude. “You have to act as you teach.””

Underhood.co raised the interest

Asiakastieto became interested in Hoodie Dude, as the startup surveyor launched the Underhood service at the beginning of summer 2015 (underhood.co). Underhood creates company pages fully automatically, making use of and analysing social media interfaces and other Internet sources.

“At first we created Underhood for our own needs, because the existing business directories were not enough for us. The data was old and insufficient”, Kuusela says.

Until now the main part of Hoodie Dude’s net sales have come from consulting, looking for startup enterprises as partners or investment or acquisition targets for bigger companies. Along with the beginning cooperation with Asiakastieto, this will change.

“We will naturally continue to help big companies, but we will contribute more to the development of Underhood”, tells Hoodie Dude’s CEO Antti Ketola. “We will be scheming with economists and top nerds how to get company data to be up-to-date. Our secret concept has attracted interest in the banking world, among others.”

“Of course we challenge the world’s biggest business directory services with the omnipotence of a startup enterprise, but it is good to respect Asiakastieto’s experience of more than a hundred years in the field”, Ketola analyses.

Hoodie Dude’s infinite ambition is also understood at Asiakastieto.

”It is important to keep possible disruptors close”, Jukka Ruuska comments.

Asiakastieto Group Plc and Hoodie Dude are not publishing the size of the investment.

Asiakastieto (asiakastieto.fi)

Asiakastieto Group Plc quoted on the Helsinki Stock-Exchange is one of the leading information service providers for corporate management, financial administration, risk management and sales and marketing in Finland. We provide electronic services to be integrated in our customers’ decision-making processes, tailored web services for our contractual clients and company and consumer information services available for all.

Hoodie Dude (hoodiedude.com)

Hoodie Dude (Hupparihörhö Oy) is Finland’s most famous startup consulting enterprise, connecting traditional corporations with startups. We offer our clients access to the inner circle of the startup world. In the summer of 2015, Hoodie Dude launched the underhood.co business directory service based on automatic data retrieval.

More information

Jukka Ruuska, CEO, Asiakastieto Group Plc, tel. +358 10 270 7111

Antti Ketola, CEO, Hoodie Dude, +358 50 516 5261