Where Our Story Started: Kalle, Timo and the Road to Flowhaven

Editor’s note: we first shared this story in January 2021, when we announced our $16 million Series A. A lot has happened since, so we have refreshed it in 2026 to tell the story as it stands today.

Every company has an origin story. Ours has a teenage art project, a very famous game, two friends with a promise made over beers, and one borrowed couch in Los Angeles. It is the story of how Kalle Törmä and Timo Olkkola set out to bring the magic back to an industry they love, and why, years later, they are more excited about it than ever.

A first lesson in intellectual property

Long before Flowhaven, Kalle was a movie obsessed kid who wanted to be a digital artist. In high school he created what he considered his masterpiece. Years later he spotted something remarkably similar in the closing scene of one of the world’s biggest video games. Coincidence or inspiration, nobody will ever know. Either way, it was his first real lesson in intellectual property, copyright and what it means to own a creative idea.

That lesson came back in a big way when Kalle joined Rovio and found himself running operations and the technology stack behind the global Angry Birds licensing program. He admits he learned much of it on the job. By the end, he had written a thesis on licensing management that mapped the entire licensing workflow from end to end, and he had seen the industry’s biggest problem up close.

The problem nobody could see

Angry Birds was one of the biggest licensing programs on the planet, with partners, products and royalty reports arriving from every direction. Yet the tools available made it almost impossible to see what was happening across the whole business. Agreements lived in one place, approvals in another and royalties in a maze of spreadsheets. Every answer took a small investigation.

Kalle became convinced it could be done better. What licensing teams needed was not another spreadsheet but one place where agreements, approvals and royalties connect, so people could spend their time on the creative work that makes brands come alive.

Two friends and a promise

Meanwhile, Timo was growing up as a pop culture fan who dreamed of becoming a rock star, or, to everyone’s surprise, a priest. The dreams faded (though anyone who has heard Timo at karaoke knows the rock star never fully left), and he fell in love with business, and above all with sales.

Kalle and Timo met at university, and over a couple of beers they agreed that one day they should start a company together. Years later, Kalle picked up the phone and called Timo. They met, agreed that the idea was brilliant, celebrated, and in 2016 Flowhaven was born. The exact order of those last three steps is still debated.

Pitching across California on a startup budget

With a first version of the product in hand, it was time to sell it. Kalle and Timo set off on a three week tour of California and Nevada to meet future customers and pitch as if their lives depended on it. Picture two young Finns walking away from meetings in Las Vegas, quietly humming a certain 1970s hit to keep their spirits up. It really happened.

By the last week in Los Angeles, the budget had run out of road and hotels were no longer an option. A friend from the Angry Birds days came to the rescue and offered her couch. The two founders slept in her living room, worked from their laptops and kept pitching. It was the first of many lessons in bootstrapping, and the start of Flowhaven’s life in the United States.

Want to hear it from the founders themselves? Kalle and Timo told the early story, from their first pitches to their plans for going global, on the Approved! Licensing Stories podcast. Listen to the episode on Spotify.

From first customers to a Series A

Those early pitches turned into customers, and the customers turned into momentum. In December 2019 Flowhaven raised a $5.2 million seed round led by Global Founders Capital, with Icebreaker.vc joining again. In January 2021 came a $16 million Series A led by Sapphire Sport, with Global Founders Capital and Icebreaker.vc participating, bringing total funding at the time to $21.5 million, as License Global reported.

As Kalle put it at the time, the licensing process was “largely managed by spreadsheets and a mish-mash of disparate solutions.” The Series A was raised to change exactly that, by doubling down on the product.

Where we are today: small, mighty and built for what comes next

A lot has changed since the couch in Los Angeles. Many talented people have helped build Flowhaven over the years, and their fingerprints are all over the product. Today we are a small but mighty team, still led by Kalle as CEO and Timo as co-founder and sales lead, and we have never been more focused.

That focus shows in the platform. Around 100 global licensors across six continents run their programs on Flowhaven, with more than 4,000 users and more than $2 billion processed through the platform. Agreements, product approvals, digital asset distribution and royalty management now sit in one connected system, with AI helping teams spend less time on admin and more time on growth. In 2026 we also welcomed Riverside Acceleration Capital as an investor, backing the next chapter of the company.

Our mission is the same one Kalle and Timo started with: to “build best in class products and services that help modern licensing teams uncover moments of creativity, growth, and magic.” Lean teams can move fast, listen closely to customers and ship what actually matters. That is how we plan to stay future proof.

The end? Not even close

Flowhaven started with a simple belief: licensing experts should spend their days making brands come alive for fans, not chasing spreadsheets. Ten years on, that belief still drives everything we build. If you want to see where the story goes next, we would love to show you.

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