If you had to describe the status quo of Ultimate in one word, what would it be?
I would say, the feeling within Ultimate and the whole team is bold. We’re feeling really confident.
Why is that?
Because we’re growing super quickly.
“We’ve built this exceptional team — everybody is amazingly talented and really motivated.”
The customers love the product, we’re working with these amazing partners, we’ve taken in a lot of new money and we’ve got big plans. So I would say we’re feeling ambitious. Like we can take it on.
What was the biggest obstacle the company had to overcome so far?
The most defining obstacle we’ve ever had to overcome was probably the first obstacle we encountered. We were founded in Finland. Obviously, we had to start with the Finnish language. There was no technology available that could do Finnish when we founded — nothing open source. We had to build everything entirely from scratch.
More on multilingual AI
Finland is a small market. It’s an amazing market to start your company but it’s small. We knew that we had to be able to handle Finnish.
“But we also had to be able to handle any language at native fluency. That was the first big technical obstacle we had to overcome. Now that has turned into our defining feature as a company.”
It is one of the most important technical aspects and the reason why especially European businesses choose us. Because we can handle all these complex languages that nobody else can do.
What is the next milestone for Ultimate and when are you planning to reach it?
This is maybe a shameless plug as the COO, but we’re building a lot of new teams today, right from scratch and across both of our offices. And we’re also building our existing teams significantly to be able to accelerate at the pace that we need to. My main goal is to hire the absolute best people in a whole variety of cross-functional roles. So for anybody watching this: Please reach out to me or apply for one of the open positions on our website.
What advice would you give to young, female founders?
The advice I would give to a young female founder today is just to be confident in yourself. Know you are worth it and go out there and do everything that you want to do. Because the world is your oyster and nobody is stopping you. You are as capable as you let yourself be.