We’re obsessed with building better and faster to stay ahead of what’s next. Better ideas, better methods, better tools, better results.

Afa Heikkinen

CEO

Afa represents the business end of Finlabs. A long entrepreneurial history has seen him work across many business sectors, from start-up investor to motorsport, where he built Scandinavia's largest Formula racing team, Koiranen GP, winning multiple European championship titles along the way. He led the team running the prestigious Red Bull, McLaren, and Lotus F1 Junior programs for several years. This experience gives Afa an inherent knowledge of what keeps a team motivated and running in the right direction.

From his experience, we are crafting the team structure, and business structure, that makes Finlabs an appealing prospect for both employees and clients. A firm believer in the collective power of many outweighing the knowledge of any one individual, Afa is intent on driving the companies growth through strong and lasting relationships.

Antero Kivikoski

Chief Design Officer

Antero has vast experience on applying Design Thinking for demanding business and service design cases for various industries with experience of over 400 design sprints and innovation sessions.

Antero’s background is in marketing and branding and he is a firm believer in storytelling as a key component of innovation management.

During his over 16 year career,
he has worked with many of the frontline companies, and participated in developing several start-ups.

Ari Mansikka

Senior Mobile Developer

Ari has a deep knowledge and history with over 15 years of experience in full-stack development. He has worked with companies of the caliber of Nokia and Microsoft proving to be a crucial member of their development teams.

In a recent project, Ari developed a state-of-the-art AWS NodeJS/Typescript stack scalable production environment with 1M+ users. Ari is an exceptionally fast learner that adapts quickly to new platforms and wraps his mind around new programming languages fast.

Ari is always interested in gaining and improving his knowledge of new technologies constantly exploring what can be done with every new advancement. He takes great pride in writing high-quality code, being particularly keen on making sure it's easily maintainable.

Carlos Reyes Muñoz

Front-end Developer

Carlos is on the Front lines of Finlabs work, literally. As a Front-end web developer, he brings his talents for pixel perfection and experience to Finlabs projects like CareConnect Agency Management system. Carlos is a self-taught developer who is always hungry to learn more. He has strong skills and knowledge in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React. He also compliments his front-end skills with some back-end skills with knowledge of MySql, NoSql like firebase, and NodeJs. Always keen to learn other languages and frameworks, Carlos is currently learning Dart, Flutter, and Kotlin so he can extend his influence into mobile development.

Dave Papworth

CCO

David leads the creative vision at Finlabs with a firm belief that creativity can come from anyone, making it part of the fabric of the organization and not a department.

His work is driven by embracing new technologies and pushing innovative thinking. This has resulted in many accolades including a Time Magazine Invention of the
Year. He also served as practice lead for the LABS group at mcgarrybowen, leading a team dedicated to the exploration of new and emerging technologies and their impact on the marketing landscape.

David has over 18 years of experience at some of the most recognizable advertising and digital marketing companies and has worked on clients as wide-ranging as MasterCard, Kraft Foods, Nestlé Water, Maserati, J.P. Morgan Chase, and the National Gallery of Art, to name just a few.

Eric Vukmirovich

COO, North America

Eric oversees Finlab’s North American operations and finance. His background includes 20 years of operations, finance, accounting, legal and M&A experience. His skill set ranges from leadership positions in global multi-billion dollar companies to building and advising start-ups.

Eric started at EY and Arthur Andersen before venturing out into more entrepreneurial roles. Notably, he ran operations and finance of mcgarrybowen during its most successful years as it transitioned from a boutique traditional advertising agency to a multi-service global communications company. During his tenure, mcgarrybowen grew from one office with 25 employees to 1,000 employees with five offices in four countries with revenues exceeding $200 million. Eric also spearheaded the sale of mcgarrybowen to Denstu International, one of the largest multinational media and digital marketing communications companies in the world.

Just prior to joining Finlabs, Eric was an angel investor, advisor and consultant to several successful start-ups. He is a member of the American Bar Association, and earned a JD from Wayne State University School of Law and a BA in Accounting from Michigan State University.

Hazal Doğa Kılıçkap

Service Designer

Hazal has an M.A. in Service Design from the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, and B.Sc. in Industrial Design from Turkey. She specialized in Packaging Design and then shifted focus later to Service Design. Prior to Finlabs Hazal worked in TasarimUssu, Garanti Technology, and Mercedes-Benz Service.

Hazal sees design everywhere in life and is a firm believer that for design to work, all stakeholders should be in the process of working together. Hazal embraces her role as the facilitator of that teamwork and clearly loves working with, and for people. Curious by nature, Hazal loves learning. Her biggest interests include behavioral psychology and storytelling. She is also a big fan of workshops and hackathons.

Fun Fact
Hazal has a penchant for fun socks and an ever-growing collection.

Henri Hyppönen

CIO

Henri serves as Finlabs Chief Innovation Officer out of Helsinki. He leads innovation across the organization to push the limits of our team, educate clients, and enlighten clients on where to drive their business and products.

Henri speaks regularly about the future, business, leadership and creativity, and about the intersection of human and machine intelligence. He has published five books. The most recent (2020) is about the future of creativity. He is also a serial entrepreneur and a bad drummer.

Ilkka Karjalainen

Senior iOS Developer

Ilkka is a hardcore coder with over 18 years of software development experience across various business domains. He is a lifelong learner and is driven to educate himself every day.

Ilkka has always had a knack for good code quality. This goes as far as implementing different kinds of tools to improve the code quality and making the work of also his fellow coders look better.

Ilkka's passion for coding extends into his home where he likes to teach his kids how to take their first steps in programming.

Ilkka Ulvinen

New Business Development & Sales

John McGarry (J3)

CEO, North America

John brings more than 25 years in the marketing and technology industries to his role as CEO of North America. He has spent the majority of his career developing a full spectrum of digital initiatives for Fortune 500 brands like Marriott International, Chevron, Verizon Wireless, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Intel, United Airlines, Crayola, The Wall Street Journal, Reebok, AB InBev, and more. He has a history of using innovation and technology to help companies build powerful brands, grow their businesses, and engage with consumers in more meaningful ways.

At Finlabs, he will lead the North American expansion by working with clients to use intelligent technologies to drive their success. John will be responsible for honing the vision, culture, products, and services for the U.S. market.

Jan Pahkala

Software Engineer

Jan is an enthusiastic programmer with over 8 years of experience developing software for various levels of the software stack, and across multiple business domains.

Mobile development is Jan’s area of expertise. In recent years he has been focusing on development with both native and hybrid technologies.

Jan enjoys learning new things and whenever possible works on his hobby software development projects.

Jani Seppälä

Head of Computer Vision & AI

Jani has 20 years experience of working in different technical roles in mobile phone, mobile switch, paper mill, gaming, automotive, and health care industries.

Jani has strong experience in embedded system architecture, system design, software implementation (Kernel to application-level), integration, and system-wide problem-solving. He also has experience in game programming, a system-wide understanding of graphics OpenGL es & DirectX stack, and Motorsport end-to-end SW development.

Janne Kananen

Medical Advisor

Janne is Finlabs' Medical Advisor where his objective is to assist in different projects and bring his medical expertise and knowledge to our projects in the medical sector.

Janne has an M.Sc. (Tech.) from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Oulu, and also an M.D. (Licentiate of Medicine), University of Oulu. At the moment he is working towards his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Oulu University Hospital Department of Radiology.
His Ph.D. research is to examine what happens in epilepsy patients' brains with fast functional MRI. He also works as a doctor in training in clinical neurophysiology.

Fun Fact
Has been playing football for over 20 years, mainly in JS Hercules organization in III-V divisions.

Janne Laakkonen

Senior Software Developer

Since taking his first steps in web development 25 years ago, Janne still maintains an interest in learning new technologies and helping clients (no matter big or small) to take their business to next level in digitalization.

Janne is a full stack developer with over 10 years of experience. He is a fast learner and always interested in finding better solutions for the challenges he faces.

In his work, Janne is open-minded and eager to find satisfying goals for the projects he works on while always trying to find effective and straightforward ways to reach the desired outcomes in projects.

With a little background in design, Janne also loves to bring good designs to life exactly as the designer intended.

Fun Fact
Took a 10-year break from Soccer to make a comeback in 2008 (in China) and since then has been playing at low levels in Rovaniemi, Helsinki, and Oulu.

Joni-Pekka Vesto

Software Engineer

Joni is a code writing machine who oddly does not drink coffee. He loves to build stuff and who are we to not fuel that desire. Maybe that's why he's ended up here at Finlabs.

Originally from Tampere, Finland. Joni moved to Oulu in 2017. As a result, people keep pointing out that his speech sounds foreign to the folks in Oulu.

Outside of coding, Joni enjoys good music, good memes, and good movies.

Juha-Matti Tirilä

Senior AI Engineer

Juha-Matti is a passionate developer with 13 years of experience in multiple roles within software development. He has participated and contributed to various projects by creating end-to-end solutions, architecture, concepts, security, design, and implementation.

In recent years he has gained interest in data science and artificial intelligence. He also has a keen interest in developing solutions that include building computer vision and other AI/ML models from data and setting up the data pipeline.

Juha-Matti easily adapts to new situations and quickly learns all necessary skills in order to support any software team. Juha-Matti's “get things done" attitude means we can rely on him for any software development project.

Jussi Tyynelä

Senior Software Engineer

Kalle-Oskari Suvanto

Software Developer

Kalle Pääkkönen

Senior Software Developer

Kalle started coding as a hobby at age of 12. He has been involved in a wide range of projects and experienced a full 360° view of software projects (business owner, architect, development, testing, training, and consulting).

Kalle has been involved in mobile development and contactless payment development in the banking industry. He also has strong experience in full-stack development and maintenance work using AWS stack and Javascript. Recently Kalle has worked as hands-on as a consultant to migrate customer computing/service capability to AWS cloud systems.

Kalle is an individual that adapts to new situations well and always learns all necessary skills in order to support any software development team. With his typical Finnish “get things done" attitude, we can recommend Kalle for any software development challenge..

Kari Takanen

Senior Cloud Specialist

Kari has over 10 years of experience in software development in various business and research domains. In recent years he has been focusing on developing a car-as-a-service project as part of Finnish Bank organization focused on developing new business areas where
Kari worked as a full-stack developer while focusing on backend development, as well as having a DevOps hat on for setting up new operative environments for AWS. Kari has also supervised and assisted service providers to set up environments ensuring they work efficiently and are properly monitored.

When needed Kari is also making security audits for interested companies and/or development organizations.

Klaus Kääriäinen

Project Manager

Klaus is a visionary manager with over 12 years of experience as a producer, project manager, and has run and been part of establishing multiple companies. Klaus has participated and contributed to multiple software, game, and gamified products and solutions for b2b and consumer markets.

His products have reached hundreds of millions of users through efficient use of growth marketing and have been nominated as the best technological, creative achievements and innovations of the year.

Klaus has recruited and led teams of various sizes and has gained positive feedback and extraordinary results. As a result, he has been invited as a speaker to many global level conferences. Klaus is a key Finlabs team member thanks to his quality-driven attitude, strong team player mentality, and always being committed to keeping our team and clients on track to meet and exceed project targets.

Maarit Luttinen

Assistant Designer

Maarit works with the Design team to add flair to visuals and bring in her superior touches of illustration and animation to the experiences we build.

With a BA in Fine Arts, she has been working as an artist & graphic design since 2014 for a variety of companies and clients. Prior to her move into Graphic Design, also worked as a chef after obtaining her Chef's Degree. So it's safe to say she has been cooking up creative ideas and thinking for a while. She changed to the design industry completely in 2018 and has been creating graphic design, game art, game design, product design, illustration, and marketing with different companies and teams ever since.

Markku Pulkkinen

CTO

Markku has amassed more than 20-years of experience creating new and unique solutions for companies like Nokia where he was a key contributor to Nokia’s mobile banking platform to serve the underbanked, and integrate them into the banking world.

Markku leads technology across the Finlabs offices where his skills in building proposals, finding, designing, optimizing, and architecting complex technical solutions prove invaluable for Finlabs and our clients.

He relishes the opportunity to formulate a business challenge into a manageable problem and find and develop the strategy, technical solution, and business solution to achieve the goal.

His strong leadership experience running complex concept creation, development, and maintenance projects is a strong backbone to Finlabs' capabilities.

Marko Pirnes

Senior Test Engineer

Many years of experience in software development have given Marko an amazing insight into testing and test development.

He has deep experience working in demanding customer software projects. Known for being a quick learner, he easily adapts to new technologies. Marko’s flexibility at work is a key contribution to Finlabs, with a willingness to work long hours just to get the job done. He maintains a close relationship with the dev team and is consistent and constant with his support.

Marko’s accuracy and passion to get everything perfect ensures Finlabs products are bug-free, giving our clients quality in delivery, and their customers the ultimate experience. His understanding of business and methods of testing are in perfect harmony to achieve QA speed beyond belief.

Matti Asumaniemi

Project Manager

Matti is one of our trusted Project Managers at Finlabs and generally keeps projects, on time and on track. With an M.Sc. Economics, Marketing he brings a growth mindset and budgeting chops to every project he works on. Before joining Finlabs, Matti worked in a sales-focused project management position in the field of recruiting at Saranen Consulting. However, his keen interest in all things technology drew him over to Finlabs.

Fun Fact
Played ice hockey for over 15 years. His favorite teams are the Chicago Blackhawks and Kärpät.

Mauno Vähä

Senior Software Engineer

Mika Lackman

Lead Engineer

Mika is a seasoned developer with 20 years of experience in multiple roles within the software industry. He has participated and contributed multiple various projects by creating end-to-end solutions, architecture, concepts, security, design, and implementation.

In recent years Mika has gained interest in data science and artificial intelligence and is interested in developing solutions that include building computer vision models, financial AI, and setting up the data pipeline.

Mika is always keen to learn new things and currently is learning Haskell. He also has a strong interest in providing quality solutions that are maintainable and is keen to promote a test-first approach.

Mikael Häkkilä

COO

Senior architecture expert with 18+ years of experience in multiple roles in the software business. Participated and contributed multiple various projects by creating end-to-end solutions, architecture, concepts, security, design, and implementation.

Key areas of expertise in mobile and service platforms in different categories including critical systems in the banking and health care sector, system architecture, cloud and database solutions, mobile application deployments, (secure) protocols over different bearers, and latest web technologies.

Long experience in interacting and leading technical projects with multicultural virtual teams with and without a local presence. A technical leader with excellent ability to create and understand high-level concepts but also has a very deep understanding of technical details and implementation.

Niko Rehnbäck

Mobile Development Lead

Niko has strong experience of modern development methods and technologies with past history of companies like Nokia and Osuuspankki, as a leading member of teams creating globally award-winning products.

His input and unique way of intercepting the development and product team results in amazing speed and quality of the whole product development.

On projects, Niko is often the driving force and person to look up to. His passion to push himself to the edge also drives other team members to push themselves beyond their regular limits.

Olli Mämmelä

Senior AI Engineer

Olli is a Doctor of Science (Tech.) of telecommunication engineering with an analytical and collaborative mindset. He has more than 10 years of working experience in both international and national research projects. His specialties include algorithm design and development, machine learning, and data analysis.

In recent years he has gained interest in data science and artificial intelligence, and is interested to develop solutions which include building prediction models from data and setting up the data pipeline.

Sari Lampela

Controller

Seppo Tomperi

Senior Software Engineer

Seppo has over 14 years experience of in software development in companies like IndoorAtlas, VTT, Huawei, Hantro / On2. In recent years he has been focusing on developing iOS Swift and React front-end applications.

His iOS development career started with video transmission, network measurement, and augmented reality apps at VTT.

At IndoorAtlas he worked on developing iOS SDK for a revolutionary magnetic indoor positioning system that enables accurate and precise indoor positioning using phone hardware only.

His drive to build quality products is the backbone of the Finlabs application development team. He is always keen to develop beautiful, functional, and secure web and iOS applications for Finlabs and for our clients.

Simo Hiltunen

Senior Back-end Developer

Simo has over 20 years of experience in IT service and software development in companies like Nokia, Nokia Siemens Network and Uros. In recent years he has been focusing on developing cloud-based services.

Always passionate to learn the latest technologies and software development processes, his drive results in constant improvement with our offerings at Finlabs.

With his quality-driven attitude, and strong team player, he is always committed to keeping our team on track, our clients happy, and achieving and exceeding project targets

Toni Vaakanainen

Lead Web Developer

Tuomas Nissinen

Product Designer

Tuomas is a product designer with over 15 years of versatile experience from fine-tuning the user experience to aligning product strategies with business goals.

Before joining Finlabs he was leading the customer experience of OP Financial Group’s daily banking and personal finance management services with over a million active users.

Tuomas is adept at crafting impactful services with a high user and business value. This passion for creating tangible value drives his work every day. His broad skill set, and a team player mentality, enables him to tackle any product design challenge that lands on his desk.

Valeri Haataja

SW Engineer

Vivian Huang

Software Developer