Kaarina Pekkinen

Kaarina Pekkinen is a long-serving partner at Teknoventure Oy, an independent Finnish investment and corporate-finance firm founded in 1991 and owned by its key personnel. She joined the firm in 1995 and today serves as its Chief Financial Officer and a Partner. She holds a degree in Business Administration and has built her career around financial business analysis, the development of financial-administration systems and reporting, and the operational side of running an investment house.

Within Teknoventure, Pekkinen's remit spans the firm's finance and fund-administration functions — including balance-sheet management and the administration of the private-equity funds Teknoventure manages — alongside her partner-level role. Earlier in her tenure she was described as the firm's Investment Director, a role in which she took active board positions at portfolio companies. For example, when Teknoventure's capital-investment fund took a significant minority stake in the Oulu-based children's clothing retailer Antoniina Oy in 2011, Pekkinen chaired Antoniina's board.

Teknoventure sits at the intersection of venture/private-equity investing and corporate-finance advisory. The firm reports involvement in roughly 70 Nordic acquisition or ownership-arrangement projects, arranging capital funding across different stages of company growth, matching companies with venture investors, and advising on M&A and restructurings — chiefly in Finland and Sweden. In more recent years the firm has focused heavily on mining, metals and critical raw materials, developing the ESG-oriented "Green Deal Fund" concept aimed at sustainable extraction of critical minerals for the EU.

• Backs and advises Finnish (and Nordic) companies at both early and later stages, typically through Teknoventure's managed capital-investment funds rather than as a personal angel.
• Core sector emphasis on mining, metals and critical raw materials, technology, green tech, and financial services — increasingly steered toward carbon-neutral, ESG-compliant projects via the planned Green Deal Fund (targeting an initial €100M and up to ~€1B over a decade, aligned with the Paris Agreement).
• Combines equity investment with hands-on corporate-finance work: ownership and financing restructurings, balance-sheet arrangements, M&A, and IPO/capital-funding support.
• Takes an active, board-level ownership approach — Teknoventure partners commonly join or chair portfolio-company boards (Pekkinen chaired Antoniina Oy's board after the firm invested).
• On the Antoniina investment she signalled the firm's growth orientation: the company "is a significant player in its field… we believe the company can grow according to its strategy."