Kalle Kaivola

Kalle Kaivola has spent roughly two decades in the games industry as a journalist, developer, publisher, operator, and investor. He came up through Finland's demo scene and spent his first decade as a games journalist, rising to Editor-in-Chief at two publications and producing a game TV show. In 2007 he moved into game production at Recoil Games, beginning an operating career that would span several of Finland's best-known studios.

At Rovio Entertainment he served as SVP of Product and Publishing, overseeing the content and monetization of Rovio's game titles (including work tied to the Angry Birds franchise, such as Angry Birds Trilogy and Amazing Alex) and launching and running Rovio Stars, Rovio's third-party publishing label. He later became Head of Licensed Games at Next Games, where he helped build the licensed-games business and worked on titles including The Walking Dead: No Man's Land and a Blade Runner 2049 project. He has also served as COO at Germany's remote control productions. Across his career he says he has shipped games reaching over 250 million players on more than a dozen platforms.

In 2014 he co-founded Helsinki GameWorks with Samuli Syvähuoko and other industry veterans. He joined Sisu Game Ventures in 2018 — reuniting with Syvähuoko for a fourth professional partnership — as a Venture Partner, helping back early-stage game founders. In 2019 he became full-time CEO of Lightheart Entertainment, a mobile studio incubated within the Sisu ecosystem, which pioneered a "Hypercore" approach blending hypercasual accessibility with mid-core depth and live ops.

This dual role — operator by day, investor by network — is central to his positioning: he backs founders both through Sisu and as an individual angel, drawing on hands-on studio-building experience rather than a purely financial background.

• Invests at the earliest stages — pre-seed and seed — and via Sisu is often the first institutional check into a games company, backing teams that are frequently pre-revenue and pre-product.
• Games-only focus: mobile, PC/console, and enabling technology/tooling for interactive entertainment; Sisu's stated mission is backing "the next generation of game-studio founders."
• Bets heavily on founding teams and studio culture — his own operating philosophy at Lightheart emphasizes autonomous, self-organizing teams and rapid iteration ("We've done away with the concept of soft launches and global launches").
• Brings operator credibility — publishing, licensing, monetization, and live-ops experience — as differentiated value beyond capital.
• Leans into experimentation and speed to market: a preference for teams that test relentlessly and learn fast rather than polish in secret.