For more than a decade, the global startup economy has been fixated on unicorns—companies valued at more than one billion dollars. Valuations became a shorthand for success, often disconnected from the underlying business reality. That era is now fading. In its place, a more demanding benchmark is taking hold: revenue.

After years of cheap capital, soaring valuations, and “growth at all costs,” the tech sector is sobering up. Startups are increasingly judged not by how much they raise, but by how much they earn. The creature gaining attention today is not a unicorn, but a centaur.

The term centaur, coined by Bessemer Venture Partners, refers to companies that have crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (often in the startups discussed as ARR). It is most commonly used in the SaaS and software sectors, where subscription models make recurring revenue easy to measure. There are more than 1,200 unicorns globally, yet only an estimated 160 cloud centaurs—Cloud and SaaS companies with over $100 million in annual recurring revenue—according to Bessemer Venture Partners (2022). While the total number of centaurs across all sectors is higher, no comprehensive global count exists.

What matters is not the count, but what the milestone represents. Reaching $100 million in recurring revenue signals true product–market fit, repeatable growth, and the ability to scale globally. It reflects performance rather than promise.

The view from one of Finland’s most experienced growth CEOs

Few Finnish leaders have witnessed the global startup journey as closely as Mårten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, an open-source relational database management system. For him, the centaur framing is not just trendy—it’s essential.

Mårten Mickos is an experienced global tech leader, entrepreneur, and author of Kasvun paikka (2025) — a Finnish business book on leadership, growth, and scaling companies with purpose.

“Centaur is a new moniker for startup companies that become growth companies, reaching and then exceeding 100 million in revenues. It's a practical and useful way of measuring real impact on the economy," Mickos says. "Company valuations rise and shrink, but revenues measure true value delivered to customers.” In other words: unicorns show potential; centaurs show performance.

Why Finland is suddenly talking about centaurs

The centaur debate gained momentum in Finland when entrepreneur Kristo Ovaska, co-founder of Smartly.io and Taito.ai, compiled a list of Finnish companies that have reached centaur status. Alongside it, he highlighted a long-term ambition he has been advancing as a board member of the Startup Foundation: 100 Finnish startups generating more than €100 million in annual revenue by 2050.

According to Pia-Maria Nickström, CEO of Startup Foundation, the 100× ambition is a necessary and deliberately demanding target for Finland. The goal is to mobilize the entire ecosystem—founders, investors, policymakers, universities, and support organizations—around a shared and concrete definition of success.

Finland’s centaur club

Based on Ovaska’s compilation, Finland has produced roughly 20 centaurs over the past 25 years. For a country of 5.5 million people, that record is notable. Among the most prominent are Supercell, Wolt, HMD Global, Oura, and RELEX Solutions.

Taken together, these companies generate multi-billion-euro annual revenues, employ tens of thousands of people globally, and rank among Finland’s most significant technology-driven export successes since Nokia.

Yet Nickström consistently brings the discussion back to a less comfortable issue: the pipeline. The ambition cannot be realised without a steady flow of new companies—and that flow is weakening. In 2016, roughly 600 startups were founded in Finland. Today, the number is closer to 200. While the average quality of new ventures may be improving, volume still matters. Fewer attempts mean fewer future centaurs.

Why the centaur shift matters

The shift from unicorns to centaurs quietly redefines what success looks like in the Nordic startup economy. Valuations are a function of capital markets and sentiment. Revenue reflects customer trust. Focusing on €100 million revenue milestones encourages founders to build scalable business models earlier, to think globally from the outset, and to optimise for long-term value creation rather than early exits.

If Finland were to grow from roughly 20 centaurs to 100, the impact would be structural. It would mean a new generation of export champions, a stronger domestic ownership base, and tens of thousands of high-value jobs.

How Finland gets from 20 to 100 centaurs

Mårten Mickos believes Finland’s trajectory toward one hundred centaurs is already in motion. The real question is not whether the country will get there, but how quickly. For him, the journey unfolds along two parallel paths:

1. People

Finland must continue empowering young, startup-curious builders early and boldly. Programs like FR8 and Aalto Founder School show how powerful early encouragement can be, while Slush continues to amplify Finnish ambition. A dense web of founder-to-founder support is also emerging, with today’s centaur leaders reinvesting their time, capital, and experience back into the ecosystem.

2. Structures

This is where Finland still faces friction. As Mickos has pointed out, stock option frameworks remain uncompetitive, bureaucracy and regulation continue to slow down growth companies, and talent immigration is widely discussed but implemented too cautiously. These challenges are practical rather than philosophical—and each one directly affects how quickly Finnish companies can scale.

A Nordic maturity moment

At its core, the equation is simple: founders can build world-class businesses, but only if the surrounding system supports growth instead of resisting it.

Mickos argues Finland must hold two truths at once: support young founders more than ever before, and challenge them to build enduring, revenue-driven companies. At the same time, Finland must adopt a societal mindset that instinctively supports growth companies and removes obstacles from their path.

In many ways, this marks the second act of Finland’s startup story. The unicorn era taught founders how to dream; the centaur era is teaching them how to build something customers truly love. The transition signals that Finland is no longer chasing mythical creatures—it is building real ones, grounded in customers and revenue.