Where our names come from
We name our work after figures from Finnish myth and folklore — partly for the love of the stories, partly because each one captures, better than the usual consulting language, what the work is actually meant to do, and partly because it’s close to home: our founder lived and worked in Finland.
Finland isn’t only where these stories come from — it’s one of the places modern software delivery was actually forged. Our founder spent part of his career there, in exactly that tradition. Nokia, in particular, became one of the world’s great proving grounds for delivering complex software at scale.
Created at Nokia in Finland by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde — the leading approach to scaling Scrum across large, multi-team organisations.
Created by Dean Leffingwell and shaped in real-world settings including Nokia in Finland — whose own agile requirements model fed SAFe’s early design, and where Maarit Laanti led one of the largest transformations of its era.
Mik Kersten’s landmark book builds its argument around Nokia — the cautionary tale of a company that measured activity over outcomes and missed the shift from project to product. The exact shift we help clients make.
Helsinki-born Linus Torvalds created Linux and Git — the foundations almost all modern software delivery still depends on today.
So when we reach for a Finnish name, we’re nodding to a place we know first-hand — and to a tradition of doing exactly the hard, large-scale delivery our clients need.
In old Finnic folklore a hiisi (plural hiidet) wasn’t a monster but a place — a sacred grove, a rocky hill, an outcrop where the ordinary rules didn’t apply. These were sites of power, treated with respect and a little caution, and the spirits that belonged to them took the same name. Only later did the word drift toward something wilder and more feared.
That’s the terrain we work in. Defence, safety-critical engineering, regulated finance — environments set apart from ordinary delivery, where you don’t simply wander in and ‘move fast’. They command respect, they can be unforgiving, and they reward people who genuinely know the ground. We’re at home there.
Vipunen is the ancient giant-sage of the Kalevala — a vast being lying buried in the earth, holding the oldest and deepest knowledge and spells. To get at it, Väinämöinen has to climb into his mouth and go right down into his stomach, drawing the hidden wisdom out from the inside.
That is an AI audit. You go deep inside a complex, often opaque system; you extract the knowledge that isn’t visible on the surface; you’re handling something powerful that, mishandled, is genuinely risky — so it takes real expertise and a bit of nerve to do properly. A rigorous, knowledge-extracting examination, not a surface-level checklist. Exactly the tone the work demands.
Kaiku simply means ‘echo’. In folklore it carries a lighter note too: a small answering presence you could call out to and put questions to — it would answer back — and one that was even said to help find cattle lost in the forest. A responsive voice that returns something when you call into the dark.
Synthetic research does the same. You call out to the audiences you can’t reach — the cleared, the constrained, the scattered — and Kaiku answers back with their likely response. It helps you find the perspectives that have wandered out of reach, and echoes them faithfully enough to act on. An answer when the real room is silent.
It’s a small thing. But we think the name you give a piece of work should tell you something true about it — and each of ours does.