Sisu meets Silicon: VTT and the rise of Flow's innovative PPU

Ever since Finland’s legendary Nokia phones first took the world by storm in the 1990’s, Finland has been a shining example of a national tech ecosystem done right. 

Despite being a small country of only 5.6 million people, the legendary Finnish ‘can-do’ spirit of “sisu” has led the country to have an outsized impact on world technology with an influence far beyond its small population and high northern locale. This is reflected by the unprecedented amount of euros invested into Finnish startups.

In 2024, despite a very tough fundraising climate throughout the European Union, Finnish startups raised a total of €1.4 billion in investments - which is 56% more than in the previous year, according to the latest statistics from the Finnish Venture Capital Association.

Foreign investment in Finnish startups rose to as much as €957 million in 2024. Investments rose by 70%, almost doubling from €564 million in the previous year. At the same time, domestic capital is mainly concentrated into early-stage companies.

While Finland has a healthy VC ecosystem, government resources, such as Business Finland, have also played an important role by enabling many small startups to take advantage of taxpayer-funded capital to become the undisputed leaders in their markets. 

Ranging from Rovio in mobile gaming to Varjo in extended reality and a host of others in between, Business Finland and the VC community are both potent engines driving the Finnish startup ecosystem forward throughout the country.

That said, another, less well-known Finnish government initiative has done just as much (if not more) to bring deep tech startups into the world - because this arm of the Finnish government is basically the Q branch à la James Bond. This group helps fund non-commercial research into the most compelling problems bedeviling not just market segments and technologies, but as a means to improve humanity’s overall well-being.

Think of them as the Finnish version of the legendary U.S. government research group known as DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.

Unlike DARPA’s military focus, the Finns have a more civilian-oriented approach to funding deep tech research through the agency known as VTT.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd is a state-owned and controlled non-profit limited liability company founded in Finland in 1942 during the throes of World War II. 

VTT is the largest research and technology company and research center conducting applied research in Finland - with close to 2,400 employees, scientists and researchers spread across the country. It provides research and innovation services and information for domestic and international customers and partners, both in private and public sectors.

In 2019, VTT launched its own incubator activities, VTT Launchpad, through which it provided support for research teams in setting up businesses. 

On 30 October 2024, it was reported that VTT was selected as the first-ever foreign partner to join an ARPA-E research program funded by the United States Department of Energy. In the program VTT, together with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, aims to accelerate the commercial use of fusion energy. The collaboration focuses on solving the challenges of materials needed in extreme conditions.

Needless to say, VTT is a world powerhouse in pure research with an underlying goal of improving the human condition as opposed to funding purely military applications of its research.

Many of Finland’s leading commercial tech companies started as research projects at VTT, including Dispelix (the world leader in optical waveguide components) and now, a 1 year-old startup has literally dropped the collective jaws of the entire world semiconductor industry. 

The story of Flow Computing: Increasing the performance of processors up to 100 times

In 2024, one new VTT spinout came out claiming to have solved the performance issues plaguing every CPU design currently in production. 

They claimed to achieve a doubling of performance through a drop-in replacement for one CPU core and promising up to 100X performance increases. 

The world listened - and many disbelieved these bold statements from an unknown, tiny Finnish startup  claiming to have solved performance issues that the world’s leading chip companies with thousands of EE Ph.D’s could not. 

However, they failed to realize that boasting is sheer anathema to Finns - you either do what you say you can do or you stay quiet - this is the Finnish way. The skeptics are not in disbelief anymore - but more on this unique company and their journey in a moment.

In total, VTT spin-offs have secured a remarkable 15% share of all equity capital invested in Finnish startups. VTT spin-offs alone attracted a notable 207 million euros, based on data from Pitchbook – reinforcing VTT's role as a powerhouse in science-based entrepreneurship and innovation.

A total of 16 VTT spin-offs secured investments in 2024, and half of them raised over 10 million euros. One of those companies was that tiny Finnish startup  claiming to have solved a huge problem in CPU performance - Flow Computing.

Starting with just 3 employees - two electrical engineers / computer scientists who were leading world authorities on parallel processing in CPUs and a CEO who was formerly a senior executive in Nokia. 

One software engineer - Jussi Roivainen - was a Senior Scientist at VTT for 26 years; Dr. Martti Forsell, was a Principal Scientist of processor architecture and parallel computing at VTT for decades; and Timo Valtonen, a 15 year veteran of Nokia in strategy and business development.

These 3 quiet men from Finland raised one hell of a ruckus with their claim of having solved the problem of enabling true parallel computing techniques in standard Von Neumann-based CPUs - from ANY vendor.

Flow’s PPU (Parallel Processing Unit) technology was developed by Dr. Forsell during his decades of research into parallel computing at VTT. 

A software pseudo-compiler developed by Mr. Roivainen allowed any software running any CPU architecture - from ARM to Intel to RISC-V and others - to be accelerated by the PPU-enhanced CPU cores. 

Mr. Valtonen brought needed business and company building expertise to the team and the three men decided to follow the well-worn path of previous VTT-backed startups. They decided to spin out from the organization and commercialize the decades of research that went into the PPU ecosystem.

Flow’s next generation CPU performance improvement is achieved through PPU that are integrated on-die through a license from Flow (similar in scope to an ARM® core license). Simply replacing some CPU cores with PPUs will - out-of-the-box - boost performance by 2X, all achieved with zero changes to any software source code.

This huge performance boost is independent of the CPU instruction set (ARM, RISC-V, x86, IBM® Power®, etc.) and enables next-generation CPU throughput. 

PPU performance scales linearly - the more PPU cores that are integrated on-die, the higher the performance boost that will be subsequently gained. PPU is parametric and can thus be easily-integrated across every major tier of the CPU market - from wearables, to mobile devices, to PCs, and even all the way up to servers/cloud and supercomputers. 

Flow’s combination of PPU technology is also complementary in nature to the entirety of the devices - while PPU boosts the CPU, all other connected units (such as matrix units, vector units, NPUs and GPUs) holistically benefit from the performance of PPU.

With 4 million Euros now raised in pre-seed funding, Flow’s team decided it was finally time to announce the company and their technology solution to the world. 

They claimed a minimum 2X performance boost to any CPU by simply replacing one core among many with a bank of PPUs, enabling up to 10X with some minor software optimizations and up to 100X performance with a full software recompile.

Hundreds of articles appeared around the world expressing everything from wild acclaim to intense skepticism around the company’s announcement.

To no one’s surprise, these bold claims were met with - at best - raised eyebrows and at worst as claims of wild exaggeration and even fraud. How could two scientists from Finland have solved a challenge that the world’s finest R&D teams at every major CPU vendor over the last 45 years had failed to do?

Skepticism slowly gave way to shock as proof point after proof point was shared - engineering white papers, code examples, even validation tests run on the FPGA prototype developed as the proof of concept were shared worldwide. 

A multi-part video series was shared online including interviews with a neutral, non-company affiliated Professor of Parallel Computing in Germany who was hired by Flow’s VC’s to perform due diligence.

His job was to prove this could never work.

His response was conclusive - it DID work. 

Flow then attended the world-famous Hot Chips event in August of 2024 at Stanford University, where engineers from Apple to IBM to Qualcomm to Arm and many other of the world’s leading CPU designers flocked to Flow’s humble table.

They walked up as skeptics and left as believers.

Today, it has been a year since Flow launched and on 14 May 2025, the company announced it has hit the next series of its technical benchmarks and has successfully achieved a critical milestone in Flow’s development roadmap towards commercializing its parallel processing ecosystem. 

Specifically, the company’s pseudo compiler today entered official Alpha testing. Through the first target compilations using the Alpha compiler, it has been determined that simple parallel workloads consist of a massive amount of loops in RISC-V CPU models without PPU assistance. 

However, in RISC-V CPU models incorporating the PPU, the amount of these loops is significantly reduced by recompiling the existing code - demonstrable proof that it is indeed possible to achieve a significant performance boost with a PPU-enhanced CPU design at up to 100X performance.

In summary, Flow has now achieved full end-to-end operation by being able to compile high-level programs into extended RISC-V binaries and executing them in its gem5-based simulator modeling PPU integrated into the RISC-V CPU system.

This critical milestone in the company’s product development roadmap means the full commercialization of its Parallel Processing Unit (PPU) architecture is on schedule for the next critical milestone, which is the completion of the next set of PPU Performance Modeling over the coming months.

Some dreams do indeed turn into reality and Finland continues - through VTT - to prioritize and make real the next major evolutions in deep tech for the betterment of the world.

For more details, please contact Flow Computing PR Counsel Jonathan Hirshon at jh@horizonpr.com. 

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Want to learn more about Flow and our PPU technology?
Contact us at: info@flow-computing.com.