From blank page to funded project — how Aveksana turns ideas into fundable projects
Finnish AI start-up Aveksana has built a platform that guides researchers, founders, and public sector teams from a raw idea to a structured funding application. Over ten thousand people across Finland and Estonia have already used it, and the company is now preparing to scale internationally.
Text by Solja Sulkunen, 21.5.2026 | Photo by Olga Kryuchkova
Every great project begins the same way: with a person staring at an empty document, unsure where to start. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a researcher at a university, a founder building a start-up, or a city official trying to launch a community initiative.
The earliest stage of any ambitious project, figuring out whether your idea is worth pursuing, whether anyone has done it before, and how to turn a hunch into a structured plan, is often the loneliest and most paralysing part of the whole journey.
Luckily, new AI-driven solutions are reshaping how research and development projects are conceived and executed. Finnish technology company Aveksana is addressing one of the most persistent challenges in innovation: how to transform an idea into a validated concept and ultimately into a competitive funding application.
The solution has been developed in close collaboration with leading Finnish universities, municipal development organisations, and innovation ecosystems, and validated alongside partners including Finnish AI Region (FAIR), AISTART, Helsinki Education Hub, and Tampere University’s GPT Lab.
Turning hunches into plans
The company’s founders know the feeling intimately. The earliest phase of any research or development project is often the most uncertain and time-consuming one, because you need to identify a meaningful problem, validate its novelty, and build a structured plan forward.
‘At the beginning of every research project, you are essentially starting from zero’, they explain. ‘You spend a significant amount of time just figuring out what is worth working on and whether it has already been done.’
Many of us know the feeling — it’s a surprisingly universal frustration. Tools exist to support literature management, track citations, and organise documentation. But the messy, uncertain first step of simply defining and validating an idea? That part has remained largely unsupported. No one hands you a map.
Aveksana set out to fill this gap by building a platform that takes researchers from the first spark of an idea to a structured, fundable proposal. Rather than leaving people to wrestle with a blank page, it guides them through exploring, stress-testing, and shaping their thinking into a concrete proposal — ready for funding applications, research calls, or even collaborative development.
From academia to city hall
What began as a tool for researchers quickly proved useful far beyond universities. According to Aveksana, a major acceleration point came through collaboration with Professor Pekka Abrahamsson from Tampere University’s GPT-Lab. Besides testing the platform, he also helped to define the additional value opportunities for researchers throughout the research planning process.
Aveksana’s team then extended the platform from supporting idea validation into AI-assisted drafting of research and funding proposals, allowing users to combine their own materials, strategic inputs and funding templates into structured drafts tailored to specific calls. The new use case significantly widened the platform’s relevance beyond academia to start-ups, city organisations and innovation ecosystems.
City-led pilots with Business Helsinki and Business Vantaa put this to the test in some of the most demanding environments imaginable — complex, multi-stakeholder public projects where bureaucratic requirements are high and resources are stretched thin. The feedback was telling. According to the city representative, the biggest benefit was getting started. Instead of staring at an empty document, they could immediately have a structured draft to develop further.
A day's work, not a month's
By removing the barrier of the blank page, the project team was able to generate a structured draft aligned with the high requirements of the funding call and refine it collaboratively, focusing on elaborating concrete tasks and budget utilisation and strengthening the overall proposal.
For smaller teams unfamiliar with public funding processes, preparing grant applications often competes with product development and business operations for scarce time and resources. Perhaps the most striking testimony comes from Emilia Koskiniemi, founder of TaskHire, a small team applying for grants to pilot their own platform.
‘Preparing grant applications can take weeks of work for our small team, which is unfamiliar with this kind of process’, she says. ‘Building and facilitating the project and managing our business are where we are strong, and we already struggle with time management. With Artha I was able to validate my project idea and build an application in less than a day.’
This is the core of what Aveksana is offering: not a replacement for human expertise or creative thinking, but a dramatic reduction in the friction between having an idea and doing something with it. The founder’s vision remains the foundation; Artha simply removes the obstacles between inspiration and action.
Ready to scale internationally
Aveksana didn’t develop its solution in isolation. The platform has been shaped through hands-on collaboration with partners across the ecosystem, drawing on real insight from real users — right from the beginning. This ecosystem-driven approach meant the product was tested and refined against actual problems before it ever reached the market.
GPT-Lab supported the technical development of the platform by asking positively challenging questions such as ‘can you really do it?’ According to Aveksana, these types of questions helped sharpen its positioning, value proposition and focus on differentiated, workflow-level impact.
That grounding also shows in the numbers. Artha has now been used by over 10,000 private users, spanning researchers, start-up founders, university staff, and public sector teams across Finland and Estonia.
Through Finnish AI Region and related ecosystem activities, the company has been able to connect with a wide range of stakeholders, test its solution in diverse contexts and accelerate both product development and market validation. They have also been able to present their solution and piloting needs at once to five cities across Finland and Estonia.
Business Helsinki’s expert Solja Sulkunen has contributed to the progress as a business mentor, supporting the scaling of AI-driven solutions and helping translate technological capabilities into viable business opportunities. This ecosystem-driven approach has allowed the company to continuously refine its solution and expand its applicability across different sectors.
Towards wider adoption
Aveksana’s platform has now been validated across multiple user groups. The results point to a shared need: faster, more structured ways to move from ideas to fundable execution. With a working product and proven demand, the company is now preparing for the next phase of growth.
This includes scaling to international markets, strengthening commercial capabilities and further developing the solution to meet the needs of larger organisations, including the public sector. Aveksana is currently seeking seed funding of 1.5M€.
‘Our goal is to make it easier for anyone — from researchers to companies, cities and business ecosystems — to move from an idea to a concrete, fundable project’, the founders concluded.
