The city of Järvenpää is the first city in the world to utilise artificial intelligence in investment services for growth companies.

An AI-based investment service which aims to attract companies undergoing strong growth to the city in a whole new way has been introduced to the service range offered by the BusinessJärvenpää concept, which is part of Järvenpää’s city competitiveness services.

In November, for its artificial intelligence pilot project, BusinessJarvenpää sought growth companies specialising in health technology with a ready product, strong funding, and the opportunity to utilise Järvenpää’s commercial connections to Asia.

Artificial intelligence screened thousands of companies to find six with the most potential for Järvenpää

Companies participating in the search were limited geographically to Europe and Israel, home to more than 120,000 growth company candidates. No technological limitations were set; instead, the AI analysed the companies using 150 different data points.

The primary selection criteria were strong growth identifiers, such as funding, reference data in comparison to control companies, major partners and customers, personnel growth and other corresponding metrics.

Of the 935 companies which met the criteria for Järvenpää, 22 technology companies were chosen for the final stretch, and six were ranked as having very high potential. The aim is to initiate collaboration with at least two companies within a short timeframe.

“The next step is to promote the location of these companies in Järvenpää as lightly as possible. The companies will be able to network locally and cross-commercialise their services with other local, growth-seeking companies. We call this solution “cloud investment”. We believe that digital investment is inevitably followed by physical investment,” says Marko Lehenberg, City Growth Evangelist for Järvenpää.

A manually impossible task became a two-week project

The service process, which utilises artificial intelligence, is superior in efficiency compared to traditional, human analysis. It is not possible to manually screen thousands of companies because of the vast amount of data to be processed. The new services makes slow and expensive consultancy commissions a thing of the past.

The city of Järvenpää’s technological partner is Finnish artificial intelligence company Catapult International Oy, which serves large and international listed companies, such as Kone, Neste and Fortum, as well as a number of market-leading European companies from teleoperators to banks.

“It has been great to see that Järvenpää wants to utilise technological opportunities and save time and resources while achieving results which were not previously possible,” says Development Director Paavo Beckman.

A scalable service for cities

The new service is expected to be expanded from companies that already operate in the city to future operators in the area. In this way, the city of Järvenpää wants to shake up the outdated commercial policy that focuses on plot sales.

“We productised investment services in a whole new way, as towns and cities have already spent enough time on conventional methods. Business is already digital, and that’s why cities’ investment services must also be able to use digital means, and artificial intelligence is one of the most interesting of them,” says Marko Lehenberg.

The city of Järvenpää wants to act as a pioneer in promoting robotics and automation in any case.

“There are no obstacles to being the best in the world in this field,” says Lehenberg.

More information is available from:

City Growth Evangelist Marko Lehenberg,tel. +358 (0)40 315 3590, marko.lehenberg@jarvenpaa.fi
Development Director Paavo Beckman, tel. +358 (0)40 541 9122, paavo@catapult.guru