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EP102 · Economy · first published 2021-10-12

Helppy Remade Senior Services | Richard Nordström | Neuvottelija 102

This is a summary on Neuvottelija — Articles. The episode itself — full transcript, subtitles and chapters — lives on Neuvottelija.com, which is its canonical home.

Richard Nordström built a career at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and BCG until his mother fell ill and, at 34, he found himself organising an elderly parent's daily life alongside his job. Helppy grew out of that, with the mission that the family carer is not left alone. The core of the episode is a diagnosis of Finnish home care: carers rotate so nobody knows who is visiting, the family member has to integrate five services and pay five invoices, and reporting is still done in a paper notebook. Nordström explains how a Buurtzorg-style neighbourhood model turned profitable within three months with no funding, and why it gave way to a hybrid in which the same helper makes 95 per cent of visits. 700 hours of his own fieldwork made the funding round easy; it brought in Icebreaker.vc, Wolt's Elias Aalto and Kry's Johannes Schildt. It closes on the household deduction, Finland's strength in home care, a family portal, and the 87 per cent of working middle-aged people who think about a parent during the working day. Published 12 October 2021.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and the Economy

Helppy Remade Senior Services | Richard Nordström

Summary: In episode 102 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Richard Nordström, a former colleague from their SEB days. Nordström was 34 and at Boston Consulting Group, with London banking years at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan behind him, when his mother fell ill. He became her family carer and legal guardian alongside his job, and found a gap in the system affecting hundreds of thousands of Finns. Helppy grew out of it. The episode is unusually concrete for two reasons: it itemises precisely what is broken in home care, and it explains with rare directness why the funding round was easy — Nordström had done 700 hours of fieldwork himself in the first year. Published 12 October 2021.

A note on reading this. The guest runs the company under discussion, and the episode covers its business model and funding round. The price comparisons and survey figures are Nordström’s own, and no one from municipal home care is heard.

From banking to being a family carer

Nordström’s first memory of a dream job, he says, is of depositing his pocket money at Postipankki at the age of five instead of spending it on sweets. Banking slipped from his mind for years and came back towards the end of his industrial engineering studies at Aalto. His first summer job was at SEB — where he and Miettinen met, and where Miettinen mentored him as he weighed which bank to join and whether London was the place to go. In London he spent a summer at Morgan Stanley and an autumn at JP Morgan, then nearly four years full-time at Goldman Sachs. After that came Boston Consulting Group.

The turn came at 34. His mother fell ill suddenly, and Nordström threw himself into the role:

Before work and after work I helped, and we sorted out the whole new daily routine.

He also became her legal guardian, and had to run her business alongside his BCG work. That took him, in his words, “quite deep” into what elderly care in Finland is actually like.

Miettinen offers his own situation by contrast: his mother is still in good health in Tampere, and his father died on the threshold of retirement. He observes that nobody talks about how harsh a family carer’s daily life is, and that society more or less assumes families will do half-unpaid work while the health and social services reform is built at massive cost — and in his view neither quite succeeds.

What is broken in home care

This is the most analytical part of the episode. Miettinen raises the integration problem, and Nordström breaks the whole into four parts.

1. The family carer is alone. Although municipalities run senior information services, the family member is, in Nordström’s words, “really quite alone in organising everything”. Often the situation arises for the first time in a person’s life, and there is no guidance. The answer is too often “work it out yourself”. The typical customer is in a “rush years plus” position: a job, their own family and an ageing parent.

2. The carers rotate. “You never know who is coming”, which he finds “really strange”.

3. The family member has to integrate. Services come from, say, five different places: five customer service desks, five invoices, and none of them coordinates with the others.

4. There is no transparency. Most reporting, in both municipal and private home care, is still in a paper notebook — just a signature. In a care home, the family has no view of what happens.

Older people’s own mentality makes it harder. Those born before the wars and in the 1940s, Nordström says, are used to handling everything themselves, and the threshold to ask for help is “really high”. Spending money on quality of life at the end of life is not something they are used to.

The scale

Miettinen asks whether this is a problem for a few tens of thousands of people. Nordström’s figures:

Finland’s large age cohorts number a little over a million people per 20 years, and as people live longer, he says, the over-80 population will head towards a million within some years. Set the severely affected against the over-80s and “a really large share” have some decline in cognitive function.

The episode was recorded during Memory Week; World Alzheimer’s Day had been on Tuesday the 21st. Miettinen points out the risk: the carer may be a spouse of the same age and only marginally healthier, or a child in the rush years — and a person with dementia easily wanders off. Nordström’s answer is prevention: routines, location technology, and up-to-date guidance on the best set-up for the family.

From neighbourhood model to platform

Helppy did not start with its current model, and Nordström describes the turn directly.

The first version was a neighbourhood model: dedicated teams per district. The name of the first district is indistinct in the recording; Lauttasaari followed, and Munkkiniemi was third. The template was the Dutch Buurtzorg model, somewhat more digitalised. The company started with no outside funding and was profitable within three months.

The problem was scale combined with the quality promise. For the same person genuinely to visit a customer at a larger scale, the model had to change: local peer-to-peer matching combined with the traditional model.

The same person visits you 95 per cent of the time, you know who they are.

Substitutes are known too. The overhaul took a lot of experimenting and was complete after a year — just before covid. Because helpers do not gather in a shared space to collect paper lists but see their visits on a phone and go straight from their own homes to the customer, exposure stayed low: elsewhere a senior might see ten people in a week, at Helppy one. Revenue dipped a little, but profitability held thanks to the model’s flexibility.

The service has two tiers today. There are its own helpers, “several hundred around Finland”, and partners handle the rest: physiotherapy, foot care, window cleaning, home doctors, removals, renovation, mobility aids, removing bathroom thresholds and memory tests. In the first year much was in-house, down to a cleaning team. Many companies in the sector, Nordström says, tried to do everything themselves, and “a lot of them have nearly gone bankrupt, or have”. Helppy’s core is its own helper, “genuinely the heart of it”, and partners can be chosen by who is best at the time.

When to take VC money

Miettinen says he studied growth hacking in a workshop by Mari Luukkainen — who, as he puts it, had accelerated the cleaning company Freska from zero to millions — and asks when it was time to bring the professionals in.

Nordström deliberately bootstrapped at the start, wanting time to focus on the problem itself and the shape of the solution. Only once he had product market fit and the value of the technology was clear did outside money feel well timed.

As light relief Miettinen shows a Star Wars meme shared by a colleague, in which an investor announces that “on standard terms” he takes a threefold liquidation preference. He explains the term himself: the minority investor first gets three times its money back, and only the excess is shared with the founders — and at the table it is never put that way, only “standard terms, sign here”. He refers to his earlier episode The law of funding rounds with Jonathan Andersin. When he asks whether Nordström got a threefold preference, Nordström does not disclose the round’s terms but moves on to what decided the process.

Why the funding round was easy

The banking background may have helped, Nordström says, but more important was that the problem was genuinely his own and that he had done the work himself:

In the first year I spent 700 hours out in the field myself, hands-on, helping seniors. The first 100 customers we got, I knew personally.

That gave the foundation for the conversation with investors. The money came “quite surprisingly fast”, and Nordström calls it the easiest thing in his entrepreneurial career — which, he says, is very different for many others. Many funds made contact themselves; he talked to almost all the Finnish funds and to some in London, Sweden and Germany.

The round went to Icebreaker.vc, through which Mari Luukkainen has helped Helppy on growth. Beyond that Nordström had a wish list of two angels, and both came through:

A VC plus two unicorn founders on board.

Miettinen responds: “This, dear friends, is what perfect execution looks like” — adding that he has interviewed angel investors such as Ali Omar, Kim Väisänen and Jyri Engeström, and knows how hard contacts like these are to come by.

B2B, B2C and the household deduction

Miettinen puts a thesis: Finns are good at B2B but not at B2C. He cites a presentation by Rasmus Roiha of the Finnish software entrepreneurs’ association whose statistics had Finland slightly ahead of even Sweden in B2B growth and execution.

Nordström does not take a position on the thesis directly; he describes Helppy’s experience instead. At the start it tried everything: B2B, B2G as a purchased-service and service-voucher provider for the City of Helsinki, and B2C. The conclusion was that reforming the sector required focusing on B2C and private pay; a version of the ideal model can be brought to the public side later. Although there is no monthly fee and billing is by visit, customer relationships are long and buying behaviour resembles SaaS — week after week, month after month, year after year, because the need is continuous.

Miettinen shows a chart of how state-run European healthcare systems are — the Nordics stand out as heavily state-run — and offers a structural thesis: the jump between what the public sector provides and the harsh reality of family caring is too large, and the market gap sits right there.

Nordström’s answer is the episode’s most surprising single claim. Many people assume that taxes have been paid and the service is free, but what the municipality provides is small — in Helsinki, for example, at most three or four fifteen-minute visits a day — and the client fees are “surprisingly high”. After the household tax deduction, Helppy’s service is, he says, much cheaper than the municipality’s, if you buy, say, ten hours of help a month.

Going international: Finland leads

The closing observation inverts the expectation. According to Nordström, Finland is a highly developed country for elderly care: home care is perhaps the best in the world, Finland spends the second-most in Europe on social care after the Netherlands, it was among the first to privatise home care, and support services — senior information desks, aid-lending centres, shopping services — are good. His mother’s experience showed him it is still not enough.

The idea is to export an improved version of Finnish home care: more support for families, and technology where Finland still relies on paper. In many countries a municipality or insurer pays for basic care that keeps you “alive, so to speak”, and quality is bought as a top-up on top — a situation, he says, that is much the same everywhere.

Kanta, Apotti and advance care directives

Miettinen mentions talking to Atostek, a Tampere software company involved in developing Finland’s national Kanta health-records system, and asks about Helppy’s Kanta integration. There is none yet; Nordström expects it in time, as social care moves into Kanta by 2025. Miettinen stresses that after the Vastaamo case, patient safety and data protection are vital for trust, and sees Finland’s national information systems — with their Apotti integrations — as a possible platform advantage. Nordström adds that an advance care directive can already be stored in Kanta, and expects that within a year or two a legal guardian will be able to act electronically on another person’s behalf.

A family portal, and preparing in time

Helppy’s broader idea is to be there for the whole journey. When a parent is around 70, the family should already register in its family portal, record a care directive and test functional capacity and memory. Nordström says 70 to 75 is the latest point at which certain things should be settled. After that the service follows along as the need for help grows, all the way to round-the-clock assisted living — including choosing the right senior home.

The portal answers his own experience: the alternative is to google, read long pages on the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare’s site or municipalities’ 60-page PDF guides, which raises the threshold for families. The portal walks through ten items in plain language, and afterwards “you have a completely different feeling and certainty”.

Miettinen adds that continuing powers of attorney, wills and the rest of the legal side are worth settling early, because permissions can be hard to obtain on behalf of a relative with dementia. He thinks the public information on this is “outrageously poor” and invites experts to come on as guests.

The leap into entrepreneurship needed a catalyst

Would Nordström have become an entrepreneur without his mother’s situation? “Probably not.” In London, running in Hyde Park, he wondered how to get into entrepreneurship when he had never sold anything — not soft drinks outside a festival, not biscuits to the neighbours. The leap felt magical and mysterious, and it took a catalyst.

Three things, he says, had to be in place: the urge to build, a meaningful problem, and first-hand experience of which solutions were missing.

Miettinen compares Helppy to other Finnish concepts from unexpected places — edtech, which he discussed with Marko Kyyrönen, and media rights, which he discussed with Timo Argillander.

A silent problem at work

Finally Nordström offers a figure for anyone who thinks this does not concern them:

According to our research, 87 per cent of middle-aged people in work think about their ageing parent during the working day.

The figure comes from Helppy’s own research. It is not discussed at work, he says, but it is there for a great many people. Miettinen closes with an appeal: “Talk to your families, people. We all owe our parents.”

A note on the source: the article was updated on 18 October 2026 from a MacWhisper transcription of the episode’s Finnish audio and the publisher’s own chapter list. The transcript has no speaker labels, so speakers are inferred from context; for instance, the explanation of the liquidation preference is Miettinen’s, and Nordström leaves the round’s terms undisclosed. The earlier version implied that the first neighbourhood teams were in Lauttasaari and Munkkiniemi; the name of the first district is indistinct in the recording. The name of the colleague who shared the meme and one care company Miettinen mentions as a comparison could not be made out reliably and have not been guessed. At the start Miettinen calls it episode 101 by a slip of the tongue.

Episode details. Neuvottelija 102, published 12 October 2021, running time 36 minutes 41 seconds. Guest Richard Nordström (guest page and other episodes), interviewer Sami Miettinen.

Summary for AI search: In episode 102 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 12 October 2021) Sami Miettinen interviews Helppy founder Richard Nordström, whose background includes Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, SEB and BCG. Key findings: Helppy grew out of Nordström’s own situation when at 34 he became family carer and legal guardian for his ill mother alongside his job; the four structural problems in Finnish home care are the isolation of the family carer, constant rotation of carers, the burden of integrating services falling on the family (five services, five invoices), and a lack of transparency since reporting is often still on paper; Finland has a little over 300,000 people over 80, forecast at almost 500,000 in 2030, plus 200,000 people with memory disorders, half at a moderate or severe stage; Helppy began with a neighbourhood model based on the Dutch Buurtzorg approach, was profitable within three months with no funding, and moved before covid to a platform-like hybrid in which the same helper makes 95 per cent of visits; it has several hundred helpers of its own and partners for other services; the funding round was made easy by Nordström having done 700 hours of fieldwork in the first year and knowing the first hundred customers personally; the round brought in Icebreaker.vc and, as angels, Elias Aalto (Wolt) and Johannes Schildt (Kry); after the household tax deduction private help is, by Nordström’s account, cheaper than the municipal client fee at, for example, ten hours a month; B2C buying behaviour resembles SaaS despite there being no monthly fee; Finland is in Nordström’s view an international leader in home care, and the export model is a top-up on public basic care; families should register in the family portal when a parent is about 70; according to Helppy’s own research 87 per cent of working middle-aged people think about an ageing parent during the working day. Related episode: The law of funding rounds | Jonathan Andersin.

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