Operators turned investors

Money is the easy part of an investment. The hard part starts the week after: the first sales hires, the first large customer contract, the next funding round, the move into a second country. That is where we spend most of our time, and it is the reason we invest at all.

Trado Capital is an investment company run by Olli Sirkiä and Sami Aho. We invest our own capital. Olli co-founded LeadDesk in 2010 and led it from a small team to a listing on Nasdaq First North in 2019, with several acquisitions along the way. He has also co-founded Profinder and N Health Technology, spent three years at McKinsey, and invested in a long list of startups since. Sami runs Trado’s day-to-day operations and its finance, and came to Trado from corporate treasury and equity research.

What we bring

Three things. The first is advice that is concrete enough to act on, because we have done the work ourselves. Olli has built outbound sales organizations from the first hire to a team that carries the company, and he has taken companies from Finland into new markets, LeadDesk and Timma among them. Sami structures the financing side: the rounds, the instruments, the shareholder agreements, and the public funding that goes with them.

The second is timing. Over our careers we have learned to read when a company should accelerate and when it should brake. That judgement, together with a first-hand understanding of the problems that come with scaling, comes only from operating experience. It is a skill we put to work for the benefit of our portfolio companies.

The third is time. We stay involved from the founding team’s first months until the company is large enough to run without us. N Health Technology, which Olli co-founded and Trado backed in 2019, employs more than 100 people, and WP SEO AI, which we backed in 2023, has passed 250 [as of 9/2026]. The work in between is rarely glamorous: recruiting, pricing, sales process, financing, and product development.

Investing our own capital

We invest from our own balance sheet. There are no outside investors behind Trado, no fund lifecycle and no management fee. This changes the nature of the relationship. A fund invests other people’s money and answers to them; we answer for our own decisions, and we carry the same risk as the founders we back. In practice it means we can invest as equity, debt or a combination of the two, we can wait when waiting is the right call, and the advice we give has our own capital behind it.

What to expect from us

We are easy to work with, and execution is what we care about most in a founder. We follow the numbers every month, spar on strategy, help with hires, negotiate alongside you, and open doors where we have them. We do not need to be visible, and we prefer founders who feel the same way: the ones who spend their energy on the business rather than on the story around it.

If you are building a B2B software company and want an investor who has done the operating work, pitch us.