Around Finnish Entrepreneur’s Day, the Finnish Startup Community is highlighting Finnish startups and growth companies building solutions to some of society’s most important challenges.
Behind every company is a problem someone decided was worth solving.
For Timo Siukkola of TheStorage, the challenge is getting industrial factories off fossil fuels without disturbing production or blowing up energy bills.
The energy transition also has to work for industry
The scale of the challenge is significant in Finland. In 2025, the energy sector accounted for 66% of Finland’s greenhouse gas emissions, excluding the land-use sector (Statistics Finland, 2026).
When electrification comes up, the conversation is often about cars, batteries and steel. But factories also need large amounts of energy to produce the heat and steam that keep industrial processes running.
Many still burn fossil fuels to produce that heat. Steam is essential in industries including food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and paper.
For these businesses, moving away from fossil fuels needs to be practical. Production cannot stop, and cleaner energy has to make business sense.
Electricity is the obvious replacement, but its price moves hour by hour, and no plant can schedule production around that.
Industrial heat deserves a much bigger place in the energy transition discussion.
Storing electricity as heat
TheStorage is building a thermal energy storage system for industry based on its proprietary Sand-in-Motion technology.
The system charges using electricity when prices are low, stores that energy as heat in sand, and holds it until production needs it.
TheStorage’s aim is to provide heat-intensive industries with the process heat they need at a price that competes with burning fuel — but without the emissions.
By allowing factories to use lower-priced electricity and access the heat later when needed, thermal energy storage can make cleaner production a more practical option.
Making clean heat the obvious business decision
TheStorage’s ambition is to help factories around the world stop relying on fossil fuels for heat.
If the company succeeds, it wants to make clean heat reliable and affordable enough that switching becomes an obvious business decision.
At scale, TheStorage believes this could significantly reduce industrial emissions while helping companies remain competitive and continue to grow.
What needs to change in Finland?
For Timo, Finland is at its best when someone is willing to take a risk on something unproven.
Many successful Finnish companies exist because an investor, customer or founder backed a technology before it became the safe choice. TheStorage believes Finland needs more of those decisions from its largest companies as well as its smallest.
One company backing a new technology can help create an entire industry that did not exist before.
The opportunity is also much bigger than Finland’s domestic market. With strong talent but a small home market, companies built here need to think globally from the beginning.
As TheStorage puts it, Finnish technology travels because it never had the option not to.
For TheStorage, making the energy transition work for industry is a problem too important to ignore.
Entrepreneurs Build. Because Some Problems Are Too Important to Ignore.