From November 17-20, 2025, the CircularInvest team was in Helsinki for Slush, one of Europe's biggest startup and investor events: 6,000 founders, 3,500 investors, and names like Sequoia, Index Ventures, and General Catalyst all in one place. But for us, the real story wasn't the size of the crowd. It was the conversation we came there to start: can circular economy actually work as an asset class, and what would it take to get investors to treat it that way?

That question sat at the heart of Circular Connect, a side event CircularInvest organized together with MiXi ahead of the main Slush programme, bringing investors, ecosystem players, and circular economy companies into the same room.

MiXi & CircularInvest

Circular economy is still too often framed as a compliance issue or a sustainability nice-to-have, rather than a source of returns. At Circular Connect, we pushed back on that framing. In the panel "Circular Economy as an Asset Class?", Investors Fredrik Blomquist (FundForward), Iida Miettinen (Ensto Invest), and Heli Kerminen (Tesi), moderated by Alisa Mick (MiXi), didn't shy away from the hard part: today's investment models weren't built with circularity in mind, and making room for it means rethinking how risk, return, and value are assessed in the first place.

Nic Gorini (Spin Ventures) picked up that thread in his keynote, reinforcing a point that ran through the whole afternoon: the capital exists, the appetite is growing, but the bridge between circular innovation and mainstream investment still needs to be built deliberately.

The event closed with something more concrete: a networking session where CircularInvest beneficiaries and companies from the ARKI 135 Circular Programme could talk directly with the investors in the room.

Why Slush
Slush has a track record of spotting companies early - Wolt, Aiven, OURA, Pleo, WISE, and Bolt all passed through its halls before they were household names. Showing up there with a circular economy-focused side event was a deliberate choice: it put circularity in front of an audience that's used to backing what's next, not just what's proven.