Greetings from Alumni: Antti Toponen, Ovido — Lawyer in the Startup World

This time in Greetings from Alumni, we catch up with Antti Toponen, who used to work in our M&A Team as a lawyer. Since his time at HS, Antti has moved on to the startup world, co-founding AI startup Ovido.

Hi Antti, how are you? What is topical for you right now?

I’m doing as great as ever, thank you for asking.

What is especially topical for me right now is helping our customers prepare for the upcoming requirements around Digital Product Passports. We are witnessing a pivotal moment in European regulation where companies need to move from manual product compliance to digital compliance. At the same time, the amount of compliance work is increasing, which requires investment in new tools that can automate workflows and structure product and supply chain data.

What these regulatory changes are in fact doing is making companies turn compliance into structured data. That shift, in turn, is unlocking much broader potential for digital transformation across organisations.

During your time at HS, you worked as a lawyer in our M&A Team. If you had to describe that time in three words, what would those words be?

Picking just three words is never easy for a lawyer, but I would say educational, fast-paced, and collaborative.

Since your time at HS, you have co-founded AI startup Ovido. What is Ovido and how did it come to be?

Ovido is a SaaS platform for managing product and supply chain data and preparing Digital Product Passports, currently focused on textile manufacturers and brands, especially SMEs. The platform enables automated management of product data, chemical substance traceability, and sustainability impacts across apparel and related segments, while also allowing customers to derive actionable insights for decision-making.

We started Ovido from a very practical frustration. In a previous company, we saw first-hand how difficult it was to collect and manage sustainability and compliance-related data across supply chains. At the same time, reading the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) made it clear that this challenge is only going to intensify and impact companies of all sizes.

While ESPR is often framed as sustainability regulation, in practice it is driving a much deeper shift. It is effectively forcing the digitalisation of product compliance across industries.

What we are building is an easy-to-use tool that helps companies make that transition while ensuring continued market access. In essence, we are building the data infrastructure layer for companies that have historically operated without it — where compliance is built in, and the real value comes from how that data can be used to improve decision-making and enable more meaningful adoption of AI across processes.

How would you say your time at HS prepared you for this career leap? What is it like being a lawyer in the startup scene?

My time at HS gave me valuable insight into how investors think about transactions and what they ultimately value. That perspective has been very useful when building a company.

As for being a lawyer in the startup scene — while it is a lot of fun, I do sometimes miss the company of other lawyers. On a more serious note, I think startups today are much more attuned to the importance of legal and regulatory considerations than they were a decade ago.

More broadly, EU regulation is increasingly creating entirely new opportunities for company building, particularly for those with a legal background who can interpret where things are heading.

The HS x Päätös Podcast cooperation continues this year, so what better way to end this interview than to ask — what is the most significant decision you have made that has shaped your professional life?

For me, that would be the decision to move from working as a lawyer into an in-house role at a startup. Without that step, I would not have learned how to stop worrying and love uncertainty — and I would never have co-founded Ovido.