Spotlight On
A spotlight on Casambi
Former Nokia innovators lead the way in smart lighting technology at Casambi. CIE editor Amy Wallington asks CEO Timo Pakkala about how Casambi aims to become the de facto wireless lighting control platform
secure bank credit worth 50,000€. As a result, my colleague Elena Lehtimäki and I founded Casambi in the summer of 2011 to create wireless lighting control systems. We’re one of a large number of companies to have been set up by former Nokia staff: some 400 new firms were created, including Tellyo, PulseOn and BetterDoctor. Lehtimäki, our CTO, is the brains behind Casambi. She created much of the source code you’ll find in our Bluetooth chips, our app and the cloud service behind our smart lighting control system. We now have an in-house R&D team and offices in six countries, headquartered in Helsinki.
How long had you been at Nokia, and how did your role there prepare you for life as an entrepreneur?
Timo Pakkala
Tell us about how you came to launch your wireless lighting control company, Casambi.
W
hen Nokia restructured in 2011 and made thousands of employees redundant, it set up
the Bridge programme to help affected workers. Bridge provided training, assisted people in finding new work and offered support for entrepreneurs who wanted to launch their own companies.
I was one of 5,000 people in Finland to benefit from the programme: alongside 20,000€ of funding, Bridge helped me
30 May 2017
I had been at Nokia since 1996, when I joined as a software engineer. Fast-forward a few years and I was overseeing a team in Nokia’s Research Centre. Our aim was to innovate: we pitched ideas to Nokia’s management team and, if they liked them, we’d get resources and a set of targets to meet. If you achieved those goals and they liked the direction you had set out for your idea, you would get more resource. In the team I was overseeing, we had all the functions of a start-up and were responsible for our own profit and loss. Nokia gave us a lot of autonomy and the process taught me a huge amount about developing products for international markets. It planted a seed in my mind about setting up on my own, without the safety net of a big corporation behind me.
Components in Electronics
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