How to Actually Get Hired

Juho Niemi studied at Aalto University, which is not only Finland's most productive founder school (ranked 8th in Europe by VC-backed startup alumni 2011-2021, and responsible for a hand in every Finnish unicorn) but also the institution where CRACI's CTO did his master's thesis and where Dennis and Erika Marttinen both studied. The origin of the company is therefore a cohort effect as much as a founding decision: people who built relationships through Aalto's technical culture and then decided to solve one of the hardest unsolved problems in software supply chain security together. Juho describes the CRACI thesis on LinkedIn as solving what was "thought to be impossible" in software supply chain visibility, which is not hyperbole. Getting provably complete SBOM coverage at the transitive dependency level, continuously, across every deployed version of every product, is genuinely unsolved at production scale in most enterprises. His public operating style is visible from his LinkedIn feed: he organises Kubernetes security meetups at Founders House Helsinki (CRACI hosted the event, with Lucas Käldström and Stacklok's Juan Antonio Osorio as speakers), he travelled to New York with Dennis for the Nordic AI Night to position CRACI in the global security conversation, and he posts about supply chain attacks in real time when they happen (his npm supply chain attack post about Axios is the kind of content that lands in the feeds of the exact CISOs who are his buyers). He is not a founder who posts inspirational content. He posts when something is operationally relevant to his customers. His DMs are explicitly open for CRA conversations. The pre-seed announcement ends: "If you're shipping products with software into the EU and the CRA is on your roadmap, we'd love to compare notes on what your prep looks like today." CRACI was the first batch at Founders House Helsinki, a curated founder workspace that opened in the former Sähkötalo (Electrical House) building in central Helsinki and is described in Finnish media as an "ihmeittentekijätimonenavaruus" (roughly: a space for wonder-makers, a Finnish culture reference). Juho's co-founders are not just professional colleagues: they are part of the same Aalto technical cohort that has produced a disproportionate share of Nordic deep tech. The fact that the company hosted a Kubernetes security meetup before its own funding was public is the tell: they are building community before they are building pipeline, which is the right order.

Dennis Marttinen is the most extensively documented of the CRACI founders in public technical records, and the documentation is impressive. He completed a double-degree Master of Science in Security and Cloud Computing (SECCLO) across Aalto University in Finland and NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in Norway, one of the most rigorous cybersecurity master's programmes in the Nordic region, which explicitly combines cloud-native security, network security, and HPC. His master's thesis, Supernetes: Establishing Synergy Between Supercomputers and Cloud Computing, was presented live on stage at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London, one of the largest cloud-native computing conferences in the world. Supernetes is an open-source HPC-to-Kubernetes bridge that creates a 1-to-1 bidirectional mapping between Slurm-scheduled supercomputer jobs and Kubernetes Pods, and he demonstrated it live on LUMI, a global top-10 supercomputer based in Kajaani, Finland, operated by CSC. That is a KubeCon main stage talk, in a room of thousands of engineers, demonstrating software that runs on one of the most powerful computers on the planet. He was a student at the time. Before founding CRACI, his open-source contributions include Weave Ignite (a production container-to-microVM solution co-authored with the Weaveworks team, which produced Weave Scope and Flux CD and was later acquired by AWS), Racklet (a scale model datacenter rack project presented at KCD Africa 2021 that won community recognition for making distributed systems education accessible), and Supernetes (his own project, now hosted under the supernetes GitHub organisation). He is also listed as co-author of kubeadm, the standard tool for bootstrapping Kubernetes clusters, which is used by millions of engineers globally every time they set up a new cluster. His GitHub handle is @twelho and his profile bio reads: "Kubernetes, Supercomputing, Security + more." That is the accurate one-line summary of what he actually does. His SECCLO degree runs across two countries and two universities simultaneously, which is structurally unusual: students do the first year at one institution and the second year at the partner institution, producing engineers who have operated in two national technical cultures and two regulatory environments, relevant for a company building EU regulatory compliance software. Erika Marttinen (CRACI's Software Engineer, also an Aalto CS student with an exchange semester at TU Wien) shares his surname, suggesting a family connection on the founding team. His KubeCon talk was accepted on the strength of Supernetes alone, without a company affiliation: he was still a student presenting an open-source project he had built during his thesis, in a room with engineers from Google, AWS, Microsoft, and every major cloud-native company. He is now applying the same infrastructure rigour to software supply chain security.

Jaakko Sirén is the product co-founder at CRACI. His LinkedIn handle is jaakkonen, and his public profile is lower than Juho's and Dennis's. He holds a background consistent with the Aalto founder cohort and is responsible for the platform's product direction: what the SBOM graph interface looks like for a CTO or Head of Engineering who is not a compliance specialist, how vulnerability handling integrates into pull request workflows without adding friction, and how the product scales from a startup with 10 microservices to an enterprise with 500 products in production. His role title is CPO, which at a 13-person company means he is simultaneously doing product strategy, customer discovery, and UX decisions. The platform's positioning, "CRACI as your CI" and "compliance ships with every build" is clean product thinking that reflects someone who has translated a complex regulatory requirement into a single sentence that an engineer can act on. He was specifically named alongside Dennis Marttinen as the person Dennis spent "the 6 craziest months of my life" building with, in a LinkedIn post Dennis wrote about the founding period, suggesting the two had been building CRACI together from the earliest days before Juho and Petteri joined or formalised the co-founding structure. His LinkedIn is sparse but his connection to the Aalto Kubernetes and cloud-native community is confirmed through the founding team context.

Petteri Pulkkinen is the security leadership co-founder at CRACI: the person responsible for ensuring that a compliance automation platform is itself secure, and for translating what "CRA compliance" actually means in legal and technical terms into the product's design constraints. At a company selling security compliance software, the CISO co-founder is the trust anchor: the person who can sit in a customer conversation with a CISO at a Nordic industrial company and speak at the same technical and regulatory depth. Tomorrow (May 20, 2026), Petteri and Erika Marttinen are speaking together at KCD Helsinki, the regional Kubernetes Community Day, on the future of software supply chains. That is not a marketing event. KCD Helsinki draws the serious Kubernetes practitioners in the Finnish cloud-native community, and speaking there on software supply chain security the day after a funding announcement is a deliberate community signal. The CRACI team is not announcing then retreating. They are immediately embedding in the community that their product serves.