Collaboration across organizational boundaries does not happen automatically. Established companies, startups, researchers, investors, and public-sector actors often work with different objectives, timescales, language, and decision-making processes. Bringing them into the same room is a start, but it is not enough. Collaboration has to be designed, facilitated and carried forward.
For Crazy Town, the first EriCa Reactor cohort is a practical example of this kind of ecosystem work.
A shared challenge creates a reason to collaborate
According to WHO and UNICEF, 2.1 billion people still lack access to safely managed drinking water. Kemira’s solutions already help enable clean water for around 400 million people worldwide. Both figures show the scale of the challenge – and why no company or technology can solve it alone.
Clean water was therefore selected as the theme for the first EriCa Reactor cohort. Together with Kemira, Crazy Town turned this broad global challenge into an accelerator program through which industry and emerging deep-tech companies could explore concrete opportunities together. Seven teams from five countries were selected: Anferra, CAAMA / University of Oulu, Countertrace, NPHarvest, P-Agro Minerals, Spectromarine and Wellmatix.
Their approaches demonstrate how many different capabilities the water challenge requires:
- circular chemistry that turns industrial residues into useful water-treatment chemicals and materials
- reusable adsorbents for removing and recovering metals from industrial water
- programmable polymers that selectively capture targeted substances
- recovery of nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater for use as fertilizers
- modular phosphorus filtration and reuse
- optical sensors and analytics for continuous water-quality monitoring
- AI-guided development of advanced materials for water treatment
The solutions are different, but the teams share a common challenge: how to move validated technology towards industrial use, customers, pilots and international growth.
Crazy Town delivered the collaboration process from start to finish
EriCa Reactor is implemented by Crazy Town in partnership with Kemira. Crazy Town designed and delivered the five-month program as an end-to-end service.
Our role included:
- designing and delivering the hybrid accelerator program
- turning the industry theme into a clear international call for solutions
- finding and recruiting relevant startups, scaleups and research-based spinoffs globally
- facilitating collaboration between the teams and Kemira’s experts
- bringing in mentors, investors and ecosystem partners
- helping teams refine use cases, business models and pilot pathways
- supporting soft landing, company-building and access to EriCa’s workspaces and laboratories
- producing Demo Day and supporting the continuation of promising discussions
A turnkey service does not mean applying the same accelerator template to every challenge. It means taking responsibility for the full process, from concept and recruitment to delivery, facilitation, connections and follow-up, while adapting the program to the industry partner, technologies and intended outcomes.
The work produced different forms of progress
Over five months, the teams worked with Kemira experts as well as ecosystem partners to identify opportunities, validate use cases and understand what would be required to move their technologies forward.
Across the cohort, teams:
- refined their business cases and commercial focus
- prepared pilot plans and pathways towards industrial validation
- advanced commercial and collaboration discussions
- strengthened their investor readiness and built new funding connections
- connected with potential customers and partners in Finland and elsewhere in Europe
- moved research-based cases closer to company formation
- built close working relationships with industry mentors and experts
- raised hundreds of thousands of euros of pre-seed and seed funding
Some commercial discussions and pilot preparations are still ongoing and cannot yet be shared publicly. More team-specific results will be shared later. One public example is Wellmatix from South Korea. With support from the program, the company completed its soft landing in Finland and established Wellmatix Oy in June 2026. The team now has its Finnish home base at Crazy Town EriCa and is building relationships with customers and partners in Finland.
Social capital is part of the infrastructure
The sold-out EriCa Reactor Demo Day on August 20th brought more than 100 people from industry, investors, startups, research, and the wider innovation ecosystem to EriCa Green Chemistry Park in Espoo.
The presentations mattered, but so did the conversations around them. Teams met Kemira experts, investors and potential collaborators, and the discussions continued during networking and the informal after-work.
This is where ecosystem work becomes practical. Trusted relationships provide access to expertise, talent, facilities, funding, partners and customers. Social capital helps companies cross organizational boundaries and gives technical collaboration a chance to continue after the formal program ends.
For the teams, Demo Day was not simply the conclusion of a cohort. It opened the next phase of pilot preparation, commercial validation, fundraising, company-building and international collaboration.
What comes next?
The second EriCa Reactor cohort focuses on enabling a circular future via fiber-based renewable packaging. The five-month program is open globally to startups, scaleups and research-based spinoffs with validated technology at TRL 4 or above. It runs from January to May 2027 in a hybrid format. Participation is free of charge and no equity is taken. Applications are open until 25 October 2026.
Learn more and apply to EriCa Reactor program here.
EriCa Reactor is one example of the ecosystem activities Crazy Town designs and delivers. We help companies, universities, cities and other ecosystem organizations turn shared challenges into practical programs, partnerships and new business. This can include accelerators, innovation challenges, hackathons, workshops, venture-building activities, soft-landing programs and the operation of physical innovation hubs. The delivery can cover the whole process as a turnkey service: concept development, partner engagement, participant recruitment, program delivery, facilitation, communications, matchmaking and follow-up.
