How Parvi came to be

I met Aapo for the first time in January this year, over lunch.

I’d been following him on LinkedIn for a while. He was active there, visibly building something, and I’d noticed. If I’m honest about why I asked him to lunch, part of it was that I thought I might sell him digital marketing services. Lucky for both of us, I didn’t put that in the message. It would have ended the conversation before it started.

”He wanted to hire me.”

At the time, I was in the middle of moving an agency’s whole go-to-market onto AI agents. Doing far more, across far more channels, with no new hires. It was the most interesting work I’d done in fifteen years in marketing, and I couldn’t stop talking about it. So over lunch, that’s what happened. I went on a rant about agentic AI: what it could already do, what it was about to do, why almost nobody outside a small circle understood how much had changed.

Aapo listened. And afterward, he had one thought: he wanted to hire me.

I want to be honest about that, because it’s not the version of this story that sounds best. The idea of starting something new, together, didn’t come up at that lunch. It came later, in the conversations after. And I don’t think either of us could tell you today which of us said it first.

What I do know is my side of it. I was clear from the start that I didn’t want to just go work for another company. If I was going to make a move, it had to be mine. I’d had that pull toward building something of my own for a long time, going back to being a broke student sending out fifty job applications and getting nowhere, and becoming a freelancer because I had no other choice. That instinct never really left.

So instead of a job offer, the conversation became something else. Aapo and I met with Panu, the group CEO, and the three of us started asking a real question: could there be something here? Not instantly, and not in one meeting. It took most of the year. The lunch was January. The company went live in August.

The part I haven’t told as often is what it cost to say yes. I had a well-paid job at the time, and a five-year plan already in motion at home. Leaving both wasn’t a small thing, and I expected the conversation with my wife to be hard. It wasn’t. She was completely behind it from the start. What settled it for me, in the end, was simple: if I didn’t do this, I’d spend the next ten years wondering what if.

The name came out of that same period. Parvi is the Finnish word for a flock, but it’s also half of *parviäly*, swarm intelligence, what you’d call a hive mind. A team of AI agents working together, directed by one person, is a kind of hive mind in that sense. I came up with it, and at the time it was just a name I liked. It’s grown into the only name I can imagine the company having.

None of this happened as cleanly as it reads. Seven months passed between that lunch and the day we opened the doors. In the weeks before launch, our revenue was zero, and we were already paying for the systems that would run the company. We built it anyway, because we believed the timing was right: agentic AI had reached a point where a two-person company could do work that used to take a real team, and almost nobody in Finland was set up to take advantage of it yet.

That’s the bet Parvi is. Not that AI replaces the people doing the work, but that it lets a strategist do dramatically more of it, faster, with the judgment and the taste that AI still can’t supply on its own. I didn’t want to build another agency selling hours. I wanted to build the thing I’d already started proving out, on someone else’s business, and see how far it could go on my own.

We decided, the moment we founded Parvi, that we’d share how this actually goes. Not just the wins. The failures too, and everything in between, because AI is new to everyone right now and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise. So if you’re wondering whether any of this works, the honest answer is: come watch. We’re building it in public, starting now.

If you want to see what it looks like for your own company, book a call with your Growth Strategist.

Br, Otso

Otso Karvinen

Co-founder & Growth Strategist

I help marketing and sales teams do more in a month than their competitors do in a quarter. With 15+ years in marketing and sales, I now help build agentic AI systems that let small teams deliver faster and better results. I’m easy to work with and happy to have a no-strings conversation about where you are and how I and our team at Parvi can help.

Read more about Otso Karvinen