Risto founded Viher IT Oy in Oulu, Finland, after more than a decade of building production systems for Finnish banks, media houses, and consumer products — the kind of systems where uptime, regulation, and the next ten years of maintenance matter more than any one feature.
The work has since narrowed to one problem he keeps running into: companies buy software and get their old operating model back, slightly faster. What they needed was a new one, built around the data they already produce and have never modelled. Viher IT builds that — platforms, data models, and the field devices behind them — for webshops, marketplaces, and producers.
A long view, learned early.
Risto grew up in Arkala, north of Oulu, in a household where berry-picking, fishing, and the slow rhythms of the forest were as ordinary as homework. That long view — of taking care of things that long outlast you — became the bedrock of how he later came to think about software.
He studied Computer Science at the University of Oulu and has spent more than ten years shipping production software in the Nordic technology industry: at Neusoft, Unikie, Quriiri, Schibsted Suomi, Pepron, and most recently as Technical Lead at Rakentaja Mediat Oy, where he leads the migration of a portfolio of high-traffic Wagtail and Django sites onto a Next.js / AWS / Kubernetes / Terraform stack.
Earlier, at Pepron, he was part of the team that built and operated a customer-messaging platform for one of Finland's banking consortia — a system that today carries more than two million users and over a hundred thousand conversations a day, in a regulatory environment where boring is a virtue.
Alongside Viher IT, Risto is the founder of Willit Oy, a marketplace for Finnish small producers — the system Viher IT builds and runs: a Rails 8 platform plus the IT behind its pickup containers, from 4G and smart locks to edge agents and cold-chain sensors. He is also Operations Lead of Founders of Oulu, a community of Northern Finnish founders helping each other build companies that last.
Since 2026 he has been studying that community's central question formally rather than anecdotally: a Bachelor's thesis in Business Administration at Oulu University of Applied Sciences on how early-stage founders use generative AI across the whole innovation process — idea, concept, prototype, validation, business model — rather than in the build alone. Six to eight founder interviews in the Oulu region, analysed with qualitative content analysis, published openly in spring 2027. The fieldwork has not happened yet, and nothing on this site claims otherwise.
He is a father of two and spends as much of the rest of his time as he can in the forests, lakes, and rivers of Northern Finland.
What he tends to say.
- Specs before code. Production resilience before features.
- Boring tools, used well, beat clever tools used hopefully.
- The most sustainable line of code is the one we don't have to rewrite.
Tools he actually uses.
Where he’s worked.
- 2024– — Technical Lead, Rakentaja Mediat Oy
- 2022–25 — Software Consultant, Pepron
- Earlier — Engineer, Schibsted Suomi · Quriiri · Unikie · Neusoft
- Education — Computer Science, University of Oulu
The most sustainable line of code is the one we don’t have to rewrite.