In 2019, Hanna Kallioniemi made a big life change, leaving behind a 20-year career in international American IT companies and decided to jump into a completely new industry - travel. During her first few months in the industry, Hanna started to see the opportunities, but also the pain points. She was particularly struck by the fragmentation of digital tools in the travel industry: dozens of different booking systems that didn't talk to each other, and the development of e-commerce, which seemed to be in its infancy. The idea that the industry could be different stuck in his mind.

In 2020, Hanna founded Northern Luxury Consulting Oy with the mission to help small rural tourism entrepreneurs and business group projects to improve their sales and marketing. The company also often helped with digitalisation and the implementation of booking systems, as these were unfamiliar and challenging for many entrepreneurs. 

In the customer encounters, Hanna began to see more and more clearly how resources were being spent on repetitive processes that were manual and how much there was a need for tools that would make everyday life easier. When the interest rate pandemic added to the loss of customers and increased the pressure on the industry, the idea of automation became more and more important.

In autumn 2023, Northern Luxury Consulting was awarded EuroEmotur funding through Haaga-Helia to support the digitalisation of small tourism businesses. This gave Hanna the courage to start developing her own business in a new direction. 

In the spring of 2024, the potential of generative AI began to reach a wider audience, and Hanna decided to start looking for ways to use AI technology to create something completely new. 

Originally, the idea was to build a virtual concierge service for Nuuksio Lakeland ry's companies, but a discussion with Jenni Selosmaa, who is in charge of the Finnish AI Region FAIR project in Espoo, led to writing her own business plan. The result was a service plan called Northern Luxury Concierge, and the company was accepted as a FAIR client on May Day 2024. 

Instead of technology, the marketing professional was the first to think about the name of the new service and in May, as nature burst into bloom and the first dandelions popped out of the ground, an idea was born: does anyone in the world use the English name for dandelions, the residue that connects sommelier and hotelier? It turned out they didn't and Dandelier was born.

The logo was designed by Jaska Poikonen based on an AI version made by Hanna, with the aim of making the logo multifunctional. The logo was immediately registered in the EU Trademark Register with the help of Kati Repo from KREAM Helsinki and the SME Fund funded by the EU Commission. 

The start of product development was pretty sticky. Although the vision was clear, it was difficult for a non-technical person to understand what to do and how to communicate it to the PoC team. However, under the guidance of an efficient and skilled project manager from Metropolia and a highly intelligent and technically skilled student, the core of the project was condensed and the core areas that needed to be implemented were identified. The proof-of-concept was finally completed at the end of the summer. 

Once the PoC was ready, collaboration with technology partner Artific AI enabled the further development of the solution with Haaga-Helia's EuroEmotur funding. However, at this point the truth became clear: even with the Azure environment in place, GitHub and Quadrant set up, it would not drive development forward. Going it alone without a technology partner would not work and it would not make sense to buy this as a service.

In early July, Hanna had attended the Kiuas Co-Founder AI meeting and now the idea came back to her. She contacted four people through the matchmaking platform and one of them referred Hanna to her cousin Mikko. Congratulations!

In October 2024, Hanna and Mikko met face to face for the first time, discussed the basic idea behind Dandelier and decided to start building the product together. Mikko Hällfors, who had over 20 years of experience in web application development, joined as CTO. 

Once Mikko came on board, it was obvious that the development of the product could be financed in the early stages without external capital. 

When January 2025 arrived, Dandelier AI was ready to be launched at the Travel 2025 exhibition. The achievement was a combination of hard work, creativity and finding the right people at the right time. 

Now the first Dandelier are in production and the story is just beginning.

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Dandelier's vision is to make digitalisation of the tourism industry an opportunity for all entrepreneurs - and at the same time to take Finnish tourism innovation to the world.