For Ville Kymäläinen, CEO of Draivi, leading a fast-growing company day to day has left little room for comfort zones.
Asked what made him say yes to Draivi in the first place: “The growth potential was clear for me and the market was competitive enough to be interesting. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t mind a bit of competition, so that part wasn’t a hard sell.” Fifteen years in consumer finance, mostly on the lender side, and Draivi was a chance to work the other end of the same problem: helping partners win customer acquisition instead of granting the credit. The timing, the people and the unlocked potential made it, in his words, an easy decision.
Coming from a world where the framework is fixed and the rules are written down, Ville has found the opposite at Draivi — the framework doesn’t sit still, and stepping outside the comfort zone hasn’t stopped since he joined.
“You can’t manage a scaling company the way you’d manage a stable one.” That’s the shift he points to when asked what leading Draivi has taught him that nothing else could have. Not a specific skill. A different relationship with uncertainty.
Committing without the full picture
For Ville, stepping outside the comfort zone usually looks like this: deciding without complete information. “Expanding into new markets like Germany, Spain and Mexico means committing before you fully understand the local status quo,” he says.
The uncertainty isn’t only external, either. It shows up in hiring, in structure, and in the direct conversations that shape how a team works. All of it, Ville says, “gets only partially easier with experience.”
Ville is direct about what he looks for in the people he brings in: not a finished playbook, but the willingness to operate without one. He’d rather have someone who tries, gets it wrong and corrects than someone who waits for instructions. As he puts it, that’s not something you learn at school, you either have the drive or you don’t.
Rebuilding while still hitting the numbers
Draivi has grown from €9M to €30M since 2022, across eight markets. Growth at that pace doesn’t leave an organisation as it was.
“What worked at €9M doesn’t work at €30M,” Ville says. The team has grown just as fast — up nearly 50% in 2026 alone — and processes that fit a small team start to break, so you rebuild them while still hitting numbers. The genuinely hard part, by his account, isn’t the growth itself, it’s keeping the organisation pointed at the same goal while its shape changes underneath it. Saying no to good opportunities, so the ones already started actually get finished.
Much of that growth has gone into building capability in-house. Draivi has hired across nearly every function: new performance marketers and country managers, business development leads in Mexico and Spain, backend and machine learning engineers, a performance creative lead, visual designer and CRM specialist, alongside finance and a first in-house legal counsel. Some of those hires point straight at where the market is heading, a dedicated Data Protection & Information Security Lead among them. The logic, Ville says, is that you can’t buy that kind of capability off the shelf the moment you need it. You build it ahead of time, so it’s there when the market shifts.
Trusting the team, without letting go of the wheel
In a fixed framework, control is easier to hold onto because less is moving. Coming from regulated banking, Ville has had to learn a different balance here: trusting the team to handle things he can’t be across himself, “while still keeping your hand on the wheel to make sure we’re heading where we want to go.”
It’s not something that came naturally. As he puts it, “you learn to be comfortable with that.”
Built for what’s coming
Numbers are one thing, Ville says. Building something partners can trust in a competitive market is harder — and that’s what he’s actually proud of, more than the growth curve itself: that it’s held up across eight markets, and that Draivi has kept its partnerships with serious financial institutions through the expansion.
On a personal level, though, what Ville finds most rewarding as a leader lies behind the numbers. It’s about enabling and observing the people around him to grow. Some joined long before he did and have taken on far more than the roles they started in; others have arrived more recently and are already shaping where Draivi goes next. What they have in common, he says, is the willingness to reach for more, and that’s the part he’d point to first.
“The best thing to witness is people stepping up and becoming real drivers of the business, whether they’ve been here for years or joined last quarter.”
Since 2022, Draivi has done more than grow: it’s built an organisation ready for the shifts this market has ahead of it. As the rules tighten across the sector, compliance moves from nice-to-have to business-critical — it has to be built in, not added later. From here the question isn’t how fast can we grow, but how well can we hold and sharpen what we’ve built, and stay the strongest lead generator in every market they operate in. That’s the work Ville and the team are focused on now.
