Vainu

Nordic Company Data, With the Homework Published

Vainu builds and maintains a company database for Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and sells access to it three ways: through its own prospecting platform, as an enrichment feed into your CRM, or as raw data into a warehouse via API and exports.

What Is In the Data

• Basic: revenue, employee count, location, official industry, web profile, contact details
• Vainu Custom Industries, its own classification, which is often more useful than official industry codes for defining a real target market
• Advanced: advanced financials, group structures, financial PDFs, event data, vehicle data
• Public documents on request
• Trigger events and email alerts when something changes at a target account

Published Pricing, Which Is Rare Here

Vainu for Prospecting starts at 3,500 €/year plus a 200 € one-time onboarding fee. Vainu for CRM starts at 4,200 €/year plus 750 € onboarding. There is a pricing calculator on the site and a free trial.

Cost scales with which of the four country databases you turn on and which data tiers you need. Publishing a starting figure and a calculator at all puts Vainu ahead of most of this category, including Clevenio, where everything is quote-only.

The Documentation Is the Best in Its Category

Vainu publishes four separate legal documents, and the split is the right one: a privacy policy, a customer register description, a security page, and, crucially, a database privacy statement.

That last document is the Article 14 notice for the people who are in the database rather than for customers, and it is the strongest example of its kind in this directory. It sets out:

• The legal basis as legitimate interest, limited to personal data in the public domain relating to a person's role in their company
• The Article 29 Working Party position that business people, company management and representatives can usually be considered to fulfil a role in public life, cited by name as the reasoning
• The sources: national patent and registration offices, public officials, company websites, press releases and other material the company itself made public, with all personal data linked to the source it came from
• A data minimisation commitment: processing is limited so as not to extend beyond what data subjects could reasonably expect, and does not continue beyond the period the person holds the position
• Automatic correction: if the original source is updated or removed, the record follows it

Most vendors in this category publish nothing like this. Reading it takes ten minutes and it is the document you will want when someone asks how the data was obtained.

Security, and the American Layer

From the security page:

All the application servers and database servers are protected with encryption, network isolation and firewalls. All services are hosted within the EU area.

Since all the software development regarding the applications and data processing is being done by Vainu – not by external contractors – the only parties that have something to do with your data are Vainu and its hosting providers.

That second sentence is effectively a sub-processor list of length two, and it is a strong statement. The hosting providers are named as AWS and MongoDB Atlas (hosted by AWS), both American, which is why this row carries US CLOUD Act exposure despite EU hosting. It is the same trade as Bouncer and Yespo: EU location, US provider.

Vainu holds SOC 2 Type 1, independently audited by Prescient Security, and requires ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018 and SOC compliance from its hosting partners. A 99.99% uptime SLA is required of business-critical vendors.

The Company

Vainu.io Software Oy, business ID 2557864-2, FI-00530 Helsinki, Finland. The privacy statement refers to subsidiaries of Vainu Corporation applying the same principles, and notes that data may be processed by staff operating outside the EEA, with transfers covered by data processing agreements or Commission standard contractual clauses.

The Part That Is Still Your Job

As with any prospect database, Vainu's legitimate-interest analysis covers Vainu's processing. Once records reach your CRM you are the controller: your own Article 6 basis, your own Article 14 notice, your own handling of objections. Vainu's documentation makes that work considerably easier than most, because the sources are recorded per record, but it does not do it for you.

Where It Fits

Against Clevenio directly, both Finnish: Vainu is stronger on published documentation and pricing, Clevenio reaches further across Europe and ships MCP. See also Dealfront for DACH, Cognism and Albacross in sales prospecting.