Elina Pahta-Erma isn’t waiting for a full-time offer. She built her own structure instead. As the Founder and CEO of HELENE Advisory, Elina specialises in providing advisory services for startups and scale-ups as a fractional CFO and COO. Her current work sits at the intersection of financial strategy, operations, and growth leadership, firmly focused on early to mid-stage tech companies that need senior finance expertise without a permanent hire. Before HappyOrNot, she spent nearly four years as a Financial Specialist at Efecte Plc, a Finnish IT service management software company, which gave her grounding in SaaS finance before she took it to a much larger scale.
The Path to HELENE:
Elina moved into finance from 2010, building through accounting and financial specialist roles before joining HappyOrNot in 2018 as Group Financial Controller. She progressed to Interim CFO in 2019 and took the Group CFO title in December 2020, becoming the company’s first ever CFO.
HappyOrNot, the Finnish customer feedback company combining SaaS and hardware operations with clients across 135 countries, gave Elina nearly 7 years of direct exposure to the pressures of a scaling global business. Her remit covered finance, HR, legal, data, business technology, and global logistics. She contributed to a successful Series B round, led finance through due diligence, and built the company’s reporting frameworks, rolling forecasts, and SaaS metrics infrastructure from the ground up. She founded HELENE Advisory in August 2025, running it concurrently with her final month at HappyOrNot, before leaving the company in September 2025. That firm is now listed as serving clients including Ellie.ai and SolidIO, among others.
What She Actually Does:
HELENE helps founders and CEOs of SaaS, tech, and growth companies sharpen strategy, scale with confidence and build capital readiness, from pre-seed onwards. The model is fractional by design, meaning Elina embeds as an actual financial partner rather than acting as a consultant who delivers a report and leaves.
Services cover the full spectrum of financial leadership, from day-to-day clarity to high-stakes decision making, including cash flow visibility, rolling forecasts, board and investor reporting, and international expansion guidance. For companies that need immediate leadership, HELENE also provides interim CFO and COO support to bridge transitions without losing momentum.
Finance Meets Operations:
Most fractional CFOs stick to numbers. Elina’s scope is broader. She has led the full scope of G&A in global contexts, partnered closely with commercial leadership, founders and CEOs, and built strategies that withstand both rapid growth and crisis. Her background covers capital funding, diverse debt financing, and experience in the US market as well as global business environments.
That combination of CFO and COO experience is deliberate. Founders dealing with rapid scale or a turnaround typically face both financial and operational breakdowns at the same time. Having one person who can handle both sides reduces the coordination overhead that often slows early-stage companies down.
Building for Clarity:
Elina describes her approach directly: she works with founders and growth leaders when the stakes are high and clarity matters most. Many founders in SaaS and hardware hit a point where spreadsheets stop being enough and decisions get made without the financial visibility to support them. HELENE’s work addresses that gap directly, without requiring a company to hire a full-time executive it may not yet need.
One of her clients, Noora Hujala, Founder and CEO of SolidIO, described the impact clearly: building a structured reporting framework together with a trusted fractional CFO, combined with regular financial sparring, brought clarity and confidence to planning, decision-making, and stakeholder reporting.
Her Place in the Ecosystem:
Elina is part of a wider shift in how Finnish and European tech startups approach finance leadership. The fractional executive model has grown significantly across Scandinavia, particularly in B2B SaaS, where companies often reach Series A or B with strong product traction but underdeveloped financial infrastructure.
Her work with Ellie.ai, a Finnish data modeling platform backed by Newion and Crowberry Capital with 60+ enterprise customers, started in August 2025 as one of HELENE Advisory’s first client engagements, putting her directly in contact with the kind of scale challenges that test even experienced operators. For founders who need a CFO but can’t justify the hire yet, Elina Pahta-Erma has already built the answer.
