Lasse Seppänen departs Supercell to form new UK startup

• Lasse Seppänen spent more than seven years at Supercell.
• He has been "daydreaming" about a new games startup with recent AI advancements.

Lasse Seppänen has departed from Supercell after more than seven years with the studio.

Having long served in leadership roles at the company, Seppänen has worked as game lead for Hay Day, Boom Beach and Everdale, supported all Helsinki-based teams as head of game production services, and spent his last year and a half with the company as general manager of Supercell London.

In that final role, he helped integrate the studio following the acquisition of Beatstar maker Space Ape.

Seppänen said that his departure from Supercell follows "daydreaming" about startups, especially in the context of maturing AI tools and the opportunities they present to small, ambitious teams. He plans to start a new studio in 2027 and expressed a passion for new game IPs.

He also shared excitement around digital card games, "a category that, in this era of AI tooling, offers plenty of room to build entirely new kinds of game experiences".

While Seppänen hasn’t disclosed the specifics of this next endeavour, he has teased more details "when the time is right".

A packed CV

After helping to establish Supercell London, Seppänen will be staying in the UK for his next career move. He has prior founding experience with Elven Industries and PlayRaven in the 2010s, with the latter acquired by Rovio in 2018. It’s been over a decade since Seppänen last founded or co-founded a games studio.

Seppänen also has close to three decades’ experience in making games, including almost six years at Remedy Entertainment.

"After seven and a half magical years, I've decided to leave Supercell. I've been daydreaming about the startup world again for a while now, and this feels like exactly the right moment to go," he posted on LinkedIn.

"Huge thanks to Ilkka Paananen, Sara Jansson Bach, Eino Joas, Janne Snellman and everyone at Supercell. It's a truly special company - one that hands you an enormous amount of trust and freedom, and then gets out of the way. That culture is a superpower I haven't seen anywhere else, and I'm definitely holding on to my shares for the long term."