Tero Sarkkinen

Founder & CEO Basemark

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Tero Sarkkinen is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Basemark, a Helsinki company that builds the software toolchain carmakers use to create augmented reality experiences inside vehicles — head-up displays that overlay navigation, hazard and ADAS information onto the road as the driver sees it. The commercial argument is a development-economics one rather than a visual one: Basemark’s tooling, Sarkkinen says, lets an OEM run an AR design team of two or three people instead of ten to twenty, and iterate a hundred times a day instead of once a fortnight. Basemark is his third company in visual computing and the third link in a chain of carve-outs: he ran Futuremark, which made the 3DMark graphics benchmarks; founded Rightware in 2009 expressly to buy Futuremark’s mobile and embedded unit and turn it into automotive UI software, eventually selling it to Thundersoft; then co-founded Basemark in 2015 and bought Rightware’s benchmark business in turn. He has raised around EUR 35 million for Basemark, including one round he has called the hardest of his career.

Career Highlights

• Established Futuremark’s Silicon Valley subsidiary in 1999 and ran US operations for seven years, later becoming CEO of the company behind the 3DMark benchmarks.
• Founded Rightware in 2009 to acquire Futuremark’s mobile and embedded business unit, raising roughly EUR 3 million from Inventure Oy and Nexit Ventures Oy, and built it into an automotive user-interface supplier before its sale to Thundersoft.
• Co-founded Basemark in April 2015 with Arto Ruotsalainen and acquired Rightware’s benchmark business unit.
• Appointed CEO of Basemark on 15 April 2021, succeeding Keith Silverang, who moved to the board.
• Raised approximately EUR 35 million in total across equity, R&D loans and grants, including a EUR 22 million round with EUR 17 million of equity and a EUR 2.5 million European Innovation Council grant.
• Built out subsidiaries Basemark Inc. in Delaware and Basemark GmbH in Munich.
• Supplied BMW with development services since 2018 and closed production licensing deals, one of which he has described as worth tens of millions and destined for millions of vehicles.
• Signed automotive partnerships with Lucid Motors, IGNITE by FORVIA HELLA, KPIT and Distance Technologies during 2025-2026, joined the NATO Innovation Continuum, and demonstrated real-time data fusion for defence with Patria.

Professional Journey

Sarkkinen’s career has been spent almost entirely inside one technical domain — measuring and then creating real-time graphics — and his distinctive move has been to buy and sell the same lineage of assets repeatedly as their market shifted.

He joined Futuremark, the Finnish company whose 3DMark benchmarks became the standard by which PC graphics hardware was judged, and in 1999 established its subsidiary in Silicon Valley, running US operations for seven years. He later served as the company’s CEO. Benchmarking is an unusual business: it requires deep engagement with every GPU vendor while remaining credible as an independent measure, and it produced exactly the relationships and the low-level graphics expertise that the automotive industry would later need.

In 2009 he founded Rightware for a specific purpose — to acquire Futuremark’s mobile and embedded business unit and build it out as a separate company. Backed with around EUR 3 million from Inventure Oy and Nexit Ventures Oy, Rightware made tools for developers building visual user interfaces for cars, at the moment when instrument clusters and centre consoles were turning from analogue dials into screens. That business found its market and was eventually sold to the Chinese software group Thundersoft.

Basemark came in April 2015, co-founded with Arto Ruotsalainen. Its initial idea was big-data visualisation for industrial markets; it then acquired Rightware’s benchmark business unit — the third time the same technical lineage changed hands under his direction — and gradually reoriented toward tooling for developers of autonomous driving and, ultimately, in-vehicle augmented reality. Sarkkinen founded the company and chaired it while Keith Silverang served as CEO. On 15 April 2021 the board appointed Sarkkinen CEO, with Silverang moving to the board; the stated rationale was that the next phase required the deep industry and customer knowledge needed to develop the next generation of software products.

The fundraising that followed was, by his own account, brutal. Basemark has raised approximately EUR 35 million in total, combining equity, R&D loans and grants — a mix characteristic of European deep-tech, where public instruments carry companies through periods private capital will not. The largest round was EUR 22 million, of which EUR 17 million was equity, raised during the period of the Russia-Ukraine conflict when appetite for Nordic hardware-adjacent startups collapsed; Sarkkinen has described it as the most difficult fundraising process of his career. A EUR 2.5 million European Innovation Council grant was, in his words, critical during that stretch. The company has since secured Horizon Europe funding for its Rocksolid AR project.

The product line today is Rocksolid — a complete AR application creation environment and toolchain, shipping as Rocksolid AR Studio 25.5 in December 2025 and Rocksolid Studio 26.1 in March 2026, the latter adding macOS support and production-ready reference projects — alongside BATS for graphics and ADAS performance evaluation, professional services for automotive OEMs and suppliers, and the legacy GPU benchmark business at gpuscore.com. Basemark Oy is privately held with two wholly owned subsidiaries, Basemark Inc. in Delaware and Basemark GmbH in Munich, placing it next to both the American and German customer bases.

Commercially, 2025 and 2026 have been the years the strategy has converted. Basemark has supplied BMW with development services since 2018, and Sarkkinen has said the company recently closed two major production licensing deals, one worth tens of millions and destined for millions of vehicles. In November 2025 it partnered with Distance Technologies on next-generation AR head-up displays; in March 2026 it announced a collaboration with Lucid Motors to bring an AR head-up display to the Lucid Gravity; in May 2026 it agreed a KPIT collaboration on automotive HMI production readiness; and in June 2026 it partnered with IGNITE by FORVIA HELLA. The company has also moved adjacent to defence, joining the NATO Innovation Continuum in March 2026 and demonstrating real-time data fusion for defence operations with the Finnish group Patria in August 2026. Juha Lystila was appointed Chief Sales Officer in May 2026 to scale the commercial organisation.

Education

Aalto University School of Business

M.Sc., Economics and Business Administration

Stanford Graduate School of Business

Executive Program for Growing Companies