Europe’s leading startup and technology conference Slush is organized for the 9th time this week. The event gathers 17,500 attendees including 2,336 startups, 1,146 investors and 610 journalists to Helsinki. There are over 2,300 volunteers building the event.

This year, Slush is more international than ever. Global community events have already been organized in Tokyo, Singapore and Shanghai. The Slush year culminates this week, as the two-day startup and tech event kicks off in Helsinki on Wednesday. In addition to the main event, there are over 300 side events organized in the Helsinki metropolitan area.

60 percent of the attendees arrive from outside of Finland – from a total of 124 countries. The countries with the most participants, after Finland and Sweden, are the United States, Great Britain and Russia.

Slush focuses on creating an event that brings the highest value to startups. The team goes all-in to create an event that generates opportunities for founders and investors to connect.

“There is a record-high number of investors and growth companies coming to Slush 2016. We are expecting close to 7,000 pre-booked startup-investor meetings, whereas last year we had 6,000 of them,” says Marianne Vikkula, CEO of Slush.

Speakers of Slush 2016 include Daniel Ek, Founder of Spotify, the Crown Prince of Norway Haakon, Arielle Zuckerberg, Partner of KPCB, Danae Ringelmann, Co-Founder of Indiegogo, as well as Steve Jurvetson, Partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

“This year, our stages are more conceptualized, enabling to tell entrepreneurial stories from various different angles. The main themes on stage will be survival plan for Planet Earth, the next 100 years of your life, as well as the mind of an entrepreneur,” says Katariina Helaniemi, Chief Program Curator of Slush.

Playing a crucial role for the program of Slush is the direct flight from San Francisco, which lands at the Helsinki Airport this afternoon. Slush bought a direct flight from SF to bring 300 investors, entrepreneurs and speakers from Silicon Valley to Helsinki. ”Investors from over 60 countries are coming to Slush this year. These investors represent 1 billion euros worth of venture capital. A significant part of this capital is brought to Slush on this flight,” says Marianne Vikkula.