Who Is Santtu Seppälä? Sarah Rafferty’s Husband and Investor

Known to most as the husband of Suits actress Sarah Rafferty, the Finnish American investor has spent thirty years in finance and now backs a company trying to make shipping containers fold flat.

Santtu Seppälä is a Finnish American investor with more than thirty years in finance. Most people, though, know him as the husband of Sarah Rafferty, the actress who played Donna Paulsen on Suits. The entertainment press tends to call him private. The shipping trade press, where he talks openly about cargo logistics and patents, would tell you otherwise.

Who is Santtu Seppälä?

His full name is Aleksanteri Olli-Pekka Seppälä, and Santtu is the Finnish nickname. He was born in Finland and grew up in several countries, including Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany and the United States. His father worked as a pharmaceuticals consultant, and the family moved often. He holds Finnish and American citizenship.

He studied at Yale, where he majored in Ethics, Politics and Economics, a program that blends philosophy, political science and economics, and played on the varsity tennis team. He went on to earn an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

At a glance

• Full name: Aleksanteri Olli-Pekka Seppälä
• Nationality: Finnish and American
• Education: Yale University (BA); Wharton School (MBA)
• Best known for: Investment management and his marriage to Sarah Rafferty
• Current roles: Vice president of strategy, Angeleno Group; chief strategy officer, Staxxon

Three decades in finance

For most of his career, Seppälä worked as a healthcare investor. He started on Wall Street in 1993 as an analyst at Salomon Brothers, and his early years in finance also included a spell at Morgan Stanley. In 1995 he spent a year in the Finnish Defence Forces, where he served as a corporal. He went on to earn his MBA, then joined Lazard Asset Management in 1998 and spent close to five years researching healthcare and pharmaceutical stocks. He left for Cantillon Capital Management, where he ran the firm’s health fund as a portfolio manager until 2008.

In May 2008, as the financial crisis was building, he started his own fund. He named it Kiitos, the Finnish word for thank you. Based in Beverly Hills, Kiitos Capital Management took long and short positions in healthcare, agriculture and the environment.

His interest in the environment shaped his next move. In March 2021 he joined the Angeleno Group, a Los Angeles private equity firm that invests in clean energy and climate, as vice president of strategy and business development. His work there centers on clean energy, including renewable power and energy storage.

The folding shipping container

Seppälä has been part of Staxxon, a New Jersey company, since around 2015, working as its chief strategy officer, a board member and an investor. Staxxon makes a steel shipping container that folds.

The company set out to fix an expensive and largely invisible problem in global trade. Containers spend much of their lives empty, and shipping all that empty steel back to where the goods are costs the industry a fortune. Staxxon’s design lets up to five empty containers fold and bundle into the footprint of one, which cuts the number of trucks and ships needed to move them.

Seppälä has discussed the economics on the record with shipping and logistics reporters, the kind of coverage that never touches his marriage. He told the Cape Gazette, a Delaware newspaper, that the industry spends more than $20 billion a year moving empty containers around the world, and put it bluntly. “You’re shipping air,” he said. He also explained why the company has taken its time, pointing to a patent portfolio that by 2022 covered 38 filings across the United States, the European Union and China.

By Staxxon’s account, the containers have passed international CSC certification, the safety standard required for boxes used in global trade. The company is now aiming to begin commercial manufacturing by the end of 2026.

Santtu Seppälä and Sarah Rafferty

Seppälä met Sarah Rafferty at Yale, where she was earning a master’s in acting at the drama school. They married on June 23, 2001, at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Mary in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a ceremony led by the Reverend Alfred Riendeau.

The couple has two daughters, Oona Gray, born in 2007, and Iris Friday, born in 2012. Rafferty spent seven seasons playing Donna Paulsen on the USA Network legal drama Suits, which filmed in Toronto while the family kept its home base in Los Angeles. She has credited Seppälä for making it work, once describing their setup as accepting that “the whole ‘balance’ thing is an illusion; we just embrace the imbalance.”

She has let a few personal details slip over the years. For their 20th anniversary in 2021, she posted an old wedding photo and thanked him for “hope, coffee, and poetry.” She has also mentioned his Finnish pancakes on Sunday mornings. The two appeared together at the 2018 wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who had played Rachel Zane opposite Rafferty on Suits.

The wrong word for him

Calling Seppälä private is convenient, but it does not quite fit. He gives no interviews about his marriage or his daughters, and he has no public social media presence. Yet he has been candid, even quotable, with reporters who wanted to understand container logistics and patent strategy.

What reads as privacy is closer to a choice about audience. The finance and shipping press gets the version of him who explains markets and supply chains in plain terms. The people who came looking because of Suits get a name and a few scattered facts. The private husband and the talkative executive are the same man, and most readers have only met one of them.

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