Coaches

Garage Coaches

The Coaches provide a mentoring relationship to the Garage’s Startups.  They help and guide the Bootcamp teams and select the winners.

Jussi Harvela

Jussi Harvela has over 20 years of global high technology business experience in various management positions. He is Co-Founder and General Partner at Veturi Venture Accelerator, a new breed of venture incubator that helps entrepreneurs transform into growth companies.

Harvela is also an advisory board member in a number of national technology commercialization programmes including TEKES TULI, Centre of Expertise Ubiquitous Computing & Digibusiness Program, and VTT Ventures.

Moaffak Ahmed

Moaffak Ahmed is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of marketing and business development experience in Europe, North America and Asia. Ahmed has created numerous business and marketing strategies for rapidly growing high tech firms.

He is currently working with passionate entrepreneurs and researchers helping them translate innovative ideas into significant growth companies. Veturi Venture Accelerator provides seed funding, strategic guidance and hands-on participation.

Micki Honkavaara

Micki Honkavaara is the Senior Director at Nvidia Corporation. His past positions include CEO at Hybrid Graphics Ltd, Board member at Ohjelmistoyrittäjät, and Executive Vice President at Saraxa Media Ltd. Honkavaara is a people manager with strong drive and considerable marketing, strategic and administration experience.

Inka Mero

Inka Mero is the Founder at KoppiCatch Oy and Co-Founder at DesignStory Inc. Mero has a first-rate track record in building growth businesses as she is experienced in building global online community services and mobile software businesses. Her domain is in Internet, mobile/telecom industry, technology and market experience. Mero has also been a venture capital investor in Scandinavia, US and Israel.

Ramine Darabiha

Ramine Darabiha is a French entrepreneur, gamer and blogger. He is the founder and CEO of MySites.com, expert in cloud computing. His past experience is in large scale gaming communities, and recently mentored the Summer of Startups and Garage48 programs. He also blogs regularly about the Finnish startup scene

Ville Miettinen

Ville Miettinen, Wili, is a serial entrepreneur and an investor. The last couple of years Miettinen has been particularly interested in disruptive technologies, like crowd sourcing, cloud labor, and human computation.

He has a long background in coding, computer graphics, and was one of the founders of Hybrid Graphics (later NVIDIA Finland), a pioneer in real-time 3D graphics technologies.

Petteri Koponen

Petteri Koponen accelerates and invests in very early stage life-sciences and mobile companies at Lifeline Ventures where he is a Founding Partner.

Koponen has founded three mobile/Internet -related software and/or service companies, last of them being Jaiku (co-founded with Jyri Engeström). On October 9, 2007 Jaiku was acquired by Google.

Marko Saapunki

Marko Saapunki is the Co-Founder, Owner and Managing Director at Food Process Innovations Ltd. Saapunki’s specialities are Seed and Start-up Companies, Innovations, Immaterial Rights (Patents), Business Unit Management, Sales/ Customer Relationship Management, FMCG Brands, Reengineering and business processes.

Peter Vesterbacka

Founder at ConnectedDay, Member of the Board at Star Wreck Studios and Founder at Some Bazaar, Peter Vesterbacka describes himself as “Mobility Mastermind”. Vesterbacka is well experienced in Branding, mobile e-services ecosystem building and enablement, mobile e-services ontology.

Timo Teimonen

Timo Teimonen is the CEO at Aqsens Oy which is Finnish high-tech startup company revolutionizes liquid fingerprinting. His specialties include leadership in business renewal and new business strategies.

Teimonen is on selective board/advisory roles in growth companies starting from research based startups into property Development Companies.

Ake Edlund
Ake Edlund is the CEO and founder of Pawn Promotion, and a clouds-for-startups evangelist with experiences from four startups – Cycore, eu-supply, Alzato (now MySQL Cluster), and Numeri Ltd (co-founder). On the cloud side he is the head of a cloud research group at KTH, a Board Member of EuroCloud Sweden and a Member of the EU Cloud Expert Group.

Taneli Tikka

Taneli Tikka has a long history of executive management, leadership, entrepreneurship, change making and developing businesses. Accustomed to wearing multiple hats, helmets, caps, and what have you, Tikka is an independent generalist leader. Focus on change making, driving business into new heights and producing concrete results.

Ilkka Kivimäki

Ilkka is currently a Board Member & Partner at Kibron Inc, the Chairman at Valoya Oy and Owner of Domino Mechanics Oy,
In the past, he´s been Senior Vice President at SAP, CEO at SAP Labs Finland Ltd, CEO at Wicom Communications, Vice President/COO, owner at Nexor-Superstore Oy and Project Engineer at Kone Elevators Oy.

Micke Paqvalen

Micke Paqvalen is a Serial Entrepreneur & Senior Executive. He is currently working as a Founder & Chairman at Scentara. Always on the go, Paqvalen is Founder & Board member at many other exciting startup projects including Founder, CEO & Board at Telepo. In past he´s been CFO, Investor & Board at Hotsip, CFO at Speed Ventures, CFO of Operations at Incentive/Gambro and the CEO & Founder at HansaWorld.

Mika Tammenkoski

Mika Tammenkoski is the Founding Partner at Magnifier, a startup accelator and seed fund, specialized in social media, gaming and other consumer related businesses. He has held positions at Digital Chocolate as the VP of Technology and was the CTO & Co-founder at Sumea.

Ilkka Paananen

Ilkka Paananen describes himself as an entrepreneur on sabbatical. After running the show at Digital Chocolate and co-founded Sumea, Paananen is now an investor at Uplause Ltd.