Garage Coaches
The Coaches provide a mentoring relationship to the Garage’s Startups. They help and guide the Startup Sauna teams and select the winners. They have a vast experience on growth companies as well as successes and failures.
Juha Ruohonen 
Head Coach
Juha Ruohonen is the Head Coach of Aalto Venture Garage. As the sergeant of Startup Sauna, Juha makes young startups go through blood, sweat and tears in order to learn what it takes to become an entrepreneur. He has numerous years of experience in the field as a CEO and as a VC so he knows exactly what it takes succeed and how to fail. He has done both.
Juha will also be kickin´ butts in the Summer of Startups.
Ask him for….the cold hard truth!
juha.ruohonen (a) aaltovg.com
+358 40 3511892
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. Currently he is one of the founders of Microtask.
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”. Currently he is best known as the Mighty Eagle of Rovio (Angry Birds). 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 Kiosked. 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.
Paolo Borella
Paolo Borella is the Founder at Boro Oy, an advisor service for start-ups and small companies to help shape and grow th
eir business, with a focus for Mobile/Online services and the sport segment. Paolo has passion for helping create new business and develop existing ones. His previous work included Vice President at Fox Mobile Distribution GmbH I Germany and Director at Nokia, for the Porfolio Management for Service and Software GTM.
Aape Pohjavirta
Aape Pohjavirta is a windsurfer who was pushed into the world of digital media (because of his young age) in the late 80’s. He is currently Founder, CEO and Chancellor of Ympyra – the world-leading mobile learning framework from Finland. He is also a Member of the Board of the Finnish Mobile Association.
Aape began his career as a trainer and has recently returned to this same topic by inventing a way to deliver learning to all, thus helping the world to become a better place. He has worked as a salesperson, evangelist, channel developer, team leader, inventor, innovator, venture capitalist, and polarizer in international companies and projects. Aape is also an internationally acclaimed speaker.
Aape has made a lot of mistakes, remembers them all and has learned from most of them. That’s why he’s so good.
Mohamed El-Fatatry
World’s Top Evangelist for the $1 Trillion Global Muslim Consumer Market. Visionary Entrepreneur and Motivational Speaker with a Background in Media, Technology and Business. One of the World’s “500 Most Influential Muslims” & “Leaders of Tomorrow”.
Mohamed El-Fatatry is the founder & CEO of Muxlim Inc., the world’s largest Muslim lifestyle network reaching tens of millions of people in 190 countries. During his work at Muxlim, he became the first immigrant to receive the President of Finland’s Internationalization award in its 45 year history. The award has never been awarded to a startup before and has been won by Nokia 10 years earlier.
Coming from a Computer Science background, he has been named “Egyptian Technology Figure of the Year”. Mohamed was among 200 business leaders recognized by President Obama at his “Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship” and was named by Georgetown University and the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center among the world’s “500 Most Influential Muslims” two years in a row. Recently, Mohamed became the youngest Business leader named among Chief Executive Magazine’s “Leaders of Tomorrow”.
Pasi Ilola
Pasi Ilola is the CEO of Planetify, which helps companies to grow their online businesses globally. Pasi has been building and leading profitable online businesses for 15
years, and has extensive experience in all aspects of managing the growth of a global online product. Pasi managed marketing globally for the Habbo Hotel virtual world, growing it past 100 million registered users, and built a virtual world called Virtual Magic Kingdom for the Walt Disney Company. He also founded a digital agency called Frantic, which he led as CEO for seven years, and most recently he was CEO of Suomi24, the largest social network in Finland.
