Artturi Tarjanne – Activist VC with business angel and serial entrepreneur background
Artturi has over 30 years of international IT industry experience and is well known and referenced in Finland for his track record as one of the pioneering successful software entrepreneurs and organizers of industry interests at large. He is also a sought after mentor and adviser for high growth technology enterprises and entrepreneurs and has had board and chairman positions on dozens of companies.
Artturi is deeply networked in the Finnish technology start-up community. He has been an active contributor in several Finnish private and public organizations including positions such as:
- Chairman of the Finnish Venture Capital Association (FVCA)
- Board member of the Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association
- Chairman and board member of several technology programmes of TEKES, the National Technology Agency of Finland.
As a serial entrepreneur, Artturi has founded or worked for several successful companies:
- 1999 co-founded Nexit Ventures – the oldest and largest still active Finnish Venture Capital fund. Nexit was also the first Finnish venture fund to have a permanent office in Silicon Valley.
- 1997 founded AT Consulting Ltd., with focus on business angel investing and advising high tech startups in international growth and venture financing strategies.
- 1992 co-founded Solid Information Technology Ltd, the leading developer of embedded data management platforms later acquired by IBM. While the CEO of Solid, Artturi was given the annual Innosuomi Award (“Innovation Finland”) by the President of Finland.
- 1991 co-founded Context Information Ltd. As the CEO, he co-developed an advanced multimedia document management system. Artturi was also pioneering with several Artificial Intelligence languages and tools and localized few of them for the Finnish market.
- In 1986 joined Venture Investment & Automation Ltd. He was responsible of the product management and later international sales operations of the VIA/DRE product line, an early global technology leader of the relational client/server database market. VIA/DRE was one of the first international SW products from Finland.