The Aalto Venture Garage is starting its fourth and largest accelerator program yet for Nordic and Baltic startups. Finland and the rest of the region is urgently realizing that to drive their economy, they have to stop relying on Nokia, Skype and Getjar and shift their focus to creating new startups.

The goal of the Startup Sauna is to find the best startups in the Baltic rim. They will arrange a pitching competition and mentoring session in the selected cities. Any startup at any stage is welcome to attend. There will be an opportunity to pitch, network and receive speed mentoring from the coaches. The best teams will be invited to the Garage’s 6 week long accelerator program Startup Sauna starting May 2nd to June 17th.

“We are looking for promising and ambitious teams that need a little push to become successful.” says Juha Ruohonen, the Entrepreneur-in-residence.  “The Garage is the hub for entrepreneurs from the Nordic and Baltic region, so we give the chance to other startups from outside the Helsinki including Russians, Swedes, Estonians and Latvians”

Aalto Venture Garage has 15 coaches who are amongst the most successful entrepreneurs in Finland. It includes Peter Vesterbacka ( the Mighty Eagle from Angry Bird’s Rovio), Petteri Koponen (Lifeline Ventures, co-founder of Jaiku, listed as one of the most influential investor in Europe) and Mårten Mickos (CEO of MySQL).

The winners of the Startup Sauna will receive a working trip to Silicon Valley. Kristo Ovaska, founder of the Aalto Venture Garage has already moved to the States and is setting up operations. Ramine Darabiha (Garage coach) will help startups locally with networking and mentoring.  Aalto Venture Garage is organizing a partnership with Stanford University to provide the winning teams with the best that the Valley can offer; lectures, coaching, mentoring, networking, meetings with VCs and of course with potential customers and partners.
Since its opening in January 2010, the Aalto Venture Garage has run 3 programs that have accelerated 30 startups.Highlights from the previous programs are include Blaast, a cloud-based mobile platform that recently raised 3.6 million USD, TribeStudios that will deliver a one night game rephrase, Audiodraft, a crowsourcing platform for music producing, Arada Service is a mobile payment for East Africa, DealMachine that leverage game mechanics to improve the CRM services and Eklinda an Latvian company that automates customers’ support and marketing on social networking sites.

The Startup Sauna will be travelling to these selected cities on the following dates:

• Turku 16.03.2011
• Oulu 23.03.2011
• Tampere 24.03.2011
• St.Petersburg  04.04.2011
• Moscow 06.04.2011
• Stockholm 08.04.2011
• Helsinki 12.04.2011
• Riga 15.04.2011