Jouko Ahvenainen is a serial-entrepreneur, e.g. co-founder of Grow VC Group, a pioneer in digital finance and fintech solutions, including digital investing and p2p lending. He participated in changing US finance regulation, getting the Senate and President to allow crowdfunding and has worked with EU and Asian finance regulation. Jouko started his work with crowdfunding models in 2008.
Jouko is a founder, partner and board member in several innovative digital finance companies. Jouko is also an advisor for US, European and Asian investing and finance programs. He has especially worked to plan and implement models to get crowd investing and institutional investor models to work together.
Jouko has worked in teams to close several VC deals (from 150k USD to 15M USD), and also closed many large customer deals and been responsible for 40M USD annual revenue. He started his first own software business when he was 16-years-old. Jouko has been a Certified Adviser for the NasdaqOMX First North lists stock exchanges. Jouko is on the boards of various start-up companies, and is a co-founder or seed investor in more than 15 companies.
Earlier he co-founded data analytics businesses, the world first social network analytics service. Before his serial entrepreneur career Jouko held senior positions at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Powerwave Technologies Inc. and Nokia. Jouko has vast experience of international business in Asia, Europe, and North America; he has lived and worked in the UK, the US, Finland, Malaysia and run business in Hong Kong. Jouko regularly speaks about innovative finance models and digital business in conferences and media including CNBC Squawk Box, SXSW, MWC and The Peter Drucker Forum. He is listed World Influencers in Digital Industry and crowdfunding.
Jouko holds an MBA from Helsinki School of Economics / McCombs School of Business, at the University of Texas, Austin and a M.Sc.(Tech.) from Helsinki University of Technology.