Ari Korhonen

Ari is an angel investor and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the Lagoon Capital investment company. He invests in tech companies both privately or from Lagoon Capital. Ari has been a successful technology entrepreneur for 20 years and a full time business angel for over 11 years. He developed his company Komartek into an international success story. Komartek was bought in 2004 by WM-data (presently CGI). His position in WM-data was Vice President. Within the last 11 years, Ari has made angel investments in 34 companies. In those he has participated totally to 107 investment rounds. The companies invested in include Small Giant Games, MariaDB, DealDash, Miradore, Sympa and Strossle. Of these investments, he has had four successful exits; Severa, Paytrail, Octo3 and The Switch. Ari is also an investor in venture capital funds which include Seedcamp, 500 Startups, True Global Ventures and Spintop Ventures. Of these investments, he has had one successful exit; Seedcamp fund II. In Spintop he is also a Senior advisor. Ari is an Investment council member in Finnish Industry Investments. Ari was elected by FiBAN (Finish Business Angels Network) as Business Angel of the Year in Finland in 2014. He is a co-founder of FiBAN and Vice Chairman of the Board during 2010-2012. Ari has been an EBAN (European Business Angels Network) board member and Vice-President during 2012-2016. He was awarded EBAN Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. He is also an active member of EstBAN, NFBAN, etc... Ari has been featured by EU-Startups as one of the top 40 of Europe’s most active and most influential angel investors. Ari was awarded Honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration by Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) in 2017. He holds a Master of Science degree in engineering from LUT.