New Crowd Investing Service Venture Bonsai Launched

HELSINKI, April 7, 2011 - Venture Bonsai is a new tool for startups running Crowd Investing
investment rounds. This means raising money from many parties in small chunks
instead of a few larger investments. Venture Bonsai enables versatile
pre-investment communication between the investor prospects and the
entrepreneurs, combined with social media mechanisms. Venture Bonsai is first
of its kind in offering a complete tool set for all parties to manage the
whole investment process.

Supporting growth companies is largely seen as important for Europe and
its future. However political intentions alone do not help, it is positive
action that's required. That is the idea behind Venture Bonsai, founded by
experienced serial entrepreneurs with the courage to implement real and
useful tools using private funds.

"Venture Bonsai is the first startup funding tool accessible by any
private investor. It allows anybody to become an angel investor with
investments just as small as 5000 euro, opening up the opportunity to invest
in the next Googles or Facebooks," says Antti T. Hannula, Chairman of the
Board. "I've been an entrepreneur for quite many years, and it is amazing
what you can achieve nowadays with relatively small investments, for example
100,000 euros. On the other hand, when you can't raise the funds even
extremely promising projects will get abandoned," continues Hannula.
Currently only European companies can run investment rounds within Venture
Bonsai. Investors can be from any European country.

The basic idea behind Venture Bonsai is to offer growth companies a
marketplace with company profiles showing off product demo pages, combined
with Twitter-style updates and other social media tools. When an investment
round is at hand, Venture Bonsai offers versatile tools and example documents
for the preparation of the round. During the actual investment round, it's
the entrepreneurs who get to decide who they let in to access the investment
round material. There are tools available to build trust between the parties
as well as communication tools. The use of video, especially, offers many
benefits for online trust creation.

"In my opinion, Venture Bonsai is a great concept and I believe this will
play a major role in helping new startups to grow and succeed. Now anybody
can be a business angel!" says Marko Parkkinen, a well-known serial
entrepreneur. "Additionally, there are benefits related to the so called
Crowd Effect provided by an enlarged number of shareholders, such as
potential sales leads, other valuable contacts and market data, among other
things," continues Parkkinen.

www.venturebonsai.com

Venture Bonsai is a tool for running and managing an Equity Crowdfunding
investment round with ease. The service enables versatile pre-investment
communication between the investor prospects and entrepreneurs, combined with
social media mechanisms. Venture Bonsai also offers a complete tool set for
all parties to manage the whole investment process. For private investors
Venture Bonsai is the most trusted and reliable place to discover, follow and
invest in the most promising companies through a standardized process with
emphasis on trust and transparency. When investing, the minimum investment
per investor is typically 5.000 euros.

For more information please contact: Venture Bonsai Oy, Antti T. Hannula, telephone +358-40-5447586, email antti.hannula at venturebonsai.com; Marko Lehtimäki, telephone, +358-40-4877000, email marko.lehtimaki at venturebonsai.com