HELSINKI, April 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.

http://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.

SOURCE Venture Bonsai