Brain Alliance

Just 6 minutes ago this stock market filing (in finnish) went live from Soprano. It outlines an acquisition we have been working on lately:

Soprano Plc is to buy Brain Alliance Solutions, Ltd (www.brainalliance.com). Asmo Halinen and myself are in the board, together with the CEO-Entrepreneur Jukka Hassinen.

Moments like these are rare cool stuff: despite of being an entrepreneur for more than 10 years and having 4 tradesales behind me already, stuff like this is not on the agenda every day.

Soprano is a publicly listed company in the Nasdaq OMX market, and in this acquisition they acquire 51% of Brain Alliance - effectively making Brain Alliance a public company.

The talks that lead to this acquisition progressed quite quickly - as is typical when two parties that share a strong common interest "discover" each other. Brain Alliance's CEO Jukka Hassinen has a nice entrepreneurial war story behind him: starting about 6 years ago with nothing straight from school, and now selling to a well-known public company. That's first class entrepreneurial example for you! (althou I must admit that the scale is still quite small: these companies are not mega-corporations yet, but they have such a huge potential for growth. Especially when combined together like this).

It was a pleasure and a privilege to be working on this.

This was my second time being involved in a tradesale to a public company: back in 2003 I sold Fuksiini Sites, Ltd. as its CEO, to a company listed in the same stock exchange.

People have been recently citing that "we need entrepreneurial examples in this country" - well here's one, so spread the word!

Brain Alliance Ltd announced today that me and Mr. Asmo Halinen (ex-CEO of Apaja/PlayRay, etc). Have joined the company's Board of Directors.

There a finnish language press release here.

Brain Alliance is the largest PHP-specialized programming house in Finland, with emphasis on agile web projects etc. They are the main representative of Zend Technologies in Finland. And they have for example made the tech for this blog of mine.

The company has been growing by the rate of 3231% over the past 3 years and the new board members' role is to facilitate further growth and help the company to continue their success story. Their CEO Jukka Hassinen still owns 96% of the company and has managed to grow it very fast without any outside financing etc.

I am so much involved in consumer Internet projects and in social networks that I consider it quite healthy to get heavily involved in a proper B2B business and professional services organizations for a change.

So, if you have a web-project that needs agile and prompt execution; please be in touch ;-)