Aalto Venture Garage is the hub where entrepreneurs throughout the Baltic area get support and work together to grow their businesses. Aalto Venture Garage Bootcamp is an intensive two week training program for the best startup teams. It is expected that more than 200 teams from all around the world will apply to the next Bootcamp in September.

Aalto Venture Garage started with grassroots initiatives by a group of students and entrepreneurs at Aalto University who saw the need for change in the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Finland.

Aalto Venture Garage runs Bootcamps four times a year.  It’s designed to help pre-seed startups to become successful ventures with the coaching of the Nordics’ best entrepreneurs and investors.The winners receive 5000€ in seed funding, exclusive coaching and workspace in the Garage as they become Garage Startups.

The culture at Bootcamp is open, sharing and helping, taking a cue from the open source model made famous by well known Finnish companies such as Linux and MySQL.

“Teams at Bootcamp are co-operating; they are working on each other’s ideas and challenging them. It’s not only a competition but more about sharing and team building” says Juha Ruohonen, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Aalto Venture Garage.

Audiodraft, a Garage Startup, has incorporated the open source model in a unique way. The company, featured in NYTimes last week, is a web community for managing collaborative audio projects.

“The Garage has been an excellent place to work, it provides a great opportunity to push ideas further with the help of enthusiastic entrepreneurs and coaches.” says Teemu Yli-Hollo, CEO of Audiodraft.

The next Bootcamp will take place during the last two weeks of September. It is expected that more than 200 teams from all around the world will apply to the next Bootcamp, of which ten teams will be selected. Deadline for all applications is September 8, 2010.