Jani Penttinen

Mr. Jani Penttinen

Jani in Zürich, autumn 2009

Jani founded the multilingual social network Xiha Ltd with Xiaowen Sun in 2007. The company is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, and has a US subsidiary in Sunnyvale, California. In January 2011 at CES in Las Vegas, Jani announced a new Xiha-owned business venture called PremiumFanPage.

Jani has been instrumental in Xiha’s path to international success. Early on he assumed the role of CTO and architected the technology behind Xiha’s multilingual social media platform. In 2009 Red Herring selected Xiha as one of the most promising technology start-ups in Europe.

In 2009 Jani successfully led a $1M USD seed funding round, which resulted in a group of angel investors teaming up with VC investor VeraVenture. Subsequently Xiha was accepted for Vigo, a highly selective start-up acceleration program which supports the companies with the highest growth potential in Finland with grants of up to 1M euros.

Although Xiha was founded in Finland, Jani designed it to be a distributed, global organization with employees and contractors around the world. Jani resides in the United States, while the company’s research and development activities are primarily based in Finland. Xiha’s social network is supported by an international community of contractors who live all over the world.

Prior to founding Xiha, Jani spent many years working for the world’s leading game development companies. It is this tech background which has allowed him to develop and lead Xiha.

Jani was one of the pioneers of the game development business in Finland. During the 1990’s he worked in leading roles in all of the game development companies in Finland at the time, including Bloodhouse, Remedy Entertainment and Housemarque.

From 2000 to 2003 Jani worked as the Lead 3D Engineer at Westwood Studios / Electronic Arts in Las Vegas, Nevada. There he contributed to the development of Command & Conquer: Renegade, and Earth & Beyond. He also co-created the 3D engine which later became a key part of the SAGE engine (used in several Electronic Arts hit games, such as Command & Conquer: Generals, and Lord of the Rings).

Between 2003 and 2005 Jani worked at Electronic Arts in Los Angeles, making sure their new games performed exceptionally. During this time he co-founded a mobile game development studio in the US, and was in charge of its expansion to China. He founded a subsidiary in China and acted as the Executive Director, with support from Ms. Xiaowen Sun as the director of HR (the two later co-founded Xiha Ltd in Finland, with a subsidiary in the US).

Jani is self-taught and highly skilled in programming, which stems from his participation in demo scene, a movement in the late 80's and 90's which encouraged young programmers and designers to compete in creating demonstrations that ran in real time on Atari ST, Amiga and PC computers.

Jani has been interviewed by all of the main newspapers in Finland and was also a guest on Finland’s number one prime time talk show, Arto Nyberg. He has been interviewed and quoted frequently in online technology publications around the world. In 2010 Wired Magazine interviewed him for an article on machine translation.