During past three years, Health Founders accelerator have had a pleasure to work with truly outstanding and inspiring founders. In this blog piece we’d like to give a floor to the wonderful female founders from Health Founders I, II and III cohort.

Please meet the Female Founders of Health Founders: Katrina Laks – Co-founder & CEO of Migrevention, Anna-Liisa Kubo – Co-founder & Managing Director and Olesja Bondarenko – Co-founder & CEO of Nanordica Medical, Helena Binetskaya – Co-founder of Lungpass, Birgit Krieger – Founder & CEO of SpeakTX and Elina Vale – Co-founder & CEO of Essence!

SpeakTX is an online platform with interactive exercises to support speech therapy and speech development.
Nanordica Medical has developed a nano-based product (8x more efficient compared to the competitors) for wound care patients suffering from aggressive bacteria.
Migrevention is the first fully digital headache clinic in the world with the goal to help more than 1 billion migraine sufferers globally.
LungPass is an AI-powered app and stethoscope for lungs analyzing lung sounds and symptoms to distinguish between mild and serious lung conditions.
Essence is a digital coach for women’s health & well-being enabling women to balance hormones and boost well-being by optimizing nutrition, sport, social and work engagements to their cycle.

We wanted to know how has Health Founders accelerator and its community helped them in their startup journey.. so we asked them some questions.


How has Health Founders helped you in your startup journey?

Elina Vale – Co-founder & CEO of Essence: “Health Founders has great mentors and we are fortunate to work closely with Erki Mölder and our lead mentor Ksenia Kapoor. The accelerator has also an outstanding network of other founders and peer-to-peer support.”

Birgit Krieger – Founder & CEO of SpeakTX: “For us Health Founders is all about being part of a community that shares valuable knowledge, experiences and inspiration. We have a chance to meet experts and top players of the HealthTech field, who are sharing their unique experience, best practices, lessons to learn from and valuable insights. We also have the opportunity to work daily side-by-side with other HealthTech startups with whom we can share our struggles and challenges, but also celebrate small victories and in the future hopefully the joy of making a true impact in the healthcare field! All that gives us a lot of motivation and enhances our abilities to move forward in our journey.” 

Katrina Laks – Co-founder & CEO of Migrevention: “We managed to develop a lot during the accelerator period. Most important events for us were that we came out with the MVP and raised our pre-seed round. On top of this, we gained valuable contacts, irreplaceable support and a wonderful sense of community.”

Anna-Liisa Kubo – Co-founder & Managing Director of Nanordica Medical: “Health Founders helped us to become entrepreneurs from being scientists.”

Helena Binetskaya – Co-founder of Lungpass: “Health Founders helped us tremendously with access to local healthcare professionals while conducting product design validation. It was organised at a true startup speed. One day I said I need ten+ doctors and nurses to dedicate 30 minutes each to test our product – and the next day the first batch of interviews was already running! If you’ve been in the healthtech product management field, you know that to get hours of healthcare providers’ time so quickly is absolutely fantastic. The product looked completely different after three user testing iterations we did. It saved our company plenty of software development resources and ensured that our end users would enjoy using the final product.”

Why did you join Health Founders?

Helena Binetskaya – Co-founder of Lungpass: “We joined for the community of like-minded healthtech entrepreneurs. It’s great that companies here span many disease verticals, business models and geographies. There’s plenty to learn from each other, and because it is such a tight-knit community, you get to know the behind-the-scenes stories, references and latest market insights. Altogether this may decrease your chances of making avoidable mistakes – some of which can have a rather high toll on one’s company. And although the same is probably true for all startups, it is especially critical in healthcare, where early decisions you make on your regulatory path, marketing claims or clinical partnership will impact your company’s trajectory in 3 to 5 years’ time.”

Olesja Bondarenko – Co-founder & CEO of Nanordica Medical: “Health Founders is the accelerator focusing on healthcare. It seemed an exciting challenge and a logical next step. Also, Erki Mölder was already our mentor by that time. We value greatly his advice and support and wanted to continue this collaboration.”

Katrina Laks – Co-founder & CEO of Migrevention: “Health Founders was the only HealthTech life cycle oriented accelerator when Migrevention started the journey. We had strong belief in the founders and mentors at Health Founders and they believed in our team. Health Founders is not just another accelerator program, but a supportive community of mentors and companies. That’s why we are still keeping close to its community.” 

Elina Vale – Co-founder & CEO of Essence: “Women’s health is still an under-researched area. We were looking for a great partner that would help us to validate our solution from a scientific and medical perspective. The 9-month program stood out as well since in HealthTech it is a reasonable time length to achieve some significant results.”

Birgit Krieger – Founder & CEO of SpeakTX: “We joined in order to be part of a bigger HealthTech community and to get in touch with field leaders to learn how to quickly and effectively scale our business and improve our current business models.” 

What are your next steps in the health tech field?

Katrina Laks – Co-founder & CEO of Migrevention: “Migrevention is still only a 2 year old company. We are making our first steps exploring new markets. As our side mission is to raise awareness about migraines around the world, we are also keeping that in mind. As an example, we just made a webinar about ‘Migraines at workplace.”

Elina Vale – Co-founder & CEO of Essence: “Our mission is to build a world where periods are women’s superpower. We plan to continue researching the correlations between mental, menstrual health and productivity. In 5 years we aim to give a hundred million working women a tool to holistically unlock their potential and transform the way they plan, work, create and live.”

Anna-Liisa Kubo – Co-founder & Managing Director of Nanordica Medical: “Our next step is to work on gaining the CE marking and to start with first sales.”

Birgit Krieger – Founder & CEO of SpeakTX: “Day to day we are developing features on our speech therapy platform to improve the experience for our users, including exercise and programs for more diagnoses and speech impediment issues. In addition we are introducing our platform to additional service providers to contribute to a better care provision. Our next steps will also be the ones to take us outside of our home country borders!”