Summary

Annika Lundström, the founder of Reminded, a medical technology startup, discusses her journey and the development of a diagnostics tool for mental health. She talks about her experience participating in a Finnish entrepreneurship program in San Francisco and the challenges and opportunities she encountered. Annika explains the focus of her startup on non-invasive medical devices that detect hormones and biomarkers related to mental health issues. She also discusses the process of FDA approval and her plans for expanding into different markets. Throughout the conversation, Annika emphasizes the importance of perseverance and finding a supportive community of fellow founders.

Takeaways

• Annika Lundström participated in a Finnish entrepreneurship program in San Francisco, which provided her with valuable opportunities and partnerships.
• Reminded is developing a non-invasive medical device that detects hormones and biomarkers related to mental health issues.
• FDA approval is required for Reminded's device, and the process can be expensive and time-consuming.
• Annika emphasizes the importance of perseverance and having a supportive community of fellow founders.
• Reminded plans to start in the US market and then expand to other geographies, such as Japan and China.

Sound Bites

"I'm currently running a medical technology startup named Reminded and why I was spending this past spring in San Francisco was due to me being selected to this kind of Finnish initiative called SILTA."

"What we're currently developing is a non-invasive medical device detecting various hormones and biomarkers that have been clinically proven to have a strong correlation with mental health related issues."

"We recently incorporated Reminded Inc as a Delaware C Corp now here in the US and that will be the parent company of our whole company basically and remaining reminded OE the Finnish entity as a subsidiary.”

Links

Annika’s Reminded startup: https://reminded.fi/

Please leave us a review: https://podchaser.com/AdventuresOnTheCanDo

Think Like a Startup Founder (book): https://www.manning.com/books/think-like-a-startup-founder

Jothy’s website: https://jothyrosenberg.com

The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk on disabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

02:29 Participating in the Finnish Entrepreneurship Program

09:35 Incorporating Reminded Inc and Expanding to the US

14:22 Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities in the US

21:00 Timeline and Market Entry Strategy

26:43 The Importance of Mental Health Assessment and Awareness

Okay, well hello Annika, how are you?

Hi Jothi, really nice to have this conversation with you. I'm really doing well. I just got back to Helsinki from a spring in San Francisco, so a little bit jet lagged still, but we're powering through.

Good. Well, actually, that's kind of where I like to start, which is having you tell us where you're from and where you are living now. And you're sort of living in two places. So you're from Helsinki. You're from Finland.

That's correct. Yeah up here in the Nordics and well for once we have actually quite decent weather but most of the time it's not 26 or How would you say maybe like 85 degrees Fahrenheit, but yeah, so we're lucky right now, but but yeah, so Originally here and then I've spent the last three months on the other side of the world in the US for My medical technology startups development

And you're back in Helsinki, which is where you're from, right? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, so the plan right now would be to stay here for one and a half months, visit family and spend time with friends and so on and then I will most likely head back to San Francisco again.

Is that an immigration requirement?

So the kind of visa that I would be applying now for is a six month one. It's a B1, B2. So it's for like business and so on.

Okay, okay, good. And the place that, could you just tell us a little bit about the place that you have been going to in San Francisco? Because when you started telling me about it in our first conversation, I was very impressed with what Finland is doing.

Yeah, for sure. So, well, just a brief rundown. So I'm currently running a medical technology startup named Reminded and why I was spending this past spring in San Francisco was due to me being selected to this kind of Finnish initiative called SILTA. It's an entrepreneurship program where they look for young promising upcoming founders.

to basically give them the opportunity to set a foot into the Bay Area. So what they do is they take seven different or eight different founders, drop us there in the area, pay for our accommodation, and then we get the chance to grab different opportunities and partnerships that can become valuable for us. And this experience has definitely opened up my eyes in many ways.

But they've got, so Finland has this building where it's got living quarters, like apartments for each of you, and it's your office space, right?

Well, we were living in one joint villa house that had eight separate bedrooms, two kitchens and three floors. So it was quite a nice accommodation, definitely. So very spacious and so on, but a joint kind of living space.

I just haven't heard of any other country doing that. I think it says a lot about how serious they are about fostering entrepreneurship in Finland. OK, so your startup is around a diagnostics tool for mental health. Could you?

talk a little bit about why you have this focus on mental health and do you have a personal connection to this whole thing.

Yeah, for sure. So just a brief rundown is medical technology startup named reminded setting a new standard for mental health care assessment. So what we're currently developing is a non -invasive medical device detecting various hormones and biomarkers that have been clinically proven to have a strong correlation with mental health related issues. So it is a saliva based sensor strip technology.

being able to measure various hormones such as cortisol, DHEA and a few others as well. So that objective data will be taken into consideration for those kinds of professionals who are working with their clients so that they can actually see a tangible effect on how the therapy that they're recommending is moving forward and so on. So yeah, that's the brief of it. And the reason why I have...

gotten myself into this challenging industry of medical technology is due to the fact that health is something that is the pillar stone for everything in your life. And I have such a strong connection to this as well. I've just seen in way too many circumstances how people are suffering through these kinds of things without necessarily getting the personalized care that they need, both from a firsthand perspective of my own.

story and relatives who only have gotten themselves out of the darkness when the problem has been progressing to a very severe state. And I truly believe that you can get yourself out of that before that happens. You just need to raise the awareness in a tangible way. And that's the mission that we have.

So, I mean, this is basically how you came up with this idea. Most founders have some connection to a market, an issue, a problem. They identify the problem, and then they come up with a solution. And...

That's all true for you and you've got a co -founder that sort of matches up with you having the passion, the vision, and your co -founder is bringing the science, the technology that your solution is based on. Is that right?

Yeah, that is correct. So the backbone of Reminded Technology is all based on our chief scientist's PhD work for non -invasive biosensors. Her name is Sanjita Jesmin and her PhD has been spinning out from Oregon State University. And now she's been like, is it correct? Like nine years in the industry and now wants to take her precious research into a commercial application. And that's how we aligned with.

with our two missions to move this forward. But I want to also highlight that in our team there are two other truly valuable players as well. So our CTO who is a mechanical engineer, Adil Shah, and COO whose name is Emilio Vartyainen, a doctoral neuroscientist.

So what nationalities are covered in the four people? You're obviously Finnish. The scientist who did her work at Oregon State, where is she from?

She's originally from Bangladesh and then she has been living in the US for several years now and she's a US citizen. And then the CTO, he's originally from Pakistan and then he has done his masters in Finland so he lives also here in Helsinki and Emilia also lives here in Finland.

And then the CTO, yeah.

It's a pretty amazing international group. But when you went to the building in San Francisco, were any of them with you or was it just you?

From our team it was only me, so I was the only one represented, reminded at the program, yeah.

Now, are you actually going to move Reminded to the US or are you going to have it stay based in Helsinki?

Yeah, well now in the last couple of weeks there has been some great advancements for our whole direction for the company I would say. So we recently incorporated Reminded Inc as a Delaware C Corp now here in the US and that will be the parent company of our whole.

company basically and remaining reminded OE the Finnish entity as a subsidiary. So, so yeah, and I think like just based on the few months that I spent in San Francisco, we were able to gather together more traction during that time than what I was able to do in probably in a year here in Helsinki. So I just see that our whole direction is moving more and more towards the US.

just for the market opportunity and also the need to help out for mental health is greater, I would say, in the US.

So one of the things about your background that kind of stands out as well is that is the is the Olympic, the Junior Olympic part of that. So that's in your bio. Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, yeah, it feels like such a separate part of my life now since everything has been, you know, taken a turn in the last couple of years. But so I played table tennis quite intensely for 13 years of my life and play myself up to qualify to the Youth Olympics back in 2018. So I played there in Buenos Aires in Argentina.

So in and on like an European level, let's say under 18, I was among the top 10 players in Europe as well. So I think like my work ethic, regardless if it's in sports or in academics or now building reminded has remained the same, which is that I can only focus on the true core aspects that are within my own power, which is how I show up to people.

what I do on a daily basis and you know act acts of kindness and what kind of direction that I want to take and drive this whole business forward. I can't allocate my focus towards external circumstances and people's perceptions of me because then I don't have time to focus on anything else. So.

Do you get a chance to play what we call ping pong at all anymore?

I have put my racket on the shelf after the Olympics because I think like when you play so intensely that you're in the hall for like five to six hours every day in the gym and having like a full -on you know sponsorship team around you and so on going from that to

playing like once a week, it feels really weird. So I think like I've also gotten things that I wanted out of that period of my life. And now I'm allocating my focus towards something else. But of course, like sometimes I miss it also, but for the time being, I'm more than happy this way.

I think it would be really hard for you to find somebody that you could actually play with and could keep up with you. And so, you know, if you started playing, I mean, I play ping pong, but I play, you know, jungle ping pong, right? I mean, it's just all over the place. And so if we played, I'd serve it to you and you'd kill it. And it would be like a real boring game.

Thank you.

We can take a match and then we'll see what happens. Yeah.

So you've alluded to that there were some, there have already been some challenges with the company prior to, you also alluded to recently, some very positive things. So what are you referring to about, you know, the challenges that you were experiencing?

Maybe it's before you came over to the US. I'm not sure when that period happened.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I came to the U S or I spent my time in the U S now, from March to may. So before that we, I was noticing this kind of period of stagnation in terms of our progress and also for, for the fundraising. And I don't want to be that naive and say that I want to blame the whole environment here. That would be really stupid of me to say. but the fact is that.

The opportunities and investments that can be grabbed from here is just a lot less and that's just natural. But I think the greatest change that has happened for me is an internal one. Once now I've seen the different perspective of how business can be done in the U .S. and that has helped me greatly to maybe become a little bit more less polite in order to drive, you know, traction forward and...

just relentlessly go after what I want without taking too many opinions and internalize them. I think those two things have definitely changed and that have helped me regardless if I would have been now here or in the US. So it's more about the mindset that has shifted. So.

That sounds really good that you've identified that and that you've incorporated that and you're internalizing that. So it takes time for an area that's fairly new to startups to build a culture that's going to really foster it. There are

most of the United States is not like San Francisco or Boston or New York. If you go to, I mean, even I'll say Chicago, there might be more there than some places in Europe, perhaps. But I remember 20 years ago, there was no startup culture in

in France or in Germany. And then, you know, Ireland started building something and other people saw that and it takes time. So, but it seems to me that what you're telling me, though, is that there's a little kernel in Finland that would, for example, create this place that you all can go to and

eight of you can actually live there and work there and then be incorporated into the San Francisco investor startup community. That's a really good sign.

Yeah, yeah, I am really grateful that I got this opportunity to be selected to this program. I do, however, think also that it all comes down to what kind of objectives you have when you go and take this kind of opportunity. You have to be quite clear on what are the metrics that you want to improve for your own business. And then...

just work really, really hard. I can be quite upfront and honest and say that I have never probably worked harder than during these last three months in my life, which eventually have also now created this kind of delayed gratification for a lot of things for us. But there's a lot of unseen work that nobody noticed, of course, as well. And then it looks so great on like a LinkedIn post and so on. But that's how it is, I guess. So.

Mm -hmm. So I want to talk a little bit more about your product. So now, what is the story on FDA approval? What will a device like this that's so it's non -invasive, so you're taking some saliva from somebody's mouth, I assume, and

And so does it need any FDA approval? I just am not an expert in this area. So.

Yeah, no problem at all. So we are aiming for a medical device classification. It would either be class one or class two for the FDA approval. And we've been now working with an external firm here from Finland to basically set up our regulatory roadmap so that we then can take it further to engage with the FDA and meet the necessary requirements in terms of clinical data collection and so on.

But it all just comes down to what they will eventually now say during the summer, I would say. So yeah, it will be interesting to move that progress also forward. But yeah, so it's basically like a saliva -based swab test that you take. So yeah, a much more like user -friendly and more accessible way of taking biomarker measurements than through traditional blood work.

So you take a swab and then do you put the swab into your new device?

So the small saliva sample will be dropped in onto like this kind of small strip and that will be inserted into the small device. So like a point of care setting to get the reading. So if you, this kind of glucose meter thing through a blood thing is quite a good like resemblance of a new device that's already out on the market. But there are, this is quite an emerging field. So I know that there are.

Definitely a lot of startups who are working on this particular technology as of right now, and also more and more that are coming out on the market in various ways, whether that be for hormonal detection, for women's health or cortisol measuring and so on. But it's not an overly saturated market whatsoever, which is why we want to move as fast as we possibly can.

Yeah, it sounds like you need to go fast. Is getting FDA approval expensive or, I mean, yeah, is it expensive?

It can be. It just comes down to what the clinical requirements will be, how extensive the trials and the validation studies that you need to meet with the requirements. So, yeah, I think it can range from, let's say, like $30 ,000 up to several millions if you go into invasive...

implants for devices and so on, but it really just depends on your claims that you want to put out for the device.

And will it take very long or is it a matter of months or is it, you know, does it go into years to get this approval?

I would say for our particular case, it can take between like one, one and a half, one, two years, something around that to get to the market from where we are right now.

Is that fast enough, given the competition?

Well, I think all of us who are in this particular industry field is working through similar challenges. So it all just comes down to getting good protection for what you put out. So, you know, securing it down with strong patents and trade secrets and so on, which is something that we're filing for right now as well.

Once you have FDA approval or maybe when you're partway through the process, will that then be a fairly quick approval process in Europe?

Well, since there are different requirements for the US and Europe, here it's for FDA and then in Europe they have other classifications, so you can't use your FDA approval in the US basically. But since we are aiming for a market entry here, then that's the market that we want to target now in the beginning stages and then move it and expand.

geographically.

So when you say here, you're actually meaning the US.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm here for you. Yeah, in the US. Already try mentally I'm apparently there.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay. So you're going to start in the U S you're going to get it out there. You're going to, you know, start, start seeing, how, how good the uptake is and, and all that. and then, so when then when you go to, Europe, it's like, I mean, FDA approval covers a lot of things. And then the Europeans have a few things which are different or extra. So.

Well, do they accept the FDA approval as a starting point or do you start from scratch?

Well, I would definitely say that it helps sufficiently to have that, of course, but I am not an expert in terms of like how differentiating that would be, but it requires a different certification based on EU standards. So, yeah.

Where else, what other geographies do you consider part of your plan and really important?

I see a large opportunity being grabbed from Japan and then potentially also China. But I think it's best for us right now to allocate our focus towards one market and build up a really solid foundation from there and then take it forward accordingly, seeing where the interest will be coming in mostly. So.

Mm -hmm.

Well, it sounds like a very nice product and I think it's so needed. I do some things that are very different, but I do some things that are focused on trying to help kids not develop mental health problems because...

They've suddenly, they're suddenly facing a disability. And if you then limit them to only things they can do, say, say they've lost a leg and then the only things they're allowed to or not, not allowed, but able to do are things with a walking prosthesis. And because insurance companies that tend to cover those kinds of things do not cover things that are for sports.

So you can't get a running leg paid for. And we try to do that with a foundation I have. Because what I discovered personally is that when that situation occurs, you kind of go into this spiral of getting depressed and you feel your self -esteem has been crushed, I guess, is the word I would use. And...

Mm.

Yeah.

without self -esteem, a human being is in very bad trouble. And so they're gonna get depressed. And I've seen it time and time again. And then you help them adapt. So we're tackling a similar problem very differently, but yours is to diagnose that they are depressed or something is...

seriously wrong. And mine kind of assumes they're going to be.

At least give indications on where the status is of the people who are suffering through these kinds of things. Because already like a spiked cortisol level for an extended period of time is a great indication if you're moving towards a more depressive state. And those kinds of things can go truly unnoticed for a long time if you don't get to a doctor and get those things checked up.

which is why we want to increase the accessibility to do these kinds of things.

Yeah, it's really important. So a couple of times here in our conversation, you've clearly shown that you have a lot of grit for what you're doing. Where do you think, in your case, where do you think that comes from?

That probably just comes from the results that I see that I can complete. If I let myself go into an extended period of time of being quite uncertain of what the outcome will be. But if I know that I'm putting in the work, I am doing the right things, I can go to sleep knowing that today I...

I did all that I possibly can within my own willpower to do something, to drive it forward, whether that be in the meetings that I had with investors or putting those four -hand shots on the table. That work will come back and pay off eventually. And it doesn't necessarily have to happen.

tomorrow and it won't. And I think it is all good, but you just need to see it from the perspective that this will come together somehow. It has to. I believe in that. And I've seen it on a continuous basis around the people that I admire as well. So that's the only way for me to be able to wake up in the morning and push this really challenging thing forward.

You must have had this as a kid because not very many kids have the drive to go play a sport like in your case, you know, table tennis at such and spend so much time on it and so focused on it that you're you find yourself in the youth Olympics. Did your parents push you? Did did.

You know, what made you go do that?

I definitely gained inspiration from my parents seeing what kind of work ethic they have done both on a professional level and personally as well in terms of raising us and so on. But they were never the ones who...

forced me into it whatsoever. I am really grateful to have had the freedom of choice. And I just fell in love with the sport. And I think that's just the pure interest of creating something from scratch on my own. I think I have this kind of weird fascination for that. And seeing how I can test my limits in various ways. That's the kind of thing that I enjoy.

You had some brothers and sisters?

Yeah, one older brother, his name is Thomas. He's four years older than me. He was also playing table tennis and we have had some interesting fights on the table, but I'm so grateful to have him as a brother.

Yeah, one of the biggest supporters I can have. And then I have an older sister as well. Her name is Maria. She's 10 years older than me. So a big age gap for sure. But we have a really strong friendship and sisterhood for sure now. She lives in Switzerland. She's a lawyer for the United Nations. So I don't see her so often. But yeah, I'm really lucky to be close.

with my siblings and that's something that I definitely don't take for granted.

That sounds, your family sounds awesome. Well, Anika, I think we've had a great conversation here. Is there anything additional that you'd like to add? Remember that the people listening are probably founders and they're gonna be fascinated with your story and your drive. So anything else you'd like to say?

I think one of the most important things that I have noticed have helped me going through these daily struggles is to find a community of people who can understand you on a different level, which are exactly like other founders like you. And that is something that I've missed in Helsinki a little bit. So that now being in San Francisco and so on has helped for that aspect as well. Another thing is that,

I just truly hope and believe that you are able to push forward the vision that you want, regardless of what anyone tells you, because at the end of the day, just focus on the things that you know are within your own control, and that will be sufficient enough for the people who want to support you.

Great. Well, thank you so much for doing this. And I really appreciate you being on this episode.

Yeah, thank you likewise also for having me. This has been great. And also just based on the other conversations that we had, I really want to promote the things that you put out because I'm really impressed by your work. So happy to follow your journey now also in the upcoming months and in this year.

Thank you.