I met Ksenia during a startup demo day where she was introducing her company Cardiomo and their unique product that helps people with heart diseases to monitor their health condition 24/7 and to predict possible complications in advance.
Many tech startups these days are focusing on creating technology that helps big corporations sell even more stuff to us, consumers. It’s not surprising — big corporations own a disproportionally huge share of the world’s wealth, selling to them makes all the sense and is actually a necessity for B2B startups if they want to grow. But the problem is that so many of our best talents are wasted on helping the rich become even richer. That’s why I immediately became interested when Ksenia began talking about their product, Cardiomo.
Cardiomo is a small wearable patch that you stick to your body in the area of your heart. The device then measures a series of biometric data points and sends this information to the application on your smartphone. The measurements Cardiomo collects are ECG, heart rate, body temperature, perspiration level, breath rate, sleeping patterns, amount of exercise, and others. In addition to patient’s internal data, the Cardiomo mobile application collects data on the patient’s external conditions such as weather and air pollution (thanks to partnering with another innovative startup AeroState). The data can potentially help the patient and her doctor figure out what influences the patient’s “heart behavior” — whether it’s the weather, amount or exercise, quality of sleep, or something else. But what makes Cardiomo truly unique is its use of Artificial Intelligence. Your ECG is constantly checked against a large database of ECG of thousands of other patients and if the algorithm detects any cardio dysfunction, you’ll get a notification on your phone together with recommendations on what to do — to simply get some rest and relax for awhile or to call your doctor immediately.
After the demo day, Ksenia and I met for a cup of hot tea to chat about Cardiomo, her journey as an entrepreneur, her challenges and motivations, and many other topics we felt like chatting about that day.
Below is Ksenia’s story. I am sure you’ll find something interesting and inspiring for yourself even if you don’t plan to start your own company anytime soon. But most importantly, I hope you’ll feel involved in the process of creating a new product that may save many lives if implemented. And the success of it depends completely on Ksenia and her still very small team. Isn’t it cool? 🙂
… My mom influenced me a lot when I was a kid. She has always been entrepreneurial and worked on many initiatives of her own. She is a strong-willed and determined person, and she demanded the same from me. I think I took this energy and internal drive from her. Yet, I haven’t come to starting my own company until very recently. For a long time, beginning the day after my graduation from college, I worked in politics. In Ukraine, it’s hard to avoid politics (laughs).
School? I was born in Ukraine, but because my parents traveled, I studied and graduated from the school in Russia, in Tyumen, Siberia. I’ve always loved to study, but I don’t remember any particular teacher who would influence me in any significant way during my school years. I liked to be the best. I’m competitive and always wanted to be the best (laughs). It’s a good quality of course, but it makes you constantly feel dissatisfied with yourself — you always want to be better.
My favorite subjects were Russian language and Literature, History, English. I don’t think I liked mathematics very much back then. Later though I had to learn to like it (laughs).
I didn’t do any sports at school, no. As all girls, I learned how to dance. Only after I graduated from school, many years later actually, I went into sports. Three years ago, I started doing yoga and even completed yoga training to become a certified yoga instructor. I had no intentions to teach yoga classes, no, but I wanted to understand how yoga worked. Why yoga? Not for physical exercise, rather for emotional benefits. My interest in yoga coincided with my interest in psychology. At that time, I entered a master program in Psychology so all of these came together in quite a natural way for me.
Siblings? I have a brother who is ten years younger. I babysat him a lot when he was little. Same happened to my own kids, by the way, — I’ve got two daughters who are ten years apart and the older girl babysits the younger one (laughs).
Kids and work? I’ve always worked, my daughters grew up with me being a working mom. With the older daughter, it seemed to be much more difficult – I had to find ways to take care about her and about my work. She would often travel with me for my work trips, even when she was only a few months old. With the younger one, it was a little easier because my older daughter helped me a lot. Now they are 16 and 6 and are going to move with us to the USA next year.
I met Roman, my co-founder and husband, long time ago, when we were students at Kharkiv, Ukraine. I studied philology and linguistics at Kharkiv University, Roman studied radio electronics at Kharkiv University of Radioelectronics. Everything happened very fast to us – we fell in love, married, and got our first daughter.
Before Cardiomo, I worked in politics. I worked for the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine). Starting as an assistant to one of the Parliament Members, I then organized my own center to work with a whole fraction and help its members in their parliamentary work. We would monitor and analyze all major news for them, brief them for interviews and press conferences, dealt with general public inquiries, and performed many other functions. What did I learn? To be organized, keep things in order, and to be responsible. It was a government job and I took it extremely seriously. After that, I started a charitable foundation to help one of the largest children’s hospitals in Kiev, OHMATDET, more specifically their cardio surgery and cardiology department. It looks like I was drawn to help people with heart diseases even then (laughs). I ended up running for Kiev Rada last year and I did win many votes. But not enough. Right after that Roman and I started Cardiomo.
What was important to you in your political job? What motivated you? It was a chance to influence the change, but it was also a chance to help real people in their needs. It was more about helping people for me, yes. With Cardiomo it’s the same — I see our product and our company not as a way to make money (which is also very important of course), but rather as a way to help people with heart diseases to make their life more secure and predictable.
When you are a founder of a company, you have to do a lot of talking, presenting, convincing, explaining. Is this a challenge for you?
My first public speaking experience happened when I was running in the election last year and it was not an easy one. Now I feel better, but even now it’s not what I look forward to (laughs). In the US, my additional challenge is language. I practice meticulously for each presentation: I would do it in front of the mirror paying close attention to intonation and other details. The first time when I felt more or less comfortable presenting happened, in fact, not so long ago.
How did you come up with the idea for Cardiomo?
Roman, my husband, had been contemplating an idea of a device similar to Holter monitor for some time by then. But he wanted the device to transmit this data remotely and that’s how he designed Cardiomo.
He had his personal motivations: his mom had a heart disease and lived in another city, so Roman wanted to be sure she was alright. A year ago, he suggested to start a company and invited me to join him. Our very first device was made on our own money. It turned out to be a successful prototype and earned Roman many victories in all sorts of competitions in Ukraine. It also brought us our first investment money in Ukraine. Our first investor came to us himself because, yet again, he has his own mom who also has a heart disease, and he has believed that our product will help him monitor her health better and even prevent a heart attack.
Officially we started Cardiomo Care in January of this year. A few months later we received our fist investment money in the US and entered an accelerator program here in New York.
Everything is happening pretty fast. Now we are starting another cycle of funding AND we already have pre-orders from senior homes and cardiology clinics. One of the children’s cardiac centers in Ukraine, for example, has already ordered one hundred Cardiomo patches for their young patients.
Challenges? The language of course, then regulation we are not familiar with. Any local startup is ahead of us just because they are local and know local realities. But we compensate it by working twice as hard and being twice as persistent (laughs). Now, for example, I’m doing a lot of research on the US healthcare systems, on various regulations, on how hospitals operate — it differs from what we have in Ukraine significantly, it’s much more complicated.
Family and entrepreneurial life? Roman and I discuss Cardiomo all the time, including in the evenings and on the weekends. In the morning we wake up and the first thing we talk about is Cardiomo. After we started our accelerator program in New York, I don’t remember we talked about anything else, or relaxed, or went anywhere. But it’s ok, the first year is always tough for startups.
Our plans for 2017? Now we are getting ready for the next round of seed investments and should be able to close it in January. We want to use this money to produce five hundred devices and give them to testers. In January, we’ll also be participating in the largest annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. In April we want to run a crowdfunding campaign. We want to test the interest in our product and see how well people will accept it. What’s good about crowdfunding is that we know several Ukrainian startups who have run successful crowdfunding campaigns before and who are gladly sharing their experience with us. Then, in May-June, I’ll be applying to FDA to certify Cardiomo as a medical device. And then we’ll see!
You, your co-founder and husband Roman, and your kids are moving to New York next year. What do you expect for yourself in this big, dynamic and so diverse city?
Well, in the past three months when we were at the accelerator program we had time to only see Central Park, so to begin with I want to see other places in New York (laughs).
Thank you, Ksenia, for the conversation. Welcome to New York and all the best growing Cardiomo!
About the blog guest. Ksenia Belkina is a co-founder and CEO of Cardiomo Care. A linguist and philologist by training, she later received a master degree in Psychology and worked in politics for a long time before starting Cardiomo together with her husband Roman Belkin.
You can follow Cardiomo’s progress at their website, Facebook page, or Twitter.
Dear Ksenia, thank you for sharing your story. I admire your drive to succeed and overcome the challenges along the way. Thank you for selling a product that helps people. What advice can you offer to the mothers who are panning to re-enter the workforce? What might be a good way to prevent possible challenges associated with pursuing a business with your life partner? Thank you and I wish you all the best in the future.
Dear Ilona, thank you very much for your kind words. I would really like to see women manifest themselves in all areas of life – from the family and raising the kids to building the companies. My advice for the mothers is to believe in themselves and in what they want to implement in life and know that with the birth of children life will just begin, the children – our best teachers, who teach us to solve any problems and challenges and do a lot of things at once.
When you pursue a business with your partner the most important thing is to share duties and responsibilities, support and trust each other.
Thank you and wish you to find the harmony in the family and business.
Thank you so much, Ksenia. This is very helpful.