Anna-Maria Henell is one of the Co-Founders and the CEO at Disior – a MedTech company focused on developing a new type of pre-operative software for orthopedic surgeries. In short of four years, Disior secured a Series A round with Maki.vc and Tesi as leading investors, got listed as one of the top AI companies in Finland, was selected as one of the ten most promising rising startups in Finland, and the list goes on. It was no surprise that this company kept popping up in our feeds – we had to hear more behind Anna-Maria: what drives her, her dreams, and sources of inspiration!
1. Tell us what your company does and why you do it in a few sentences.
We are a Helsinki-based startup specializing in turning CT and MRI images into mathematical models and numerical analysis. Our software quickly provides objective data for patient diagnosis, treatment planning, and outcome assessment. Our target is to help medical professionals deliver optimal care for all patients to make our society healthy, productive, and resilient.
2. Tell us something unexpected about yourself or within your entrepreneurial journey.
Well, I’m quite a home centric person with four children. I like being at home with my family. I also love classical music and would have loved to become a professional musician when I was young. How great would it be to live with only music!
3. Where do you find inspiration and what do you do to stay creative?
Working with brilliant minds of all professions inspires me!
I genuinely find it inspiring to work with our brilliant minded surgeons, for example. When I see their utmost passion and perseverance to do their work the best way they can and use all their spare time to learn even more through research, it just gets me excited. I want to do everything to help them.
4. What is the best advice you’ve ever gotten?
Remember to step outside your comfort zone every day! We often start to narrow ourselves to spend time in the areas we master already. If we dare to step outside frequently enough, our comfort zone slowly becomes bigger, and through that, we grow ourselves and become more innovative, brave, and productive.
I believe this also makes life more meaningful and fruitful in the long run. We learn so much about who we actually are and what we are capable of, even though it feels cumbersome and difficult to go where we are not comfortable with ourselves.
5. What can you do today that you were not capable of a year ago?
I have learned to see myself differently and understand my strengths and weaknesses as part of a bigger picture. Hopefully, this will help me be a bit wiser and better as a person with the ability to help and support others and our company. Hopefully already during next year!
6. What is your biggest dream?
My biggest dream is that our company and our product could positively impact patient care in the world – that it would start to fly on its own, grow and cover more and more medical specialty areas. It would be so cool to see that we would have done something that helps the world become a bit better place to live in. I think there can be no bigger dream than that. I want to foster our company to be the greatest in 5 years.
If you found Anna-Maria Henell’s story inspiring, join us by spreading positivity and sharing the story on social media with the hashtag #MovingForward.
Read all FORWARD stories:
Emmi Jouslehto from ARILYN here.
Iida Miettinen from KAMUPAK here.
Daniel Rahman from INTEGRIFY here.
Marko Reponen from NEUBIT here.
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ABOUT FORWARD
Forward is a 6-part short blog series highlighting inspirational founders in the Finnish startup ecosystem. In every post, we ask these founders to share their perspectives, hopes, and biggest dreams with others – all in 6 questions. Our goal is to uplift and inspire the ecosystem – now more than ever, we need great, positive entrepreneurial stories that make us look forward to the future. The series is co-created by Slush and Maria 01.
