Urska Srsen
The 25-year-old Slovenian applied to med school, then changed course, deciding to study sculpture at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. She ended up co-founding Bellabeat, a start-up that designs devices to track the health of pregnant women, new mothers, the unborn and the newly born. She connected with her co-founder Sandro Mur, a Croatian computer software expert, through the sport. When Mur met Sršen’s mother, an obstetrician/gynecologist, she started talking about doctors’ need for an affordable, user-friendly system that would enable routine check-ups at home and send data to healthcare providers. Mur asked Sršen to help him. Sršen’s odyssey has taken her from her hometown of Ljubljana to Zagreb in Croatia, and San Francisco. Along the way the company won first prize in the Pioneers Festival’s 2013 start-up competition in Vienna; won a place in Y Combinator’s March class; and was voted ‘most likely to succeed’ among the Silicon Valley winter cohort. These accolades helped Bellabeat raise $4.5 million in May.
