Qlupod AG is part of The Founder Games – the Balkans’ most ambitious startup accelerator and its first founder-focused reality show. Here is what the experience has taught us about communicating health technology, pitching under pressure, and building in Southeast Europe.
Twenty founders. A megayacht. Cameras rolling. Real investors watching. A pool of €300,000 in investment and a place in Silicon Valley at stake. And among those founders, a Swiss health technology company trying to explain – clearly, compellingly, in real time, under pressure – why monitoring your blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and heart rhythm at home might be one of the most
important things you can do for your long-term cardiovascular health. That is the situation Qlupod AG has found itself in as part of The Founder Games. And it has been among the most instructive experiences in building this company.
What The Founder Games Is
The Founder Games is not a conventional accelerator programme. It is something genuinely new in the Southeast European startup ecosystem: an accelerator that unfolds in front of cameras, with founders competing through a series of real business challenges designed to test not just their products but their judgment, communication, resilience, and character under pressure. Season 1 aired in late 2025. Season 2 is underway. The programme has already built one of the most active founder communities in the Balkans – a network of ambitious builders, experienced mentors, and active investors working
together across the region.
The format is built around deliberate discomfort. In one challenge, founders must sell their high-tech products to the wrong audience – folk dancers, firefighters – with only minutes to craft a story that will win over people who have no existing reason to care. In another, a fake scandal forces founders to manage a reputational crisis with journalists closing in. In the valuation game, investors bet publicly on a company’s worth in a live reverse auction. The vertical test sends founders into a lift with five strangers and two minutes per floor to make their pitch land. Each of these challenges is designed to strip away rehearsed material and reveal what is underneath: the founder’s actual command of their story, their product, and their customer.
At the end of the programme: a Demo Day in which founders pitch to real investors for real capital, with no second chances. The format is honest about what it is – a competition, a test, a show – and that honesty makes it more useful, not less, than programmes that present only the polished version of founder success.
The Particular Challenge of Health Technology in a Pitch Environment
Health technology has a distinctive communication challenge in any high-pressure pitch environment, and The Founder Games has made this challenge unusually visible for the Qlupod AG team. The value of a home monitoring device is, by its nature, preventive and future-oriented. The product’s most important function is detecting a trend before it becomes a problem, or catching an arrhythmia before it causes a stroke. These are events that have not happened yet. They may never happen, precisely because the monitoring has been in place. How do you tell that story compellingly to someone who has
no personal experience of the condition you are preventing, in two minutes, on a megayacht?
The challenge is not unique to Qlupod AG. It is the central communication problem of preventive health technology: making invisible value visible. Making a future that has been avoided feel as real and as urgent as a present problem. This is harder than it sounds, and the consequence of not solving it is that the product’s most important feature – the one that justifies its clinical value, its regulatory investment, and its premium positioning – remains abstract and unconvincing to the people it needs to reach.
The Founder Games, with its emphasis on storytelling under pressure and to non-specialist audiences, has been a demanding and productive environment for working on this problem. The challenges that require selling to the wrong audience – to people who would never naturally consider themselves customers – are particularly relevant. If you can make a firefighter understand why monitoring their resting heart rate at home is personally relevant to their cardiovascular risk, you have probably found the story that will also land for the slightly distracted professional who encounters your product in a LinkedIn
article or a website.
“The best product story is not the most technically accurate one. It is the one that makes a stranger care about a problem they had not yet thought about – and see your solution as the obvious response.”
Lessons in Pitching That Apply Beyond the Show
The lessons from competitive pitching that have been most useful to Qlupod AG are the ones that are least specific to the reality show format. They apply to investor meetings, clinical partnership conversations, and marketing communications equally.
The first is the primacy of the problem over the product. Audiences who do not yet care about your solution will care about a well-described problem – because problems are relatable, even when the solution is unfamiliar. Leading with the problem creates the context in which the product becomes meaningful rather than merely described.
The second is specificity over generality. ‘Home health monitoring’ is general. ‘The 22 minutes last Tuesday when your heart rhythm was irregular – and the fact that no clinic visit would ever have captured it’ is specific. Specific scenarios, specific people, specific moments of clinical consequence are what make health technology real to people who have not personally experienced the conditions it addresses.
The third is that conviction matters more than optimism. Investors – and clinicians, and patients – can distinguish between a founder who is enthusiastic about their product and one who has genuinely worked through the hard questions: why will this succeed where others have not? What does the path to clinical adoption actually look like, and what are the real obstacles? The founders who communicate genuine, grounded conviction are the ones who build trust most rapidly.
The Balkans as a Health Technology Market
Being part of The Founder Games has also deepened Qlupod AG’s understanding of and connection to Southeast Europe as a health technology market – not just as a community of founders, but as a region with specific healthcare needs that are highly relevant to what Qlupod AG is building. The Balkans faces a combination of challenges that make home monitoring particularly valuable: aging populations with growing chronic disease burdens, healthcare systems under significant capacity pressure, rural populations with limited specialist access, and an emigration of clinical professionals that is creating real gaps in primary and specialist care provision.
These are precisely the conditions under which the ability to check vital signs at home – and to share those readings with a clinical team when needed – is not a convenience but a meaningful contribution to health outcomes. The founder community Qlupod AG has encountered through The Founder Games understands this context from the inside, and the conversations within that community about the intersection of technology and regional healthcare challenges are among the most substantive and practically useful the Qlupod AG team has had.
What The Founder Games Represents for the Regional Ecosystem
Beyond Qlupod AG’s own experience, The Founder Games is significant for what it represents for the Southeast European startup ecosystem more broadly. The Balkans has, for many years, been underrepresented in European startup narratives – its talent, its ambition, and its growing pool of experienced founders and investors less visible than those of Western European hubs. The Founder Games changes this, both by building community infrastructure – the network of founders, mentors, and investors connected through the programme – and by producing content that makes the region’s startup
activity visible to international audiences.
For a health technology company with Swiss roots and a European market ambition, being part of this emerging ecosystem matters. The partnerships, the investor relationships, and the peer connections developed through The Founder Games are part of Qlupod AG’s long-term growth infrastructure. The show is the context. The relationships are the asset.
Conclusion
The Founder Games has been, for Qlupod AG, a demanding, instructive, and genuinely valuable experience. It has sharpened the team’s communication of a product whose most important features are preventive and invisible. It has embedded Qlupod AG in a founder community that understands the regional healthcare context in which the product operates. And it has provided, through its challenging format, the kind of pressure-tested clarity about product, customer, and competitive positioning that comfortable internal discussions rarely produce. The cameras capture the performance. The learning goes
home with the founders.
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