Qlupod AG founder Nikola Trajanov has been recognised in the Global Founder Index by FounderSquare among the Top 26 Founders spotlighting the most promising builders in New York and beyond. Here is what the recognition means – and the conviction behind the journey that earned it.
Recognition in health technology rarely arrives the way you might imagine. There is no single breakthrough moment, no dramatic pivot point after which everything is different. There is instead a long accumulation of decisions made under uncertainty, clinical validations that take longer than planned, regulatory processes that require patience and precision, and investor conversations that ask you,
repeatedly, to articulate why this product, this team, and this moment are the right combination. It is in that context — the unglamorous daily work of building something genuinely difficult – that being named by FounderSquare in the Global Founder Index Top 26 Founders carries its real meaning.
For Qlupod AG founder Nikola Trajanov, the recognition is not a destination. It is a public acknowledgement of a direction that has been consistent since Qlupod AG’s founding: that the way people monitor their own health at home is about to change fundamentally, and that Qlupod AG is one of the companies building that change.
What the Global Founder Index Is
The Global Founder Index is the flagship programme of FounderSquare – an invite-only, rigorously curated platform designed to identify and rank the founders that the world will be talking about in the years ahead. Each quarter, FounderSquare’s team reviews nominations from across their global network and selects a cohort of founders whose work, vision, and traction merit recognition in a global edition. Selected founders are published across the network, introduced to investors who are actively deploying capital, and profiled as part of a curated community of builders at the leading edge of their
sectors.
The platform operates at significant scale: more than 250,000 founders and 20,000 investors participate, with over $500 million in funds raised through the ecosystem. Being named in the Top 26 – spotlighting the most promising founders building in New York and beyond – places Qlupod AG in a cohort recognised not just for the product it has built, but for the quality of the thinking, team, and execution behind it.
This quarter’s edition features Nikola Trajanov alongside Qlupod AG, listed in the Health Tech category – Connected Medical Devices and Telemedicine – which accurately captures both what QluPod is and what it enables: a certified medical-grade device for home vital signs monitoring, connected to the QluApp and to QluDoc, the clinical platform through which patients can choose to share their monitoring data with their doctors.
The Quote That Summarises the Journey
When FounderSquare profiles a founder, they ask for a quote that captures something authentic about how that founder thinks about building. Nikola’s response was this:
“Building something meaningful is not about avoiding failure; it is about having the conviction to keep going when failure seems inevitable.”
This is not a polished public relations line. It is a description of what building Qlupod AG has actually felt like from the inside. We developed an ecosystem around a certified medical device – one that is accurate enough, safe enough, and clinically credible enough to be recommended by healthcare professionals to their patients – involves an extended period in which the gap between where the product is and where it needs to be is large, the timeline for closing that gap is uncertain, and the rational response would often be to stop. The conviction to keep going, grounded in a clear belief in the problem being solved and the people who will be better off because it is solved, is what distinguishes the companies that reach clinical validation from the ones that do not.
It is also, notably, a philosophy that applies to health technology specifically rather than to startups in general. Consumer technology can tolerate iteration in public – a product can launch imperfect, receive feedback, and improve in the open. A medical device cannot. The first version that reaches clinical use must already be right. That requires the conviction to do the work before the launch, to invest in validation before the market rewards it, to build credibility before it is commercially necessary. That is the kind of conviction Nikola’s quote is describing.
Why Health Technology Attracts This Kind of Founder
Health technology tends to attract founders who are motivated by something more specific than market opportunity. The market for home health monitoring is large and growing – that is true and relevant to investors. But the founders who actually do the work of building certified medical devices, navigating complex regulatory requirements, and building clinical trust over years, are almost always motivated by something more personal: a family member with a condition that inadequate monitoring failed to detect in time, a clinical observation made during medical training that identified a systemic gap, or a
conviction that the current model of periodic clinic visits and reactive care is insufficient for the chronic disease burden that modern healthcare systems face.
For Qlupod AG, the motivation has always been the same: the gap between clinic visits is too long, and the data that patients’ bodies produce every day is too valuable to remain uncaptured. Blood pressure trends, heart rhythm patterns, oxygen saturation responses, and temperature changes occur continuously in the real world of patients’ lives – not in the ten-minute windows when they happen to be sitting in a clinic room. Closing that gap, with a device that is accurate enough to be clinically meaningful and simple enough to be used consistently at home, is the problem Qlupod AG was founded to solve.
What the FounderSquare Recognition Enables
Being named in the Global Founder Index opens specific doors that are relevant to Qlupod AG’s next phase. The platform’s network of investors – 20,000 active participants, many of whom focus on health technology – provides access to capital partners who understand the sector’s regulatory requirements, its validation timelines, and its clinical go-to-market complexity. Conversations with investors who have already backed health technology companies are qualitatively different from those with generalist investors encountering the sector for the first time.
The network also provides peer connections – other founders building in adjacent spaces, from remote patient monitoring and wearable diagnostics to telemedicine platforms and clinical decision support tools. These connections, facilitated by a platform that has already verified both parties’ credentials and traction, are often the most productive relationships available to a health tech founder at Qlupod AG’s stage.
Beyond capital and connections, there is the signal value of the recognition itself. In a sector where clinical credibility is the hardest and most valuable asset, being named by a rigorous, globally recognised platform as one of the top founders building in health technology is a signal that reaches clinicians, health system decision-makers, and potential clinical partners as meaningfully as it reaches investors.
What Comes Next for Qlupod AG
The FounderSquare recognition is a milestone on a longer journey. Qlupod AG is continuing to deepen its clinical partnerships across Europe, expand its presence in the Swiss market, and develop the telemedicine infrastructure that connects home monitoring data to clinical care pathways. QluPod, the device, the QluApp, and QluDoc are each evolving, and the feedback from clinical partners and patients continues to shape that evolution.
The team is also active in the startup ecosystem in ways that reflect Qlupod AG’s regional roots: participating in The Founder Games – the Balkans’ most ambitious founder accelerator – and building the community connections across Southeast Europe that are part of Qlupod AG’s long-term market strategy. Being based in Switzerland while building a European health technology company means engaging with both the established and the emerging parts of the continent’s healthcare innovation ecosystem.
Conclusione
Being named among FounderSquare’s Global Top 26 Founders is, ultimately, a recognition of what has already been built and an investment in what is still being built. The conviction to keep going when failure seems inevitable is not a past-tense quality – it is the present-tense condition of every founder still in the middle of building something meaningful. Qlupod AG is still in the middle. The recognition helps. The work continues.
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