In healthcare there is a growing demand for light mobile devices, which can be used by consumers in addition to professionals. For example performing self-diagnoses is becoming more common. As the user base expands from professionals to consumers, the amount of potential users naturally multiplies. When manufacturing for customers, the price point must be lower and producing the devices cost-effective and scalable. Ginolis aims exactly at this.
“After nine years of development we are now transforming to be an industrial player”, says Teijo Fabritius, the CEO of Ginolis. “We are currently growing rapidly and need more professionals to scale up our operations. Our standards are very high and our market global. Now we are ready to take the next step.”
Investors to speed up product development
Ginolis was founded already in 2010. After a year of careful market analyses the actual product development started in September 2011 with the first paying customers getting on board already in 2012. However, until these days the production volume has not been enough to cover the sales, marketing, and production costs. Several R&D projects funded by the European Commission and Business Finland as well as external VCs have enabled product development. Now the companies order backlog is full until late 2020.
Before Ginolis, Fabritius already had a significant career in automation and mass production behind him, including working at Nokia and JOT Automation. Ginolis offered him a channel to apply his experience in a new industry domain. Back in 2010 for example, devices used for quick diagnoses were manufactured mainly manually. Ginolis has developed a way to produce such devices automatically, in a cost-effective manner but still enabling customization. In addition to diagnostic devices, Ginolis has another product segment: small size healthcare technology devices. More specifically, Ginolis creates devices to mass produce add-ons to such healthcare devices such as the containers for insulin pumps.
Going global
The headquarters and production of Ginolis are based in Oulu, Finland. The company has opened sales offices also in Sweden, Ireland, the USA, the UK, and China. At the moment 75% of their customers come from the USA, but Europe and Asia are also growing fast and customers can be divided roughly in two segments: billion dollar companies and startups. In the case of startups, Ginolis aims to start the co-operation as early as possible in order to make the production efficient from the get-go.
Ginolis has a significantly modular approach in its production. Varying customer needs can be satisfied with just small changes. This makes Ginolis different from traditional automation companies with rigid and heavy solutions.
Fabritius lists some cornerstones of success: “Do not copy others’ concepts but boldly try out your own thing. Believe in yourself hundred percent but tolerate also failures. Surround yourself with skilled and committed workforce. Finally: have courage to go global, to completely new markets. We have followed these guidelines and gotten Ginolis to a very nice growth track.”
This is a feature in our monthly ‘Portfolio insight’ blog series, where we showcase our portfolio companies and provide insights on their businesses. Ginolis is one of our Innovestor Growth Fund I portfolio companies.
Text: Santtu Toivonen