CTO interview: Catalina Turlea, the founder who raised €7.5m to bring mental health at work
Meet Catalina Turlea, the CTO who has co-founded a start-up that helps businesses empower their employees by providing mindfulness services. How do you help solve such sensitive issues as mental health with technology, and more importantly how do you combine the two? Read the latest interview in Tech Captains and find out what tech stack is used for such a business model which requires full privacy, the power of diversity, and how to address such important issues as mental health.
Can you please tell me about your career path leading you to co-found nilo.health? How did it prepare you to become a CTO?
I had a quite traditional path. I studied Computer Science in Romania for my bachelor’s degree with a bunch of different things, so there was no specialisation. I wanted to move to another country and see how things go there, so I have found a master’s degree in Mobile Computing in Austria. I studied there for 2 years and I was the only Romanian and only girl on the programme. It was a different experience from my bachelor’s degree where there were 300 students, down to 30 students in the class. It felt more personal.
That’s how I started with mobile computing, including working for a small start-up doing private business jet operations. I was looking for a job across Europe and got one in Munich as an iOS developer. I have joined a big company, but only a week later realised that’s not what was for me. So since then, I only worked for start-ups. It gave me visibility in the world of HealthTech. I met my co-founder through a recommendation from my then-CTO.
I was both hands-on and managerial as I’ve been leading teams for 7 years then. The largest team was made up of 12 people. I also had some experience in the Android developers team leading. When I joined to co-found nilo.health, I learnt DevOps, backend, and everything non-mobile that was needed. Thankfully, my basic knowledge of AWS and Python helped.
So why did you start nilo.health, and what is it?
My co-founders had the idea through personal experience and circle of friends about how difficult it is to get mental health support in Germany, and the big stigma surrounding it. People are ashamed to talk about it. They needed someone technical, so they reached out to me. It is a platform for mental health support for employees in companies. Therefore, it is a B2B business model
Nilo.health offers mental health support tools accessible both — via web and mobile with a pool of 100+ counsellors (psychologists and psychotherapists). We offer one-on-one sessions with the coaches but also offer to take part in organised group sessions. Besides, we have developed mental health surveys where users can track how their mental well-being is improving over time. Users can be anonymous if it makes them more comfortable.
Do you share data with companies that are paying for your services?
Our clients are small to medium-sized businesses. We share with them aggregated users’ data such as how many users are registered, how many sessions they used, and other aggregated data. However, we never share personal things and anything that users share during their sessions.
Isn’t there a lot of competition in this space? How are you different?
Yes, there is a lot of competition. We started the company before the pandemic. However, for obvious reasons, COVID-19 pandemics have accelerated the development of mental-health providers, as the need for mental health support increased. Today there is a lot of competition.
nilo.health differentiates itself by offering a holistic approach: we provide a wide range of tools. Some of the other companies offer more coaching, mindfulness, or digital therapy. We cover all of them at once. However, there are companies we compete with directly.
What is your tech stack? And why these choices?
We started with a web app: frontend in React and TypeScript. For the backend, we have a non-traditional setup, but I quite enjoy it. We have everything on serverless Lambdas on AWS and lots of managed services from AWS. Lambdas are in Python. We use DynamoDB as the database, Amazon Cognito for authentication, SES for emails and so on. We also have native mobile apps: our mobile lead is a very experienced developer, so we decided to try Kotlin on multi-platform to share the business logic between iOS and Android. The UI is in native Kotlin and SWIFT.
Kotlin enables you to write all the logic and it compiles in mobile code. So, we can easily share this code.
How come you are so dependent on AWS? Why did you make that choice?
When we started, the project needed to move fast so we re-used everything we could leverage from AWS. We only built what was relevant to us, especially as I was the only one working on everything. I had discussions with previous colleagues and CTOs and validated my architecture with them. It has evolved a lot since, but security is a very important aspect, as we deal with very sensitive data.
Do you have any advice for younger techies who join the industry?
It might seem a little bit discouraging when you see other people having successful careers or knowing a lot of stuff, so remember that everybody starts without knowing anything. They slowly made their way up. I do a lot of mentoring sessions with people starting their careers, and I know how difficult it is at the beginning to get your first job and overcome these insecurities. Another important thing is to be constantly learning in tech: things move forward so fast and there are always new and better ways to do things. It kind of keeps you young and fresh. I think it’s something that you must be aware of. It’s a fast-moving industry.
Any fun fact or horror story you’ve encountered during your tech career?
I would call it a funny story: in my master’s I was the only girl. We had one project where we were supposed to build a GPS interface. There were no directions, we had to use our imagination and just do stuff. In the end, when presenting our project, my UI and all I did was completely different from what other students did. They all had something quite similar but mine was different! At that moment I realised diversity in teams is important. Today I take that into consideration when building my team to have the best result.
If you want to connect with Catalina, click here.
To learn more about Nilo.health, visit their website: nilo.health
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
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