ISSUE NO. 25 | JUNE 2022
IEE WiE Interviews - Joana Pinto Joana Pinto is the co-founder and CEO of Clynx, a company that focuses on developing digital health solutions to track progress and improve motivation in physiotherapy. Clynx began in 2018 after Pinto earned her master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering, and has since received much acclaim due to their approach of digitization and gamification in the realm of physiotherapy. In the meantime, she also conducts research regarding the topics of biosignal processing and emotion recognition at the Instituto de Telecomunicações. 1. Would you tell us about the “birth” of Clynx? How did it all begin? Our founding team met at Junitec, the Junior Enterprise of Instituto Superior Técnico (2017-2018). Being managed by students only, Junitec gathers members from all academic fields, and the main reason for which we became a team was the fact that we shared the mission of innovating and the ambition of bringing valuable digital solutions for real-world problems. Our backgrounds in biomedical, electrical and computer engineering made us relentlessly enthusiastic about solving real problems, especially in Healthcare, through our technological and entrepreneurial skills, and that is how we committed to Clynx’s mission: making Physiotherapy treatments a more enjoyable, digital and motivating experience. 2. When you first began University, was entrepreneurship something that interested you right away? When I entered University, I already understood I was passionate about identifying problems, designing solutions, building strategies - but not in a structured way. I did not know that those concepts were so closely connected with being an entrepreneur. So it was not longer after I got into the University that I was much more exposed to the startups ecosystem and realised that Entrepreneurship, Business strategy and Innovation were all concepts that described what I wanted to pursue.
3. Being responsible for a start-up is a very daunting task; how did you keep motivated? In hindsight, is there anything you would do differently? Throughout this journey me and my cofounder, Gonçalo Chambel, have learned and grown so much. If I was to co-launch Clynx again I would take in the lessons learned so far and do it slightly differently, not in the sense of doing different things but in the sense of doing them in a better, optimized way. Most importantly, even though it might sometimes be a daunting task, I am pushed by my own passion and personal mission, which is the best source of drive.
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