Ecosystem at a GlanceNovember 2026Published by Openfor.co, from Tokyo

The people behind the work.

Investors, founders, mentors and members we work with every week. Each conversation becomes a feature you can read, with the video beside it.

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Hosted by Erdinc Ekinci and Yu Li Shein

Features

One conversation. One feature. Read it, then watch it.

Each guest sat down with Erdinc. We turned the recording into an editorial with the main ideas, the best lines and the video.

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Coming soonRecorded. The feature and the video are on the way.

In their words

Nine members. Press play and hear them.

We did not write these. Each member recorded what changed for them.

Members at work

Members who now teach, sell and speak inside the network.

Each of them has a page in the network. This is what they do with it today.

More members on the wallA few of the people building next to them.

Mentors and investors

The people who sit across the table every week.

250+ mentors in 30 countries. More than 80% of them are investors. These are some of the faces members met this year.

It works both ways. We feature our mentors and share their work, as our thanks.See everyone on the Atlas →

Organisations

The organisations around the table.

Partners we run things with, and the firms our mentors come from.

Partners

Organisations we work with on events, programmes and content.

Where our mentors work

Funds and firms behind the people in this issue.

Names identify where people work. They do not indicate a partnership with, or endorsement of, Openfor.co.

Open calls

What members are asking for right now.

A collab call says what someone needs and what they give back. Anyone can read them. Members reply.

From the Atlas

The reports behind the people.

The Atlas is our open database of who supports founders, country by country. These reports come out of it.

8,742 entries in 62 countries. Open, and corrected by anyone.Investors, mentors, programmes, media, corporates, venues and partner programmes.

Open the Atlas →

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Ecosystem at a Glance

Podcast · 59 min · Healthcare · Exits

Funding the future of healthcare

Fredrik Debong turned his own diabetes into mySugr, the first medical device app, and later into a second company and a specialist fund. His message for founders in regulated markets: the rules are your operating system.

Fredrik DebongCo-founder of mySugr and hi.health, healthcare investorProfile ↗

Erdinc EkinciHostProfile ↗

Watch the conversation

$100Mthe reported exit of mySugr to Roche

70countries mySugr launched in

26companies he has invested in

01A personal problem first

Fredrik Debong lives with type 1 diabetes. While studying medical computer science, game design and psychology, he started rewarding himself for testing his blood sugar. It worked. He wondered why so few people were working on the psychology of the disease, when so many patients burn out.

That became mySugr. It made daily therapy more enjoyable and the data useful. It was the first app approved as a medical device, launched in 70 countries, and was acquired by Roche. He then co-founded hi.health, a payment service linked to health insurers, after seeing that people skip medication when even a small payment stands in the way.

02Deep knowledge in one place

He believes the interesting things happen where deep expertise in several fields meets. For him it was psychology, computer science and game design, all pointed at one condition.

Today he invests almost only around diabetes and chronic conditions. If it is about diabetes, he can probably judge it and help. A narrow field can still be a large market. Checking that people in it can pay is, in his words, basic homework.

His path

Lives with the problem
Builds mySugr around it
Exit to Roche
Builds hi.health for payments
Invests in the same field

03Regulation as an operating system

Founders fear the rules in healthcare and finance. He has come to like them. They exist, he says, because these products can be dangerous, and builders are responsible for the safety of the people they serve.

The rules also describe how to work well: how to track quality, notice when something breaks, and change it through a set process. If you build the company that way from the start, you already have a system for growing from ten people to two hundred. He calls it a kind of hack.

New rules also open doors. When a law changes how an industry must work, a startup that solves the new requirement has an opening.

“Regulations are there for a reason. It's because we do dangerous things.”
Fredrik DebongHear it at 0:12

04What makes an exit

His view of acquisitions is practical. A large company buys you when you remove one of its big problems. In his case the buyer's margins were shrinking, and the service changed how it could sell. Know the market well enough to see what hurts the big players.

He also warns that the hard part of scaling is the organisation itself: two people, then ten, thirty, a hundred, two hundred. Prepare for that before it arrives.

“When you scale up the organization, two people to 10 to 30 to 50 to 100 to 200. That is the challenge.”
Fredrik DebongHear it at 0:00

05From founder to investor

After an exit, helping other founders felt natural. He has been on both sides of the table and can help a company move faster. He is clear about the job, though. Running a fund is mostly fundraising, with investing as the smaller part.

His closing advice is about home. Before you start a company, make sure your family is with you. You will be busy for years, and you will need them.

What to take with you

Start from a problem you know from the inside.
A narrow field can be a big market. Check who pays.
Treat regulation as a way of working, not a wall.
You get acquired by solving a large company's real problem.
Get your family's support before you begin.

This feature is an editorial summary of a public conversation hosted by Erdinc Ekinci. Quotes come from the recording and are lightly trimmed. Figures are the speaker's own. Nothing here is investment advice.