GSEA 20th Anniversary Spotlight: Solve the Hard Problem, Not the Easy One

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA), marking two decades of mentorship and empowerment in motion, Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) is catching up with past competitors to learn how their GSEA experience shaped their trajectory and impacted their lives.

Early in the history of AIATELLA, a Finnish-UK medtech startup, Onni Eriksson and his co-founder, Jack Parker, pitched an investor who opened with a question the duo still jokes about four years later: "Is cardiovascular disease really a problem?"

Cardiovascular disease is the world's leading cause of death, killing more people than cancer. As Onni explains, the vast majority of those deaths are preventable. Sometimes all it takes is a simple lifestyle change or a preventive medication, such as a statin. Other times, safe, routine, preventive surgery can stave off a life-altering stroke or heart attack.

The hard part is identifying those at risk early enough to act. Doctors are overwhelmed, and the manual image analysis required to catch disease early is so slow and specialized that widespread screening has never been feasible. AIATELLA uses AI to automate that analysis, to detect warning signs before they cause harm.

It is exactly the kind of problem most people would consider too hard and too regulated for a first-time medtech founder in his early 20s. That is precisely why Onni chose it. Hard problems, he explains, scare off the crowd. Instead of competing with hundreds of companies chasing the latest hype, he built in a territory few others dare to enter.

And when the inevitable low points come, purpose is what keeps him working. “Chasing easy, fashionable ideas is not going to keep you going for the next five years when things go up and down, and it is not going to make you feel fulfilled,” he explains. “For us, if it had been something we were not so passionate about, we definitely would not be building this anymore.”

2025 GSEA Global Finalist Onni Eriksson

A Solution Looking for a Problem

Onni, 25, grew up in Helsinki, Finland, as the fifth of seven children. His father is a veterinarian, and many of his extended family members work in medicine. But Onni knew early on that he was headed toward entrepreneurship. “I have never been able to work under someone when my opinions were not being listened to,” he says. Still, his family’s medical background shaped his sense of purpose, instilling a deep interest in using his work to help people. That opportunity arose while he was at Aalto University, where he met Jack, a British biomedical scientist, at a hackathon. In 2022, the two co-founded AIATELLA.

AIATELLA started, Onni admits, the way many young startups do: with excitement about technology and no clear sense of who needed it. Jack had a background in cardiovascular research and wanted to work on the disease. Onni had a background in 3D printing. They first proposed printing models of patients’ vasculature so surgeons could plan implant procedures. Physicians' responses were lukewarm, with comments such as, “Okay, but I would not pay for this.”

“We had a solution that we wanted to find a problem for,” he admits. “Quite quickly, we noticed that this was not the right way to do it.”

The breakthrough came from listening to doctors. Their pain point was clear: medical images are hard to read, and finding what matters in them is even harder. Digging deeper, the founders identified a task nearly every doctor struggles with: measuring cardiovascular structures. Measuring the aorta in a CT or MRI study can take 20-40 minutes; results vary from reader to reader, and many radiologists lack the specialized training to do it accurately. AIATELLA’s first product was an AI that automates those measurements, and the platform has since expanded to ultrasound, carotid arteries, and other imaging modalities.

“There are people whose lives we have already changed by finding something that would have been missed otherwise,” he says. “It makes all the late nights worth it.”

Even after a product was set, the path was anything but smooth. About nine months in, the company’s first investors pulled out. For a young founder with rent to pay, the timing was brutal. For half a year, Onni studied in the evenings, built AIATELLA during the week, and worked weekends as a consultant for a drone company to make ends meet.

The episode taught him a rule he now passes on to other founders: “It does not really matter what people say unless the names are on the paper.” Looking back, he is philosophical about it: “The investors would not have been the right people in the long term,” he says.

Onni and his cofounder Jack Parker at a recent event. 

From Small Pond to Open Seas through GSEA

Finland has no EO chapter, and its entrepreneurial circles are small. So, in 2022, when Onni stumbled across EO’s Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA), his expectations were modest. “I thought that if nothing else, at least I could practice our pitch, learn, and meet people,” he says.

He ended up finding far more. At the Europe Regional Finals, judges, participants, and EO members kept telling him that what he was doing mattered. For a founder caught deep in the isolating early grind of a startup, that outside validation made a difference. “You get into a bubble,” he says. “Someone saying, ‘Hey, it is good that you are doing something to make the world a better place,’ is always nice to hear, and I remember hearing that many times.”

Accustomed to presenting clinical facts to doctors, Onni learned at GSEA to tell an emotional story that resonates with non-experts, a skill he says directly helped AIATELLA raise funds.

“That was honestly the most valuable thing for me; meeting those other people my age who are doing very cool stuff all around the world.”

- Onni Eriksson, 2025 GSEA Global Finalist

Two other surprises at GSEA also boosted his confidence. First, Onni had been warned that once he left his small pond in Finland, he would be swimming with the sharks. Instead, the accomplished founders and EO members he met defied the myth. Everyone was eager to help.

Second, he realized that he was among peers. “Sometimes people paint in their heads that successful entrepreneurs must be so much smarter than everyone else,” he says. “It is not true. They are normal people.” This reassured him that he had what it took to build his company.

When an email arrived in 2025 inviting him back to GSEA, he entered on a whim. This time, he made it to the Global Semifinals in South Africa and Global Finals and Japan, where he pitched at the World Expo in Osaka. Spending a week alongside competitors from around the world, he formed friendships he maintains to this day. “That was honestly the most valuable thing for me,” he says, "meeting those other people my age who are doing very cool stuff all around the world.”

Group chats with fellow competitors became a lasting sounding board for Onni and the young founders he met, who traded hard-won knowledge on everything from hiring to medical regulations. Onni now finds himself advising others. “It is a community that keeps giving back,” he says.

Onni and fellow 2025 GSEA Global Finalists

Medicine That Works for Everyone

Cardiovascular guidelines, Onni notes, are often based on decades-old data from narrow populations. For example, the threshold for repairing an abdominal aortic aneurysm is largely derived from trials run decades ago in predominantly older, white, male populations in the U.K. and U.S. Yet the same absolute diameter is applied to a small-framed woman in Japan, whose aorta may be dilating far more, proportionally, before she ever crosses the threshold. AIATELLA helps close that gap by creating a growing dataset based on specific populations, especially the populations most poorly served by today's thresholds.

Cost is another barrier to delivering equitable care. CT and MRI machines are expensive, so AIATELLA is bringing its AI to handheld ultrasound devices that cost as little as 1,000 euros and can noninvasively screen anyone in minutes. In India, where cardiovascular disease is among the most prevalent worldwide and specialists are scarce, the company is validating its technology through a research collaboration with Ramaiah Medical Institution.

Four years after its founding, AIATELLA has raised 3.6 million euros and is conducting clinical trials at sites in the U.K., the U.S., and Brazil as it works toward regulatory approval, expected by year’s end.

In 2026, Onni was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list for science and healthcare, recognition he keeps in perspective. Pursued for their own sake, awards are “an empty achievement," he says. "As recognition of the work, it feels really nice."

A good feeling to hold onto, as there is still plenty of hard work ahead.

Onni Eriksson is the co-founder of AIATELLA, a Finnish-U.K. medtech company using AI to automate cardiovascular image analysis. He competed in EO's Global Student Entrepreneur Awards in 2022 and 2025.