By Ishpreet Khanuja
Every startup is an example of great passion and determination. Every successful startup adds resilience to that mix. In the latest Ask a Founder session hosted by Altitude Accelerator, we heard from Sharmila Sriram, founder of Spectrum Medical Diagnostics and Results+, who shared with us the value of building authentic connections, scaling smart, and what entrepreneurial resilience must look like when solving problems that matter. The conversation was full of valuable takeaways for founders navigating complex, fast-moving markets.
Sriram launched Spectrum Medical Diagnostics in 2008 with the mission to use technology to make patient care faster, more accessible and personalized. While her 30 years in the medical device industry equipped her with an in-depth knowledge of the challenges faced by healthcare, her passion for creating better solutions was fueled by her own experiences with health struggles. During the session, Sharmila spoke to us about how receiving a diagnosis for a rare autoimmune disease changed her life completely.
She shared, “I went from healthy to unhealthy overnight, not understanding what was happening with my health and what I needed to do. I wish the solutions we have today existed then because when you go from being perfectly fine to waking up with severe inflammatory attacks, it is debilitating.”
Identifying the unmet needs in the diagnostic space, she built her company aligned with emerging industry shifts—rapid testing, at-home diagnostics, and patient empowerment. Founded in 2008 with a mission to improve care quality for all while minimizing the administrative burden on healthcare services, Spectrum Medical Diagnostics offers POC (Point of Care) solutions designed to optimize patient screening in every setting. Some of their products include rapid HBA1c, Vitamin D, Strep, Influenza and Lyme disease tests.
Starting Lean: Building While Employed
Many founders tend to wait for the perfect time to take the leap, but Sriram was not one to hold off on her plans to save the world. She launched Spectrum while on maternity leave, maintaining her full-time job until the business could sustain itself. She credits her efforts to reconnect with former clients and leveraging existing relationships to secure initial contracts.
“I waited out my six-month non-compete clause and started reaching out to every contact I had from my time at Thermo Fisher,” she explains. Clients, she believes, don’t just work with companies—they work with people. Sharmila grew the business conservatively, never ordering inventory without concrete purchase orders. This helped her reduce risk in the early stages.
Scaling with Intention
Spectrum’s growth spells out like a lesson in strong execution. Sriram chose to scale the business conservatively by outsourcing warehousing, hiring carefully and keeping fixed costs low. She recounts, “I’ve made hiring mistakes. Hiring too fast or hiring the wrong people can hurt a business more than slow growth ever will.” Her current team is small and highly functional, with support from independent contractors. While she acknowledges how difficult it can be for a founder to surrender control, she advises, “You can’t do everything by yourself. It is key to recognize when you have to delegate.”
In addition to gaining traction in the North American market, the company has managed to secure Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) in Taiwan and Vietnam through Sriram’s work representing Canada at global trade missions. She was also recently awarded the BMO STEM Spotlight Award and named one of the Top 25 Women of Influence in Canada by Women of Influence+.
She shares, “I want to help inspire others. If this is possible for me, this is possible for anybody. Starting a company, in my mind, is such a huge accomplishment in itself—stepping outside of your comfort zone and putting yourself out there.”
Understanding Your Customers’ Pain Points
The best solutions have always come from understanding and empathizing with your customers’ experiences. As Spectrum grew, Sriram wondered how their clients were recording and using the information they were receiving. “They were handwriting the results on a piece of paper and photocopying!” exclaimed Sriram. “I thought to myself, ‘Oh my gosh, there must be a better way’.”
In 2024, Sriram launched Results+, a patient management platform that aims to revolutionize the way organizations approach rapid testing and data management. The feedback she received from her clients allowed her to spot a gap in patient empowerment and a potential source of ethically sourced data for research. Quoting the example of sample-collection problems that became prevalent during the pandemic, Sriram emphasized the importance of end-to-end technologically supported testing for faster, more accurate, and actionable diagnoses.
Honesty is the Best Retention Policy
“Partnerships are essential to scaling innovation for a lot of young startups,” claims Sriram. She shares how she uses Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems as a tool for remembering details about client interactions and fostering trust and connection. This people-first approach has allowed the company to grow its customer base organically in an industry like healthcare, where trust and responsiveness can be key differentiators.
She emphasizes, “It is okay not to know something. I’ll never tell a story or a lie by any means to win someone’s business. My clients know that we will tell them things as they are even if they don’t like the answer and we will always be transparent. That honesty is a key aspect of building loyalty.”
Accepting Help When It Presents Itself
While the world maps the journey of a startup out in wins and losses, good founders trace it from lesson to lesson. Speaking about the learnings gathered along the way, Sriram advises entrepreneurs to use all resources available. She recalls, “It is a very niche space and getting those competitor conversions was crucial initially. That is something I learnt the hard way that I probably didn’t have to. I made it harder for myself, so use the wonderful guiding resources that are available now like Altitude Accelerator.”
When asked about the right time to seek help from advisory services, she adds, “I wish I did it sooner. I didn’t realize how many valuable resources like Altitude there are. Working with Giselle Melo and Paul Barter (Altitude’s Entrepreneurs in Residence) helped me leverage strategic insights and refine my pitch. Altitude is a wonderful safe space—knowing that you can confidently speak with advisors and mentors without feeling judged is everything.”
What the Future Has in Store
Since the launch of Results+, the company has deepened its impact in clinics, pharmacies, and remote health environments by integrating AI into the platform, enabling predictive diagnostics and data-driven workflows that assist both patients and healthcare providers.
This move aligns with Spectrum’s mission to cater to underserved communities, where diagnostic delays often lead to worse health outcomes. This is mirrored in their expansion of offerings from more traditional forms of rapid testing, such as COVID or at-home pregnancy tests, to other health areas like substance abuse, infectious diseases, menopause and other forms of fertility screening.
But Sriram believes the way to a less burdened healthcare system is through collaboration. She says, “We work with various market segments: pharmacies, clinics, physicians, hospitals, prisons, private organizations, fertility clinics. If we can all work with each other and with technology cohesively, to promote proactivity with our health, that would trickle down into minimizing the burden of healthcare costs to our system and help mitigate so many of the risks that we are all facing.”
During the session, Sriram also dives deeper into the skills entrepreneurs must develop in order to lead purpose-driven startups with ambitious goals. Listen to the insightful conversation and the engaging Q&A that followed here.
Altitude Accelerator aims to provide founders and businesses with the support they need at every stage to prosper. From ideation to investor-ready, Altitude Accelerator’s advisory services and programs are free of charge. Learn more about our Investor Readiness and Market Readiness programs.
