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Meet Andreia Trigo: Nurse & Entrepreneur

Meet Andreia Trigo. A nurse and an entrepreneur. Two words which don’t often appear together. In 2020, Andreia founded Enhanced Fertility. In 2022, she was awarded Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation Award in recognition of female leaders who are developing commercially successful solutions to social environmental and economic challenges.

Founding Enhanced Fertility

I was diagnosed with infertility at 17 years old, which was incredibly challenging. I questioned my womanhood, my role in society, family and relationships. I needed to give meaning to my own painful experience so I started looking at the experiences of others who were struggling with infertility and how I could help them.

Enhanced Fertility was born out of my conversations with patients and clinicians. Most people aren’t aware of their reproductive hormone levels even after trying to conceive for a long time. We provide at-home testing kits and a validated online assessment to speed-up diagnosis for men and women who have been trying to conceive for at least six months.

 

Nurse and Entrepreneur

We don’t immediately see nurses as entrepreneurs. But nurses are very well positioned to solve healthcare problems. We are close to patients; we listen to them and speak to them every day. We often liaise with other healthcare professionals, and we know how processes work within hospitals and clinics.

Entrepreneurship is all about understanding a problem that needs to be solved and coming up with innovative solutions to give value to others. As nurses we have so many qualities that match those of an entrepreneur. We are creative, resilient, and empathetic. We can easily identify areas that can be improved and find new ways of doing things, often in under-resourced environments. We have learnt to cope with challenging circumstances, adapt and grow, whilst understanding patients’ needs and feelings.

 

Breaking down barriers

The tech-space is still heavily male-dominated and so much needs to change. We need more female role-models, we need to see women in business to understand that we can do it too. We also need to have equal opportunities to access funding. There’s still a lot of gender and cultural biases; in 2021 all-women founding teams raised only 1.1% of capital.

Winning the Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation Award last year was important recognition. I often speak at schools about being a female CEO to encourage young girls into STEM and show them we can be business leaders too. Women need to be taken seriously and we need to be open about our entrepreneurial journeys. Enhanced Fertility is my way of challenging myself, to prove I am good enough and to re-write my story.

 

Andreia Trigo is a King’s alumna (MSc Advanced Practice: Leadership, Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care) and the award-winning founder of Enhanced Fertility. She is part of the King’s20 Accelerator (now King's Start-up Accelerator) and a member of the Women Entrepreneurs Network. This piece is part of a thought-provoking series, curated by the Entrepreneurship Institute, in celebration of International Women’s Day. The series, published throughout March, features inspiring female voices from our community who are trailblazing the way for other women to succeed.

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