When the Vision Is Clear, You Learn to Code

Marina Vieva didn’t leave corporate life with a startup idea.

She left with a question: why is it still so hard for women to manage their own health?

After 25 years in risk management, legal, finance, and operations at Fortune 100 companies—many of them in the U.S. and Europe—Marina had built a successful career. But it didn’t feel like hers.

“No matter how externally successful things looked, I was not happy,” she says. “I was climbing the wrong ladder. And the higher I climbed, the harder it was to switch.”

She’d spent years feeling out of place in large corporate structures. The projects she loved most—building new departments, solving messy problems, starting from zero—were all startup environments inside of larger companies.

That clarity didn’t come overnight. It built over time.

“Eventually I realized—I only thrive in environments where I’m thrown into the ocean and told to build,” Marina says. “That’s when I had to ask: why am I still doing anything else?”

So she walked away.

And for the first time, let herself go all-in on the problem that had been quietly pulling at her for years: women’s metabolic and preventative health.

The result is Femispace, a digital platform Marina is building to help women access personalized health insights, navigate chronic conditions, and make proactive decisions before they ever get sick.

It’s not a marketplace. It’s not a telehealth clone. It’s a full-stack data platform—pulling from family history, labs, and biometrics to generate tailored risk profiles, early-warning indicators, and evidence-based care guidance.

And she’s building it herself. Literally.

After two years of trying to manage offshore tech teams, Marina hit a breaking point. Projects would stall. Code would break. Features would get delayed for months. She was still pre-funded—no investors, no engineers—and the delays were killing momentum.

“Eventually I just said, I’m done,” she says. “I started teaching myself to code. I used AI tools. I built the website in a few days. I had a front end working in two weeks.”

This wasn’t her plan.

“I didn’t want to become technical again,” she says. “I had already done SAP implementations and finance systems earlier in my career. But I didn’t want to trust that I could only build this if someone else said yes.”

She became the developer by necessity.

“If it takes me nights and weekends to do it myself, that’s still faster than chasing people who don’t deliver,” Marina says. “Now I build everything—from the site to the AI models—on my own timeline.”

But Femispace didn’t start with code. It started with years of research.

Marina has spent nearly a decade studying women’s health, longevity, and metabolic regulation. She’s lived in Ukraine, Greece, Cyprus, France, and now the U.S.—watching how different healthcare systems work, and more often, how they fail.

Her insight: there’s no single place where a woman can see her full health picture—not just what’s happening today, but what’s likely to happen next, and what she can do to get ahead of it.

“I want to create a management tool for health,” she says. “One that integrates your full history, your family risk factors, your labs, your wearable data—and gives you a clear, personalized plan.”

The inspiration came from her corporate past.

“At Johnson & Johnson and Nike, I was building complex financial risk systems. Tracking every variable. Forecasting everything. Why can’t we do the same thing for health?”

So that’s what she’s building: a platform that doesn’t just react to symptoms, but anticipates them. A system that serves patients first, with clear data and actionable insights. A tool that helps physicians shift from reactive to proactive care—with built-in predictive analytics, education, and clinical decision support.

Femispace will launch its first direct-to-consumer product in summer 2025, starting with an Indiegogo campaign in the coming weeks.

Marina is also finalizing pilot programs with hospitals and clinics, aiming to go live with institutional partners in early 2026.

“I want the patient experience to change now,” she says. “The medical system will take longer. But if I can help women take control of their health today, that’s the fastest path to impact.”

This isn’t a pivot from her career in systems and strategy. It’s the evolution of it.

“All of it makes sense now,” Marina says. “Even though it felt disconnected for years—building models, managing risk, optimizing operations—it all led to this. Because this platform needs both: the science and the infrastructure.”

And the grit.

Marina didn’t raise money. She didn’t build a massive team. She didn’t have early traction or a startup pedigree.

She just had conviction. And when the path forward hit a wall, she built a new one.

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