May is Women Leaders Month at Startup Grind and we are thrilled to be hosting Denise Sandquist, Co-Founder & CEO of Fika - one of Vietnam's fastest growing startups - for a virtual fireside chat! Come hear her truly inspiring story and journey to launching one of the most talked about tech startups in Southeast Asia.

If you're not familiar with the company, Fika is a female-focused AI social & lifestyle app with the vision to become the world's go-to app to help people create and maintain meaningful connections. Fika's mission is to help people understand who they are, what they want, and who they are looking for, connecting & maintaining their relationships through AI.

The company is growing and scaling quickly: they had over 1.5M downloads in just their first year after soft launching in November 2020. In October 2021, Fika announced their US$1.6M seed round of funding and are now raising their Series A round to fuel further growth and product development.

But beyond the early success of the company, Denise's entrepreneurial journey and personal story is closely tied to the origins of Fika. Denise was born in 1991 in Hanoi, Vietnam, and adopted as a baby to Stockholm, Sweden. In 2016, she found her biological mother in Vietnam after 18 days of searching after her post on Facebook went viral, which inspired her to create Fika to help others create meaningful connections.