Malmö-based Joy is coming out of stealth with a different answer to a problem decades of healthcare software has failed to solve: build for the practitioner, not for the system.
Build by the experienced serial entrepreneur Charlotta Tönsgård and with traction in the UK, the startup is now scaling up.
“We have built software for healthcare for decades, and I have been part of it myself. But almost nothing has changed for the people who deliver care, because everything was built for the system. They have become its manual integration layer. Let’s be honest, practitioners often find themselves hating tech they have been forced to use; Joy addresses these frustrations,”
says Charlotta Tönsgård, CEO and co-founder of Joy.
Today, solo practitioners run the whole business themselves: the sessions, the bookings, the notes, the invoices, the marketing, spread across a dozen tools that were never designed to work together. Most lose two to three hours a day to work they never trained for, and admin load is a recognised driver of burnout in a profession that cannot afford to lose people.
Joy goes straight to decision makers who are practitioners themselves, and is not sold to regions or clinic managers.
“When the one who buys the software is not the one who uses it, the software ends up serving the buyer. That is how we got decades of systems built for the system. No one can serve two masters. We start where there is only one,”
says Charlotta.
The company starts with psychologists and therapists, followed by other professions with the same administrative load. In the UK, practitioners already use Joy every day, signing up on their own without a sales team. Joy scales like Shopify rather than like Salesforce.
From Min Doktor and Migränhjälpen to Joy
Charlotta has seen the pattern from many sides of healthcare. Most recently she was CEO of Migränhjälpen, where she saw the bottleneck up close.
“Migraine is just one of many examples. Europe is short of thousands of neurologists to treat everyone with migraine, and we will not train our way out of that. The ones we have must be able to do more, and that is true across all of healthcare,”
says Charlotta
She has since left Migränhjälpen to build Joy full time and remains on its board as deputy. Her experience spans three pieces of the puzzle: Min Doktor, Kind and Migränhjälpen.
“I bring three pieces of the puzzle. Min Doktor, which I helped scale, was my crash course in how healthcare is paid for, organised and delivered across Europe. At Kind, which I founded, we built for and sold to the same people Joy serves today, from independent practitioners to clinic chains and teams at large hospitals. There I saw what actually goes on in healthcare outside the healthtech bubble. At Migränhjälpen I was back close to care, and the bottleneck became clearer than ever: it’s the practitioner’s time that runs out. Joy is where all three pieces come together.”
says Charlotta
“AI will change healthcare and society in ways none of us can yet see. It is easy to paint a dystopian picture. But power in care has sat with whoever had the resources: the large clinics, the systems. AI can change that equation. For the first time, a single therapist can do what used to take a whole organisation,”
says Charlotta
The UK is Joy’s first test market and remains the focus for the next step, with a deliberate strategy of depth over breadth.
“The UK was a good fit for a big market to experiment in. But our focus right now is depth, not breadth. As Y Combinator puts it, it’s better to have 100 people who love you than a million who sort of like you. Next, we’ll test at least one more European market,”
she says.
