GOLD AT THE IF DESIGN AWARDS — AND WHAT IT REALLY MEANS FOR US
There's a particular feeling when your team walks across a stage in Berlin, dressed up, surrounded by the design teams behind some of the most recognisable products in the world — and someone hands you a Gold trophy for a piece of pharmaceutical packaging.
It feels, frankly, surreal. And it feels right.
Yesterday at the iF Design Award gala, our blister solution was awarded iF Design Award 2026 – Gold. We were on stage with names you'd recognise from your phone, your car, and probably your kitchen. Not bad for a pharma deeptech from Finland.
We've been quietly proud of this product for a long time. But what made yesterday land properly wasn't the trophy — it was what the jury said about it when we came on stage.
They didn't lead with how it looks. They led with what it does.
They talked about real-world impact on personalised medicine. About usability. About patient safety. They saw past the surface and into the problem we've been chasing since the day we started CurifyLabs.
That mattered to us more than any of us expected.
If you've never thought hard about a blister pack, you're in good company. Most people haven't. They're one of those objects that sits at the boundary between "obvious" and "invisible" — millions of them get torn open every day, and almost no one stops to consider whether they're well-designed for the person who's actually using them.
But here's the thing: medication packaging is one of the most important touchpoints in the entire healthcare system. It's the last thing between a clinical decision and a patient's mouth. When it goes wrong — wrong drug, wrong dose, wrong time — the consequences are real. And when medication is personalised, designed precisely for one patient with their particular combination of conditions and other treatments, the packaging has to keep up.
That's the problem we set out to solve. Not "make a prettier blister." Make a blister system that supports a fundamentally different way of preparing, packaging and delivering medicine — one that's tailored, traceable, and safer at every step.
From day one we've been chasing three things:
Safer. Fewer medication errors. Clearer information at the point of use. A packaging system that protects the person taking the medicine as much as it protects the medicine itself.
Smarter. Personalised at scale. The infrastructure to support a future where the right combination of treatments for a specific patient can be prepared and delivered without bespoke effort costing the system the earth.
Truly patient-centric. Designed for the human who has to open it, often older, often with multiple medications, often without a pharmacist standing next to them. Not designed for the manufacturing line and then handed over.
The iF Design Gold tells us we're on the right track on all three.
It would be easy to treat a design award as a marketing moment and move on. We're going to try not to.
What it changes for us is this: it's external validation, from people whose entire job is to assess whether design is doing what it claims to do, that the work we've been doing in our labs and with our pharmacy partners is genuinely meaningful. That matters when you're a team building something that requires patience — regulators don't move quickly, healthcare systems don't adopt overnight, and personalised medicine is still in the early innings.
So we'll take the validation, we'll put the trophy somewhere visible, and we'll get back to work.
This award belongs to every person at CurifyLabs and every partner who built this with us. The pharmacists who told us where the existing system breaks. The patients who told us what they actually need. The engineers who refused "good enough." The designers who pushed past elegance into clarity. The investors who believed in a Finnish pharma deeptech taking on a problem most people consider already solved.
You know who you are. This is yours.