The useful founders are often professional eavesdroppers. They hear the sentence everyone else has learned to ignore. For Suzie Welsh Devine, it arrived at work, over and over, in different voices: people faced a confusing shelf of products and fragmented information, and they wanted someone credible to help them make sense of it. She was a nurse in Philadelphia. Answering questions was part of the job. Noticing the pattern became another job entirely.
That pattern became BINTO, the consumer company Devine launched full-time in 2016. Today she is its CEO and co-founder, working with fellow clinician Andi Lucas Schmerin. The company sells personalized supplement routines and provides access to virtual consultations with licensed practitioners. Its language is direct, its design is consumer-friendly, and its original advantage came from an unglamorous place: Devine had already spent years close to the people she hoped to serve.
Her story is sometimes presented as a clean professional conversion, nurse to entrepreneur, as though one title were exchanged for another at a counter. The more interesting version is full of overlaps. Nursing taught her to educate. Graduate school gave her a room in which to test an idea. A pitch supplied confidence. Operating the company taught her which confidence to distrust.
“I think nurses make great innovators, because you have to innovate on the floor every day.”Suzie Devine, UVA School of Nursing
The field notes came first
Devine grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and went to the University of Virginia, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 2011. Her path toward nursing had started earlier. At 16, she traveled to Malawi with the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance. She later described that experience as changing the course of her life. It gave the abstract phrase “access to care” faces, streets, and consequences. Her LinkedIn profile lists volunteer work with the organization beginning in 2005.
Back in Philadelphia after college, she worked at the bedside in neonatal and postpartum settings at Hahnemann University Hospital. She then moved into fertility care at Penn while studying for a master’s degree in nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. By 2015, she had earned both a nurse educator graduate certificate from Penn and a fertility nurse credential from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
The credentials matter, but the repetition mattered more. Devine kept fielding questions from people who felt they were assembling important decisions from loose pieces. The consumer marketplace contained plenty of products and plenty of claims. What she saw missing was a trustworthy guide able to translate professional knowledge into a simple routine.
The Devine product loop
This is the first useful idea to steal from her career. A complaint becomes commercially interesting when it repeats across people who do not know one another. Most startup advice begins with ideas. Devine’s began with observation. The distinction is worth money.
The leap had a runway
Devine did not quit the afternoon the idea appeared. She has said she sat with it for roughly a year, saving money and building confidence. During the final stretch of her Penn master’s program, she entered a Wharton healthcare innovation course. Its culminating pitch day gave BINTO a business plan, an audience, and an early angel investor. Within about two weeks, she finished her degree and left her job.
The original launch was focused and local. BINTO went live in September 2016 with a launch party in Wayne, Pennsylvania. The name was a compact joke: “bun in the oven,” with a faint echo of a bento box. Early coverage described a subscription service, customized products, and access to professional guidance. Devine had moved from answering the question herself to designing a system that could answer it repeatedly.
She later told an interviewer that she had not known business, Excel, or financial models when she began. Her response was characteristically brisk: “You either sink or swim and I like to swim!” The line is funny because it compresses months of unphotogenic work. Domain expertise got her to the edge. Operating skill had to be learned in the water.
The company’s early financing reflected that pragmatism. Devine reported putting in $20,000 of her savings, followed by a $100,000 early round from friends, family, and angel investors. Ben Franklin Technology Partners became an institutional investor. By 2019, UVA’s nursing school reported 20 percent month-over-month compound growth during 2018 and into the following year, along with retail partnerships that included Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters.
Nine years, not ten
A long founder story eventually acquires its own folklore. Devine punctured hers in 2025. In a LinkedIn anniversary post, she declared BINTO ten years old, then added a correction: apparently it was only nine. “Founder brain!” she wrote, cheerfully giving herself another year before the official milestone.
The joke made the rest of the post more credible. She wrote about scaling too fast and nearly breaking the company, accepting advice that sounded smarter than her instincts, and learning the difference between growth and sustainable growth. She had come to value profitability over vanity metrics and calm over panic. These are familiar founder lessons. What made them useful was the lack of varnish.
“The best decisions come after you take the breath, not during the panic.”Suzie Devine, reflecting on nine years of BINTO
Durability soon appeared in the operating details. In March 2025, Devine announced that BINTO would outsource fulfillment and operations for the first time. The move promised more reliable shipping and stronger quality control while returning the small team’s attention to product work and customer experience. It also brought price changes. A founder can describe delegation as freedom; an operator must explain the shipping fee.
This is the second idea worth stealing. Growth is easy to recognize when it comes with applause. Sustainable growth often arrives as a process change, a narrower focus, or an invoice someone finally understands. The former makes a fine screenshot. The latter may keep the company alive long enough to earn another anniversary correction.
Celebrate the sample. Fix the process. Distrust any metric that cannot explain what happens next.
A founder who keeps teaching
Devine never wandered far from the educator role. She has appeared on Philadelphia television, podcasts, panels, and interviews to explain the company and the market around it. In 2020 she started an Instagram series called “Inside the Vitamin Aisle,” walking viewers through labels and common purchasing questions. The format returned her to the original posture of the company: stand beside the confusing thing and translate.
Her public voice became a project of its own in 2025, when she launched a Substack newsletter called Suzie’s Corner. The name belonged first to her grandmother’s antique business. Devine reused it for a mix of founder notes, professional observations, and family stories. It is a charming bit of brand inheritance. A corner suggests a modest place, but also a claimed one.
Her professional orbit is widening in another direction. In 2026, Devine announced that she had been elected to the Bryn Mawr Hospital Foundation Board. She described the appointment as a return to a traditional hospital setting nearly a decade after leaving one. The circle is tidy without being closed: the bedside informed the business, and the business now sends an operator back toward a civic healthcare institution.
The company inside the sentence
Devine’s best founder advice may be “Learn how to filter the white noise.” It describes the distance between listening and obeying. She built BINTO because she listened carefully to customers. She later had to learn that advisers, fashionable metrics, and the startup support machinery also make noise. Discernment is knowing which repeated signal deserves a company and which confident instruction deserves a polite nod.
Her biography now spans clinician, educator, founder, operator, writer, and board member. The connecting tissue is translation. She translates a professional environment for consumers, customer behavior for a product team, founder mistakes for other entrepreneurs, and institutional priorities for a community she has known most of her life.
There is no tidy finish to a profile of an active company builder. BINTO is still shipping, changing, and entering its next decade. Devine is still writing and appearing in public conversations. Her corrected anniversary may be the right emblem after all: ambitious enough to look ahead, amused enough to check the calendar, and practical enough to keep going when the cake has the wrong number of candles.
“People connect with authenticity, not perfection.”Suzie Devine