Kristian_Ranta
Kristian Ranta
Finnish musician
Kristian Ranta, also known as Kride, was the guitarist of the Finnish melodic death metal band Norther,[1] until their break up in 2012.[2] Kristian has composed most of Norther's best known songs including Frozen Angel, and is also credited for renaming the band (originally called Requiem).[3] Ranta has played the guitar on all the band's full-length albums, the most recent being Circle Regenerated (2011) and N (2008), and contributed clean vocals to the Solution 7 EP, Till Death Unites Us, the No Way Back EP and N. He has formed an experimental side project named Gashouse Garden with Children of Bodom drummer Jaska Raatikainen.
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Kristian has also acted, along with his band mates, in a Finnish film called Vares 2. Norther and Kristian also composed a title track for this film called Frozen Angel, for which a music video, featuring images of the movie, was made. He was also interviewed in a TV documentary about Finnish heavy metal bands - Promised Land of Heavy Metal - (2009).[4]
Kristian was a co-founder and CEO of a Finnish diabetes technology company called Mendor[5] until he left the company in November 2015.[citation needed]
Later in 2015 Kristian co-founded a company called Blooming to work on stress reduction at workplaces. Blooming was featured in TechCrunch in March 2016.[6] Kristian was also featured in the biggest newspaper in Finland called Helsingin Sanomat in the summer of 2016 (text in Finnish).[7]
With the lead of Kristian as its CEO, Blooming changed its name in 2016 to Meru Health and focused on building a digital treatment solution for depression and anxiety. In 2018 Meru Health got accepted to a famous startup accelerator in Silicon Valley called Y Combinator[8] and has appeared on number of mainstream media publications such as TechCrunch,[9] INC [10] and MobiHealthNews.[11]
In 2018 Kristian started his own featured blog on Forbes magazine.[12]