Built with care for the people who carry so much.

Co-Founder & President

Kirstin Thomas

Kirstin Thomas is the Co-Founder and President of KindredMind. She built it from lived experience: her mother lives with frontotemporal and vascular dementia in a memory care facility in Ontario, Canada, and would call again and again, reaching for the comfort and reassurance of a familiar voice Kirstin couldn’t always answer. Unable to find a tool that met that need, she built one, a voice companion that answers a loved one’s calls in the family caregiver’s own voice, grounded in simulated presence therapy and dementia-friendly communication guidelines.

Kirstin is an experienced executive and operator. She co-founded Snaile Inc., Canada’s leading smart parcel locker company, and as its COO and later President scaled it into a national leader serving major developers, REITs, and residential and hospitality properties, growing to more than 800 customer sites before its acquisition in 2024, including leading a rapid pivot to onshore manufacturing during the pandemic and winning national contracts against much larger U.S. rivals. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Sociology from the University of Toronto and studied design at OCAD University.

At KindredMind, she leads company strategy, operations, and the brand’s voice, building it as a growing suite of tools supporting people from mild cognitive impairment through the stages of dementia, alongside the families who care for them. Whether answering repetitive calls, offering companionship and conversation to combat loneliness, or carrying reminders through the day, the aim remains the one that started it all: making sure the person living with dementia feels heard and reassured, so caregivers can keep showing up for the people they love, without carrying the weight of every missed call.

Co-Founder & CEO

Patrick Armstrong

Patrick Armstrong is the Co-Founder and CEO of KindredMind, where he leads company strategy, growth, go-to-market, and partnerships. A serial entrepreneur with more than twenty years building and commercializing technology companies, he has a track record of turning early products into category leaders by aligning incentives across fragmented markets and building durable competitive moats.

Before KindredMind, Patrick co-founded and led Snaile as CEO, growing it into Canada's largest smart parcel locker network. He built its defensibility deliberately: by aligning the interests of competing carriers, Snaile became the only locker network approved by every major carrier in the country, a structural moat rivals could not replicate, and the first Canadian smart-locker company to achieve both ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliance. Under his leadership the company delivered triple-digit year-over-year growth, scaled across more than 55 cities, and was acquired in an eight-figure transaction in 2024.

Patrick's focus has always been the same: find the structural inefficiency in a fragmented market, align the incentives no single player can solve alone, and convert that into rapid adoption and durable revenue. At KindredMind he brings that discipline to a new category, driving growth, go-to-market, and partnerships across the dementia-care and aging ecosystem, and building a defensible position around a genuinely differentiated, both-sides product. He completed an executive education program in artificial intelligence at MIT Sloan and holds a business degree from Bishop's University.

KindredMind is also personal. Patrick watched the toll of repetitive dementia calls up close as his wife and co-founder, Kirstin, cared for her mother, and it convinced him that the opportunity and the responsibility are the same: meet the person reaching out and relieve the caregiver carrying the weight, at scale, for families across Canada and the United States.

Clinical Advisor, KindredMind

Shadee Giurgius, M.D.

"Seeing AI bring tangible relief to dementia patients through KindredMind's innovative voice companionship model surpasses most treatments we have at the present time. This trajectory should make us all optimistic in our quest to employ non-pharmaceutical treatments in the battle against dementia."

- Shadee Giurgius, M.D. Clinical Advisor, KindredMind

Shadee Giurgius, M.D. is an adult and geriatric psychiatrist in Los Angeles, California, and Medical Director of the Healthy Brain Center, which he co-founded with his father, also a geriatric psychiatrist. There, they've coined their approach "Longevity Psychiatry" — care aimed not just at preserving our years, but enhancing them. He sees patients in person and via telemedicine, conducting psychiatric medication management and comprehensive dementia evaluations.

He completed his geriatric psychiatry fellowship at UCSF and his residency at the UCLA-Kern Department of Psychiatry, and has spent over 20 years in the dementia field across advocacy, research at the UCLA Longevity Center, and clinical practice. He co-founded the Youth Movement Against Alzheimer's (now part of Hilarity for Charity), has been involved with OPICA, Los Angeles' center for memory impairment, for more than twenty years — receiving its Founders Award in 2020 — and lends his expertise to Leeza's Care Connection in support of family caregivers. In 2023, he was named an Honors Scholar in Geriatric Psychiatry by the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry (AAGP).

As Clinical Advisor to KindredMind, Dr. Giurgius keeps the voice companion grounded in sound clinical practice — how it answers a loved one's calls in the family caregiver's own voice, how it draws on validation and simulated presence, and how it serves as a companion in efforts to stave off accelerated dementia trajectories. It also acts as a reminder tool that supports older adults in aging in place longer, easing the strain on caregivers whose wellbeing is inseparable from the person they love. Across clinical care, research, teaching, and advocacy, his focus has stayed constant: the dignity of the person living with dementia and the wellbeing of the family caring for them.

CAREER

• Geriatric Psychiatry Fellowship: UCSF Department of Psychiatry
• Psychiatry Residency: UCLA-Kern Department of Psychiatry, Academic Chief Resident
• Medical School: University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine
• Undergraduate: UCLA, Psychobiology & Gerontology
• Diplomat, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology

PUBLICATIONS

• Advanced McDonnell, M., Dill, L., Panos, S., Amano, S., Brown, W., Giurgius, S., Small, G., Miller, K. (2020). Verbal Fluency as a Screening Tool for Mild Cognitive Impairment. International Psychogeriatrics 32, 1055-1062.
• Shweta Balakrishnan, Shadee Giurgius (2012). The Youth Movement: The Future of Aging and Alzheimer's Research. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, 10:2, 173-178.
• "UCLA Students Rally Against Alzheimer's." Shweta Balakrishnan, Shadee Giurgius. Aging Today Article, American Society on Aging Magazine Volume XXXII Number 4, July-August 2011.

LECTURES

• "Psychiatry for Psychologists" Psychological Care Institute (PCI), 2026
• "The Standard of Care in Adult & Geriatric Psychiatry" Grand Rounds, UCLA - Kern, 2025
• "Psychotropics in Older Adults" - UCLA - Kern, 2023
• "Advanced Psychopharmacology Neurocognitive Disorders" - UCLA - Kern, 2022
• "Can a PET scan help Veterans w/CTE better plan their future? - EBM Series" - UCLA - Resnick, 2021
• " Are Psychiatrists and Conservators/the Legal Sytsem speaking the same language" - M&M - UCLA, 2020
• "Music Theraphy and Dementia" Outpatient Family Medicine Didactics, University of Iowa, 2015

AWARDS

• 2024 Professional Integrity Award - UCLA - Kern Department of Psychiatry
• 2024 Academic Leadership Excellence Award - UCLA - Kern Department of Psychiatry
• 2024 Outstanding Academic Presentation Award - UCLA - Kern Department of Psychiatry
• 2024 Exceptional Mentor to Medical Students Award - UCLA - Kern Department of Psychiatry
• 2023 AAGP Honors Scholar in Geriatric Psychiatry
• 2020 Founders Award - Older Persons In Caring Atmospheres (OPICA)
• 2017 Heroic Act Award - Los Angeles Fire Department - EMT Unit
• 2013 Betty Ford Center - Summer Institute for Medical Students (SIMS) Addiction Scholarship
• 2013 Minority Medical Student Summer Mentoring Program Fellowship Awrad - APA