Kristian Ranta

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Kristian Ranta
Background information
Also known as	Kride
Born	(1981-05-13) 13 May 1981 (age 43) Helsinki, Finland
Origin	Vihti, Finland
Genres	Melodic death metal
Instrument(s)	Guitar, vocals
Years active	2000–present
Labels	Century Media
Website	Norther's Website

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.

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]