Inside Sword’s Global Gathering: How connection makes our mission critical

Filipa Meirelles, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Sword, is just weeks into her role at Sword Health. In this time she has already managed multiple projects working with all different types of stakeholders across various departments. That’s The Sword Way to onboard.

But not all Sword new starters get the unique opportunity to travel from Lisbon to Cancun to meet the entire team in person. 

We asked Filipa to share what it felt like to join Sword, and then immediately cross an ocean for our Global Gathering in Mexico. 

What Filipa found wasn’t just a celebration of a mission-driven healthcare company and the inspiration of planning to tackle the next phase in our quest. Sword’s Global Gathering is not “company culture” in the abstract, but a real foundation that helps us to build AI Care at scale. This opportunity to meet, plan, and connect in person creates a mission that’s lived, a team that owns shared standards, and a chance to hear the kinds of members’ stories that inspire us to push the boundaries of what is possible. 

Here’s Filipa’s reflections on the experience of her first few weeks at Sword.

I landed in Mexico as a new hire with that remote-work cocktail of emotions: excitement, curiosity, and one persistent question - did I really just cross an ocean for a work event before meeting a single colleague in person? The onboarding checklist hadn't mentioned passport stamps, but here we were.

Prior to my transatlantic journey, the surface-level understanding of Sword came quickly enough: what we value, who to contact when, the importance of delivering on a critical mission for a healthcare company tasked with expanding access across the world… 

But there's a different kind of knowing that comes when you're physically standing next to the people you've only known through screens, watching how they move through the world when there's no agenda to follow, no mute button to reach for, and no carefully curated Zoom square between you. 

From where I stood, this year’s Global Gathering didn't feel like a break from work, though I won't pretend the piña coladas and warm sunshine weren't a nice touch. It felt like a different kind of work altogether: the intentional, compressed act of turning months of digital collaboration (or in my case, a grand total of four weeks) into actual human connection.

What surprised me most wasn’t a big speech or polished moment. It was how quickly ‘I work at Sword’ started to feel like ‘I’m part of Sword.’ That shift happened through a hundred small, almost mundane interactions: teammates recognizing my name even though I was brand new, someone pulling up a chair mid-conversation like it was the most natural thing in the world, laughing at inside jokes I didn’t fully understand yet (the universal sign of early belonging, and it happened more than once).

And then there was the moment that made the mission undeniable. Members stood on stage and shared their journeys in front of roughly 900 of us, speaking with the kind of vulnerability that turns abstract work into something real, that removes any distance between “what we build” and “who it’s for”. The room went quiet. In their faces and stories, you could see exactly what our work changes, and why it matters. In that moment, “members” stopped being a word in a deck and became the whole point.

Because here’s the truth, and I’ve seen it many times: it’s easy to lose that sense of mission in everyday life, somewhere between operational issues, dashboards that start failing us, no bandwidth, pressure when targets slip, and the million problems that can (and do) happen inside a company operating at this scale. That’s not a Sword problem, that’s a reality problem.

When you’re building the future of healthcare while still delivering the present, it’s always a thin balance, and sometimes it’s easy to lose track of what is meaningful. The testimonials of Sword members sharing how they had regained their lives cut through that noise in the most direct way possible: they reminded us that the work is not abstract, and the Sword mission is not decorative; it’s lived.

I came home convinced that gatherings like this aren't just nice-to-haves. They're the infrastructure for solid working relationships. When you've cheered for teammates you usually only see in Slack, when you’ve watched other teams do the same and felt that energy in the room, you stop working with avatars and start working with humans whose humor you’ve heard, whose context you’ve learned, and whose intent you don’t have to guess. 

I guess that’s the Sword magic: the mission doesn’t live in a deck, it lives in the way people show up, in every moment, with standards, seriousness, and heart. Mexico didn’t change what we’re building; it made it tangible for me, and as a new-joiner, and that’s the difference between doing a job and joining a mission with a team who is, every day, redefining healthcare. 

Highly recommend the 'fly internationally to meet coworkers' approach to onboarding. Zero regrets, moderate jet lag, infinite context. I also highly recommend you explore the open roles available at Sword and learn how you can be part of the mission we care so deeply about across our team."

Filipa’s story captures something that can be hard to explain from the outside. At Sword, culture is not a set of values written on a wall or a slide in an onboarding deck. It shows up in how people invest in one another, how seriously they take the mission, and how intentionally they build trust across teams, time zones, and disciplines.

That commitment to connection is not incidental to Sword’s work. It is part of how the company continues to scale AI Care with rigor, empathy, and accountability. When people understand the mission, feel ownership over shared standards, and see the real impact of their work, they build better systems together.

Sword is growing, and stories like Filipa’s are becoming part of how new team members experience their first chapters here. For those looking to do meaningful work alongside people who care deeply about what they build and who they build it with, there are many paths into the team.