femtech
Auto Added by WPeMatico
LastPad is a reusable menstrual pad that does away with disposable towels
Direct to consumer online sales have helped a number of female-focused startups get products to market in recent years — often pitching better designed and generally more thoughtful feminine hygiene products than mainstream staples.
The lack of innovation in the mainstream market for feminine hygiene has certainly created a gap for startups to address. Examples in recent years include companies like Thinx (absorbent panties for menstruation) and Flex (a disc-shaped tampon alternative for wearing during sex). Or Daye — which makes CBD tampons for simultaneously treating period cramps.
Even so, there still hasn’t been a critical mass of product innovation in the category — to the point where alternatives can trickle down (no pun intended) and influence the trajectory of the mainstream market. The core products on shelves are, all too often, depressingly familiar — disposable pads and tampons — even if they may (sometimes) now be made of organic cotton or have some other mild design tweaks.
The most notable change to the available product mix is probably period pants — which have recently started to appear on mainstream shop shelves and seem to be selling well in markets like the U.K., as The Guardian reported recently.
In the average drug store, the other non-disposable alternative you’ll most likely see is the menstrual cup. Which is not at all new — but has finally got traction beyond its original (very) niche community of users, which is another signal that consumers are more open to trying different solutions to deal with their monthly bleeding versus the same old throwaway wadding.
While free bleeding — an old movement which has also seen a bit of wider pickup in recent years — can also be seen, at least in part, as a protest against the poor quality of mainstream products for periods.
All of which makes this forthcoming product launch rather interesting: Meet LastPad, a reusable (rather than disposable) sanitary towel.
Image Credits: LastPad
The first thing you’ll likely notice is that the pad is black in color — which certainly rings the changes versus the usual white stick-on fodder. The company behind LastPad says it worked with an unnamed “luxury lingerie manufacture” on look and feel — and, well, judging by the product shots alone it shows.
The bigger behind-the-scenes change is that it’s been designed for sustained, repeat usage. So each LastPad comes with its own fabric pouch (in a range of colors) for folding up and storing after use (and until you get a chance to pop it in the wash). The pad can also stay in its pouch for washing so there’s no need for additional handling until you’re getting it out of the washing machine to dry.
LastPad is the brainchild of Danish designer and entrepreneur Isabel Aagaard, whose company LastObject has — for the past three years — been taking aim at the wastefulness of single-use hygiene and beauty products, designing reusable alternatives for what are unlovely but practical items — like Q-Tips and tissues*.
In total, LastObject has sold around 1.5 million products so far — across its existing range of beauty, hygiene and travel-focused items. But LastPad marks its first push into a really female-focused product category.
A reusable (washable) sanitary pad is clearly a big step up on the design challenge front versus making reusable (silicone) Q-Tips or (cotton) tissues or makeup rounds — because of the complexity involved with designing a wearable, intimate hygiene product that can handle the variable and often messy nature of periods, and keep doing so, use after use.
It needs to be both comfortable and reliable — as so many disposable pads actually aren’t.
So it’s not too surprising that, per Aagaard, the company has been working on designing and prototyping LastPad for two years. Now they’re finally ready to bring it to market — launching the LastPad on Kickstarter today — with a goal of shipping to early backers next February.
“We’re seeing amazing conversions [for the LastPad pre-campaign],” she says, discussing how much demand they’re expecting. “This is our sixth [crowdfunder] campaign — and it’s looking really good. So I think the demand is bigger than I actually imagined. Because this is also the first product that is only for women. And we were very much in doubt that we should put it on Kickstarter because it’s a very male-dominated platform but it’s looking really positive.”
“We already started working on this two years ago so it’s really been a process. And also because we wanted it to be really innovative. Because right now you can see on the market there’ll be pads that are more like home sewn or do it yourself — and we wanted to really make an exclusive, very, very innovative version of that — that has a lot of the benefits that the single-use version has.”
Image Credits: LastPad
Each LastPad is made up of three layers: A woven top to help keep the pad feeling dry against the skin by quickly funnelling menstrual fluids down into — layer two — a central absorbent section (made of bamboo) — which sits above a TPU base to ensure no risk of leaks.
“The first layer is a woven material that is really, really fine — it has a little bit of silver in it so that the odours will disappear. It’s also woven with small funnels so that the blood disappears very quickly into the middle layer — because it’s so important that you’re not like wet. Because that’s awful. So it dries quite quickly when you’re wearing it,” explains Aagaard. “And then the middle layer is 100% bamboo — it’s absorbent like crazy; 40% more absorbent than, for example, cotton. And it also has anti-bacterial properties. And then the bottom layer is a TPU [Thermoplastic Polyurethane] — which is just a leakproof cover; it’s comfortable, it’s not like a plastic bag but it does make sure that you cannot bleed through it.”
While disposable sanitary towels rely on an adhesive layer to enable the consumer fix the pad to their panties, LastPad has to do that a bit differently too given it’ll be going through the wash. So the pads have wings — which wrap around the gusset of the panties and fix together underneath with a (soft) Velcro fastening.
That’s not all: There’s a (sticky) silicone strip running around the back side of the pad which helps prevent it from moving around — and, per Aagaard, will happily survive repeat washing (in fact if it’s not used for a time, she says dust may temporarily reduce the stickiness — but says that immediately resolves just by wetting it again).
“Where I felt that we really made a huge difference is that on the back side of the pad — it has wings [with] a Velcro [fastener] that’s completely soft and you don’t feel it; even if you’re biking — that was like the big test — and then it has a silicone strip in the back and at the bottom, like a sticky silicone… so it doesn’t move around in your pants.”
Practically speaking, it won’t be possible for a LastPad user to use just one LastPad to see them through their period — given the need to wash and dry them between uses. So a pack of several reusable pads will be necessary to entirely replace disposable pads and ensure there’s always a clean towel available to swap out the used pad.
But LastObject’s idea is, much like you own several pairs of socks and briefs, you’ll have a set of LastPads to see you through until after laundry day.
The product comes in three different sizes and thicknesses to cater to different flow levels, too. So the consumer may end up owning a range of reusable LastPads — from a panty liner option to a day flow and heavier-duty night pads.
Image Credits: LastPad
“It wasn’t as simple as I thought it was going to be — but that’s also because you have to understand the viscoses of blood, for example, compared to water,” Aagaard tells TechCrunch. “And also a flow — it’s not just blood. There’s a lot of other stuff that come out. So it’s taking all of these things into consideration.”
“We’ve been testing it for so long,” she goes on. “That was our main thing with this product. A lot of the other [LastObject products] were very much about printing it, looking at it. Using it of course — but it took us long before we had it in actually a silicone form. Because that is also expensive. Whereas [LastPad] we could sew quite quickly just here at the office and [test it]… So we’ve just been testing it constantly — how’s the feeling? Getting it out to a lot of different women that wear different panties that have different cycles. So it’s really been about testing.”
Pricing for LastPad will be around $60 for three pads — so around $20 per pad. Which is obviously a lot more expensive than the per unit cost of disposable towels. But LastObject says it will offer packs so if a consumer buys more pads it should shrink the per pad cost a little.
Aagaard says the product has been tested to withstand at least 240 washes — which she suggests will mean it’s able to last at least a couple of years, saving likely hundreds of disposable pads from being consumed in its stead.
Although it’s maybe less likely to save consumers money — depending on which disposable pads you’d buy and how many you’d used per cycle (basic disposable pads can cost as little as ~20c each) — as LastObject recommends owning nine of its LastPads which could cost around $80 or more). But the target user is evidently someone with enough disposable income to be able to pay a premium for an eco alternative.
Given the price-point, it does also look more expensive than the menstrual cup — an existing and highly practical alternative to disposable menstrual products — which can cost around $30 (for one reusable cup; and you can get away with owning just one) and, typically, a cup will also last for years as it’s made of silicone.
However the menstrual cup won’t suit every woman — and does require access to clean water to rinse and sanitize — so having more non-disposable alternatives for periods is great.
Aagaard says she’s a fan of the menstrual cup but suggests LastPad can still be useful for its users as a back-up to catch any leaks and/or provide an added layer of reassurance.
While, with period pants, she says the issue she finds unpleasant is the feeling of wetness when wearing them.
On LastPad’s environmental credentials, the washing process required to keep reusing the pad does obviously require some resources (water, soap etc.) but — as is the case with other LastObject products — the company’s claim is that it’s still substantially greener to wash and reuse its non-disposable products versus consuming and binning single-use items that have to be continually produced and shipped out (generating ongoing CO2). Such products can also pollute the environment after they’ve been thrown away — and plastic waste is of course a huge global problem (including from thrown-away sanitary products).
LastObject will be publishing a third-party LCA (lifecycle assessment) for LastPad to back up its eco claims for the reusable product — comparing it to using disposable sanitary pads. But Aagaard is confident it will be substantially better when compared against most disposable alternatives.
“You’ll be putting a wash on anyway; [LastPads] don’t take up that much space; you’re not going to wash them just them; it is with your other laundry; and if you wash them at a cold wash I think that the LCA report will look really good,” she suggests when we ask about the eco credentials.
“We’re doing this with all our products where we’re taking them through a third party who’s testing everything and putting them up against [alternatives] and having these considerations with CO2, with water, with chemicals — with the whole pack… So we’ll be doing that more specifically; right now… the alternative of a [disposable] pad — they are so differently produced. It’s crazy. So I could say the worst [for comparative purposes] or I could say the best — and ours is about 12x better than that.”
“When we got the LCA report for the LastTissue and LastSwab they were so much better than I have imagined,” she adds.
From this year the European Union has started banning the sale of some single-use plastic items (such as Q-tips and disposable cutlery) as reducing plastic waste is one of the goals for regional lawmakers. And — globally — regulators are increasingly looking for quick wins to shrink the environmental impact of the fast moving consumer goods market’s long standing love affair with plastic.
But some disposable product categories are simply more essential than others — which makes it hard for lawmakers to just ban plenty of wasteful, polluting products. So developing innovative, reusable alternatives is one way to help lighten the usage load.
“The most sustainable pad that you can ever have is actually the one that you don’t produce but that would just be free bleeding — and I think that 99% of women are not ready for that,” adds Aagaard. “So can we make some solutions on some of the things that we actually have to take care of?”
While LastObject is sticking with Kickstarter to get LastPad to market, Aagaard confirms that once they see how much early adopter demand it’s getting they plan to produce enough to also sell via some of the other outlets where they currently sell their products — such as e-commerce sites like Amazon and of course their own web shop.
So far, the U.S. has been the main market for LastObject’s reusable wares, per Aagaard — which she attributes to mostly using Kickstarter to build a community of users. But she adds that the company is starting to see more traction in Europe as it’s increased the number of regional distributors it works with.
So what’s next for the company after LastPad? The product direction they’ll take is an active discussion, she says.
“We can keep going the beauty way, we can go more personal care but we have to also [not] go in too many directions. I personally have a lot of fun things I want to do in the bathroom still, because I feel like it’s a space where not a lot of designers have actually really been investigating some of the products that we’re using. Both in beauty but also in personal care. Like in the floss and toothbrush but also in diapers and wipes and all of that. So I think that there’s some innovation that could be really fun. But… this one took two years and I’m so happy about the result and I couldn’t have spent two months less on it. Then we wouldn’t have had the solutions that we’ve gotten to. So that feels very important.”
Image Credits: LastPad
*Washable tissues are also of course not new. Indeed, Wikipedia credits the invention of pocket squares to wipe the nose to King Richard II of England who reigned in the 14th century. But the traditional (fabric) handkerchief — which was used, laundered and reused — became yet another casualty of the switch to single-use, disposable, cheap consumer goods that’s since been shown to have such high environmental costs. So perhaps reversing this damaging default will bring more ‘historical product innovation’ back into fashion as societies look to apply a modern ‘circular economy’ lens.
Powered by WPeMatico
Hormonal health is a massive opportunity: Where are the unicorns?
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse, but Elizabeth Ruzzo says she experienced it firsthand after telling a doctor that she suffered from suicidal ideation after taking birth control pills.
Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.
Ruzzo’s doctor told her there was no connection between birth control and self-harm, but she decided to stop taking the pill to see if her mental health improved. When it did, Ruzzo grasped the disconnect between women’s unique hormonal makeup and blanket-statement practices from medicine today.
Her realization led her to found Adyn Health, a startup that proactively helps women make health decisions that complement their hormonal state and background. The company started with, of course, helping people pick more personalized birth control.
Ruzzo is part of a group of growing entrepreneurs who are betting that hormonal health is the key wedge into the digital health boom. Hormones are fluctuating, ever-evolving and diverse — but these founders say they’re also key to solving many health conditions that disproportionately impact women, from diabetes to infertility to mental health challenges.
Many believe it’s that complexity that underscores the opportunity. Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.
Still, as funding for women’s health startups drops and stigma continues to impact where venture dollars go, it’s unclear whether the sector will remain in its infancy or hit a true inflection point.
The future is proactive
Ruzzo views Adyn as a precision medicine startup. Its main product is an at-home test that tracks hormone levels, assesses genetic risk for specific side effects, and then gives recommendations for which birth control methods best suits the customer with the fewest side effects.
By Ruzzo’s estimates, 98% of sexually active women use birth control for 30 years of their life. That sort of lifetime value proposition made the company look like a sweet deal to founders, and Adyn raised a $2.5 million seed in April 2021 in a round co-led by Lux Capital and M13.
The moonshot, though, is using that as a way to become a trusted partner in a woman’s life, helping understand baseline hormone levels throughout those 30 years.
“My hope is that we can use precision medicine approaches, including looking at genetic markers to identify reliable diagnostic criteria, that can remove that uncertainty and pain and diagnostic odyssey that people have to go through,” Ruzzo said.
If Adyn becomes a trusted partner with teenage women, it could reach a point where it can detect changes in hormone levels over time.
“The hormone reference ranges that are used [in labs] are too broad to be personalized, let alone prescriptive,” she said. “And so what we’re hoping to do is correct for things that we know affect hormone levels like age, weight, ethnicity and compare you to your own expectations.”
If the first wave of digital health was a company like Ro, which answers consumers when they have a condition such as erectile dysfunction or hair loss, the second wave will look more like Adyn, which helps consumers navigate their health before getting diagnosed with a condition or experiencing issues.
The industry standard is still to wait for consumers to realize they have a condition, and then go to the doctor to manage their symptoms or look for a cure. A new startup that recently graduated from Y Combinator is finding its way into hormonal health through that angle.
One-tenth of all women are impacted by a hormonal condition
Veera Health is a startup that wants to help women in India manage polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. The hormonal condition can cause irregular periods, infertility or gestational diabetes in women, as well as acne, weight gain and excessive hair growth. Plus, PCOS is far from rare, impacting one in 10 women.
Powered by WPeMatico
Our 11 favorite companies from Y Combinator’s S20 Demo Day: Part I
Startup incubator and investment group Y Combinator today held the first of two demo days for founders in its Summer 2020 batch.
So far, this cohort contains the usual mix of bold, impressive and, at times, slightly wacky ideas young companies so often show off.
This was Y Combinator’s second online demo day, its first all-virtual class and the first time that it held live, remote pitches. The event largely went well, with founders dialing in from around the globe to share a few paragraphs of notes and a single slide. There were few technical hiccups, given the sheer number of startups presenting.
But if you are not in the mood to parse through dozens (and dozens) of entries detailing each startup that showed off its problem, solution and growth, the TechCrunch crew has collected our own favorites based on how likely a company seems to succeed and how impressed we were with the creativity of their vision. For each entry, one staffer made the call that the startup in question was among their favorites.
We’re not investors, so we’re not pretending to sort the unicorns from the goats. But if what you need is a digest of some of the day’s best companies to get a good taste of what founders are building, we have your back.
ZipSchool and Hellosaurus
The next wave of edtech startups is entering a market that demands a better remote-learning solution for younger learners. But that’s the obvious product gap, one that is already being tackled by the biggest names in the booming category.
The non-obvious product-market deficit is how teachers, also impacted by the pandemic, are searching for new ways to interact with students. Teachers are collaborating and cross-pollinating on successful lesson plans that work across stale Zoom screens, so why not monetize that same content?
Powered by WPeMatico
Demand for fertility services persists despite COVID-19 shutdowns
In 2019, the global fertility services industry was estimated to be worth $14.8 billion with demand driven by the significant growth in the median age of first-time mothers, according to a Research & Markets report.
Gina Bartasi, founder and CEO of NYC-based fertility center Kindbody, has pointed to macroeconomic trends responsible for the industry’s consistent growth, such as the increase in single mothers by choice and the fact that “heterosexual couples are waiting to have children and waiting to get married, and more and more same-sex couples are having children, which is relatively new.”
Regardless of the increasing demand, disasters can disrupt fertility services: On March 17, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine directed U.S.-based fertility clinics to avoid initiating new treatments, push back nonemergency surgeries and shift care to telemedicine.
Now reopened, it’s undeniable that COVID-19’s national impact could alter the space as different types of crises have in the past. In looking back, we can find a better understanding of what the future holds.
After the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, a University of Louisville study found that there was “a prompt and significant increase in births and birthrates in the post-9/11 period” in New York City. Relatedly, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005 and created the nation’s costliest natural disaster, it was also one of five times since 1987 that frozen embryos were evacuated and protected during a natural disaster.
According to a study done by University of Wisconsin, “following Katrina, displacement contributed to a 30% decline in birth cohort size. Black fertility fell, and remained 4% below expected values through 2010. By contrast, white fertility increased by 5%.” The communities were so ravaged that the area’s Black population has remained substantially smaller.
Powered by WPeMatico
CurieMD is using telehealth to plug the menopause support gap
U.S. femtech startup CurieMD is offering menopause diagnosis and treatment prescription via a telehealth platform — beginning in California, where it launched late last year.
Founder Dr. Leslie Meserve says the goal is to widen access to treatment and support services for mid-life women, spying a business opportunity in offering an auxiliary digital service targeting an area of women’s health which she says is often overlooked within standard health service provision and suffers from a lack of trained physicians.
She also suggests there is a “unique fear” in the U.S. around the use of hormone therapy for treating the menopause that’s left an access gap in support services — blaming concerns sparked by misleading publicity attached to the 2003 Women’s Health Initiative study which implied a link with breast cancer.
“The authors of the study released a press release prematurely that then became an overnight sensationalized story about hormone therapy causing breast cancer,” she explains. “What they didn’t say was that in the estrogen-only arm of the trial there was actually a lower incidence of breast cancer. So that was never stated anywhere. The other thing they failed to state was that the slight increased risk was not statistically significant… They did women a huge disservice by releasing this press release prematurely.”
More than 15 years on, Meserve believes the time is right for telehealth services to help plug the information and support gap that still orbits menopause, in part as a consequence of “deeply rooted” but misplaced fear of hormone therapy.
Investment in products targeted women’s health and wellness has also been jumping up in recent years as VCs cotton on to an underinvested opportunity which more founders are also focusing on — led by female entrepreneurs driving attention toward women’s issues.
There are now a number of femtech startups specifically focused on menopause. Asked about competitors, Meserve points to several other U.S. startups — including Gennev and Elektra Health.
“There is a lot more interest in telehealth and I believe the time is absolutely right for more information to be given to the world… to make sure that women know that going through menopause is not the end of anything — it’s the beginning of a wonderful second half of life,” she suggests, arguing that the regular healthcare services women are accessing often don’t have the time to dedicate to discussing menopausal symptoms and potential treatments with their patients.
“Telehealth is not going to be appropriate for every single medical issue, that’s for sure, but the diagnosis and treatment of menopausal symptoms is really based on a discussion,” she says. “We do let patients know that we are an adjunct to the regular care that they need to be receiving from their gynecologist and primary care physicians. But menopausal treatment requires a lot of discussion, a lot of talk therapy — it’s a very cognitive diagnosis and treatment. And many OB-GYNs and primary care doctors really don’t have the time needed to explain the pros and cons of hormone therapy to their patients.
“They do the physical. They address immediate, urgent needs, but they may not have the time to address something that doesn’t feel as urgent. Menopausal symptoms — from insomnia to hot flushes — they don’t feel as urgent to practitioners so I don’t think that they’re always given the time needed. And we know that physicians and other practitioners are very rushed. The way our insurance models go they have to see patients every nine to 15 minutes and sometimes a 15-minute office visit just isn’t enough to perform both a pap smear, a physical and answer all of these questions. So we’re an adjunct. We’re not in place of their regular physical exams — we’re an addition to those.”
Meserve practiced in primary care for close to two decades before moving into specializing in menopause services herself — a shift that led to the idea of setting up a company to address mid-life women’s health issues via a web-based telehealth platform.
“I’ve kind of grown up with my patients and a few years ago I was noticing that my patients were having lots of menopausal symptoms so I self-trained in the treatment of menopause and then became a certified menopause practitioner,” she tells TechCrunch, explaining her own transition from practicing in primary care to focusing on menopause care.
“I realized obviously I was only going to be able to see a very small number of patients and patients in my community. And I know that women across the country are suffering with these symptoms and they’re not able to find physicians that are comfortable talking about menopause and treating menopause. And so, through friends of friends, I was connected to another physician in our community, along with his friend who has expertise in startups and we had the idea [for the company].”
“We know that there’s a lack of trained physicians in this area, we know that women want this relief — they want symptom relief, they want to live wonderful lives,” she adds, saying the key idea is to use telehealth consultations and algorithmic triage to reach “as many women as are wanting the treatment.”
CurieMD patients fill in an online quiz about themselves and their symptoms to get treatment suggestions — which can include a prescription for an oral contraceptive or, in cases where there may be a risk associated with taking estrogen, an antidepressant for perimenopausal symptom relief; and a plant-based hormone therapy for menopausal women — with the startup using an algorithm to help the telehealth practitioners offer the right treatment suggestions.
“Based on the way that patients answer questions in our questionnaire they’re driven down a certain path to help our practitioners choose the right therapy,” she explains, noting that they’re not using AI to drive recommendations. Rather, patients’ responses are used to determine which additional questions they get asked to pull out other relevant information — in a classic decision tree algorithm.
“The first thing we have to determine is whether they’re in perimenopause or menopause,” she says, discussing the decision flow. “So in perimenopause their cycles are fluctuating, their ovaries are coming in and out of retirement. That happens in their 40s. And women start to have perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms at that time — many of them do. So they”ll be having hot flushes, night sweats, irritability, mood symptoms. But the treatment for perimenopause is different from menopause. Perimenopausal patients can be treated very effectively with low-dose oral contraceptive pills — so one of the algorithm’s branches is, first of all, are you in menopause or perimenopause?
“And then for menopausal patients they have the option of choosing bioidentical hormone therapy. And if they have had a hysterectomy they only need estrogen — and so they would go down the pathway asking about their estrogen needs. And then if they still have a uterus they will need both estrogen and progesterone. So then they have the choice of what type of estrogen they want to choose — whether they want oral estrogen or estrogen delivered through the skin, which is a patch.”
In cases where a woman is having vasomotor symptoms such as insomnia and hot flushes but has had breast cancer or where there’s another contra-indication to estrogen (such as having previously had a blood clot), CurieMD’s platform may prescribe an antidepressant to treat her symptoms.
“They are candidates for an antidepressant called Venlafaxine [that’s] very effective for treating vasomotor symptoms in all patients — but we use it mostly for women who are unable to take estrogen,” says Meserve.
For now the platform has just three doctors performing remote consultations for the “dozens” of early sign-ups it’s seen so far — with a third-party company supplying the trained physicians that are conducting the remote consultations.
“We’re working with a large, national company that hires physicians who have chosen to provide telehealth,” she says. “They’re board certified and we provide additional training in women’s health for them — especially in the medications… that we offer.”
Per Meserve CurieMD applies “narrower” prescribing guidelines than an in-person physician might use — exactly “because it is a telehealth company.”
She gives the example of a patient who has had a blood clot in the past — where an in-person physician might be able to discuss with a patient’s haematologist and come up with a plan for them to be on a very low-dose estrogen patch. In this case, CurieMD’s remote service would not be able to offer such a joined-up approach to prescribing a treatment.
“In telehealth we don’t know all the physicians in each patient’s community so we’re not going to be able to do co-ordinated care as well with specialist, outside of the box patients,” she says. “So if they have any risk factors, such as a history of clotting, or of course if they have a history of breast cancer we’re not going to be able to treat those patients with hormone therapy. So if they really want hormone therapy that’s going to be an in-person visit with a physician.”
Another exception would be patients who have migraines and who may want to be on an oral birth control pill. “It depends on the type of migraines they have,” she says. “So that’s beyond the scope of what we’re going to prescribe.”
As part of the questionnaire process patients are also asked to rate the severity of their symptoms. Meserve says she’s confident this will enable it to not only demonstrate to individual patients the efficacy of the prescribed treatment but also enable it to present findings to the wider medical community — with the aim of demonstrating “the safety and efficacy of telehealth” for this particular use-case.
“One of the things that I’d like to make sure that we’re doing is really convincing the medical community at large about the safety of telehealth in certain medical conditions,” she says. “It’s not appropriate for every medical condition… There are certain things that need to have an in-person visit. But the medical community is starting to understand and adapt and trust telehealth — but I think the more data that we have the more we’re going to be able to convince them that this is a nice adjunct to in-person visits.”
“Patients are more accepting of [telehealth] than physicians are. Physicians are very conservative and very slow to change and so I feel that one of our missions is to present the data to physicians and help them understand that this is not a substitute for good in-person care, it’s just an addition,” she adds.
The business model for the service is direct to patient — which means CurieMD is not plugging into the U.S. insurance healthcare market. Rather, there’s a sign-up fee (currently waived), a per consultation fee and recurring subscription (taken via credit card) for any ongoing prescriptions which are shipped to patients by a mail-order pharmacy contracted for that piece of the service. (In an FAQ on its website, the startup claims its consultation fees “are lower than that of most co-pays and our medication pricing is competitive with that of most pharmacies.”)
The team has raised around $1 million in angel and VC investment to fund development of the business so far.
Meserve says the plan is to scale nationwide, taking a state by state approach to building out coverage in order to get the necessary contracts and physician licences in place.
“I would like to be in another 20 states by the end of this year,” she adds.
In terms of differentiation versus the growing number of femtech startups that have also supported an opportunity to offer menopause-related treatment support, she says: “We believe we’re the only one that contracts with a pharmacy and has the prescription delivered through a mail order service.”
She also flags that the hormone therapy CurieMD’s service prescribes — and delivers “right to the door in discreet packaging” — is a bioidentical plant-based “FDA-approved” treatment, suggesting that’s another point of differentiation for its approach.
Powered by WPeMatico
Fem tech startup Inne takes the wraps off a hormone tracker and $8.8M in funding
Berlin-based fem tech startup Inne is coming out of stealth to announce an €8 million (~$8.8M) Series A and give the first glimpse of a hormone-tracking subscription product for fertility-tracking and natural contraception that’s slated for launch in Q1 next year.
The Series A is led by led by Blossom Capital, with early Inne backer Monkfish Equity also participating, along with a number of angel investors — including Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of TransferWise; Tom Stafford, managing partner at DST; and Trivago co-founder Rolf Schromgens.
Women’s health apps have been having a tech-fuelled moment in recent years, with the rise of a fem tech category. There are now all sorts of apps for tracking periods and the menstrual cycle, such as Clue and Flo.
Some also try to predict which days a women is fertile and which they’re not — offering digital tools to help women track bodily signals if they’re following a natural family planning method of contraception, or indeed trying to conceive a baby.
Others — such as Natural Cycles — have gone further down that path, branding their approach “digital contraception” and claiming greater sophistication vs traditional natural family planning by applying learning algorithms to cycle data augmented with additional information (typically a daily body temperature measurement). Although there has also been some controversy around aggressive and even misleading marketing tactics targeting young women.
A multi-month investigation by the medical device regulator in Natural Cycles’ home market, instigated after a number of women fell pregnant while using its method, found rates of failure were in line with its small-print promises but concluded with the company agreeing to clarify the risk of the product failing.
At issue is that the notion of “digital contraception” may present as simple and effortless — arriving in handy app form, often boosted by a flotilla of seductive social media lifestyle ads. Yet the reality for the user is the opposite of effortless. Because in fact they are personally taking on all of the risk.
For these products to work the user needs a high level of dedication to stick at it, be consistent and pay close attention to key details in order to achieve the promised rate of protection.
Natural contraception is also what Inne is touting, dangling another enticing promise of hormone-free contraception — its website calls the product “a tool of radical self-knowledge” and claims it “protect[s]… from invasive contraceptive methods”. It’s twist is it’s not using temperature to track fertility; its focus is on hormone-tracking as a fertility measure.
Inne says it’s developed a saliva-based test to measure hormone levels, along with an in vitro diagnostic device (pictured above) that allows data to be extracted from the disposable tests at home and wirelessly logged in the companion app.
Founder Eirini Rapti describes the product as a “mini lab” — saying it’s small and portable enough to fit in a pocket. Her team has been doing the R&D on it since 2017, preferring, she says, to focus on getting the biochemistry right rather than shouting about launching the startup. (It took in seed funding prior to this round but isn’t disclosing how much.)
At this stage Inne has applied for and gained European certification as a medical device. Though it’s not yet been formally announced.
The first product, a natural contraception for adult women — billed as best suited for women aged 28-40, i.e. at a steady relationship time-of-life — will be launching in select European markets (starting in Scandinavia) next year, though initially as a closed beta style launch as they work on iterating the product based on user feedback.
“It basically has three parts,” Rapti says of the proposition. “It has a small reader… It has what we call a little mouth opening in the front. It always gives you a smile. That’s the hardware part of it, so it recognizes the intensity of your hormones. And then there’s a disposable saliva test. You basically collect your saliva by putting it in your mouth for 30 seconds. And then you insert it in the reader and then you go about your day.
“The reader is connected to your phone, either via BlueTooth or wifi, depending on where you are taking the test daily… It takes the reading and it sends it over to your phone. In your phone you can do a couple of things. First of all you look at your hormonal data and you look at how those change throughout the menstrual cycle. So you can see how they grow, how they fall. What that means about your ovulation or your overall female health — like we measure progesterone; that tells you a lot about your lining etc. And then you can also track your fluids… We teach you how to track them, how to understand what they mean.”
As well as a contraception use-case, the fertility tracking element naturally means it could also be used by women wanting to get pregnant. 
“This product is not a tracker. We’re not looking to gather your data and then tell you next month what you should be feeling — at all,” she adds. “It’s more designed to track your hormones and tell you look this is the most basic change that happens in your body and because of those changes you will feel certain things. So do you feel them or not — and if you don’t, what does it mean? Or if you do what does it mean?
“It builds your own hormonal baseline — so you start measuring your hormones and we go okay so this is your baseline and now let’s look at things that go out of your baseline. And what do they mean?”
Of course the key question is how accurate is a saliva-based test for hormones as a method for predicting fertility? On this Rapti says Inne isn’t ready to share data about the product’s efficacy — but claims it will be publishing details of the various studies it conducted as part of the CE marking process in the next few weeks.
“A couple more weeks and all the hardcore numbers will be out there,” she says.
In terms of how it works in general the hormone measurement is “a combination of a biochemical reaction and the read out of it”, as she puts it — with the test itself being pure chemistry but algorithms then being applied to interpret the hormonal reading, looping in other signals such as the user’s cycle length, age and the time of day of the test.
She claims the biochemical hormone test the product relies on as its baseline for predicting fertility is based on similar principles to standard pregnancy tests — such as those that involve peeing on a stick to get a binary ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant’ result. “We are focused on specifically fertility hormones,” she says.
“Our device is a medical device. It’s CE-certified in Europe and to do that you have to do all kinds of verification and performance evaluation studies. They will be published pretty soon. I cannot tell you too much in detail but to develop something like that we had to do verification studies, performance evaluation studies, so all of that is done.”
While it developed and “validated” the approach in-house, Rapti notes that it also worked with a number of external diagnostic companies to “optimize” the test.
“The science behind it is pretty straightforward,” she adds. “Your hormones behave in a specific way — they go from a low to a high to a low again, and what you’re looking for is building that trend… What we are building is an individual curve per user. The starting and the ending point in terms of values can be different but it is the same across the cycle for one user.”
“When you enter a field like biochemistry as an outsider a lot of the academics will tell you about the incredible things you could do in the future. And there are plenty,” she adds. “But I think what has made a difference to us is we always had this manufacturability in mind. So if you ask me there’s plenty of ways you can detect hormones that are spectacular but need about ten years of development let alone being able to manufacture it at scale. So it was important to me to find a technology that would allow us to do it effectively, repeatedly but also manufacture it at a low cost — so not reinventing the whole wheel.”
Rapti says Inne is controlling for variability in the testing process by controlling when users take the measurement (although that’s clearly not directly within its control, even if it can send an in-app reminder); controlling how much saliva is extracted per test; and controlling how much of the sample is tested — saying “that’s all done mechanically; you don’t do that”.
“The beauty about hormones is they do not get influenced by lack of sleep, they do not get influenced by getting out of your bed — and this is the reason why I wanted to opt to actually measure them,” she adds, saying she came up with the idea for the product as a user of natural contraception searching for a better experience. (Rapti is not herself trained in medical or life sciences.)
“When I started the company I was using the temperature method [of natural contraception] and I thought it cannot be that I have to take this measurement from my bed otherwise my measurement’s invalid,” she adds.
However there are other types of usage restrictions Inne users will need to observe in order to avoid negatively affecting the hormonal measurements.
Firstly they must take the test in the same time window each time — either in the morning or the evening but sticking to one of those choices for good.
They also need to stick to daily testing for at least a full menstrual cycle. Plus there are certain days in the month when testing will always be essential, per Rapti, even as she suggests a “learning element” might allow for the odd missed test day later on, i.e. once enough data has been inputted.
Users also have to avoid drinking and eating for 30 minutes before taking the test. She further specifies this half hour pre-test restriction includes not having oral sex — “because that also affects the measurements”.
“There’s a few indications around it,” she concedes, adding: “The product is super easy to use but it is not for women who want to not think ever about contraception or their bodies. I believe that for these women the IUD would be the perfect solution because they never have to think about it. This product is for women who consciously do not want to take hormones and don’t want invasive devices — either because they’ve been in pain or they’re interested in being natural and not taking hormones.”
At this stage Inne hasn’t performed any comparative studies vs established contraception methods such as the pill. So unless or until it does users won’t be able to assess the relative risk of falling pregnant while using it against more tried and tested contraception methods.
Rapti says the plan is to run more clinical studies in the coming year, helped by the new funding. But these will be more focused on what additional insights can be extracted from the test to feed the product proposition — rather than on further efficacy (or any comparative) tests.
They’ve also started the process of applying for FDA certification to be able to enter the US market in future.
Beyond natural contraception and fertility tracking, Inne is thinking about wider applications for its approach to hormone tracking — such as providing women with information about the menopause, based on longer term tracking of their hormone levels. Or to help manage conditions such as endometriosis, which is one of the areas where it wants to do further research.
The intent is to be the opposite of binary, she suggests, by providing adult women with a versatile tool to help them get closer to and understand changes in their bodies for a range of individual needs and purposes.
“I want to shift the way people perceive our female bodies to be binary,” she adds. “Our bodies are not binary, they change around the month. So maybe this month you want to avoid getting pregnant and maybe next month you actually want to get pregnant. It’s the same body that you need to understand to help you do that.”
Commenting on the Series A in a supporting statement, Louise Samet, partner at Blossom Capital, said: “Inne has a winning combination of scientific validity plus usability that can enable women to better understand their bodies at all stages in their lives. What really impressed us is the team’s meticulous focus on design and easy-of-use together with the scientific validity and clear ambition to impact women all over the world.”
Powered by WPeMatico
What top VCs look for in women’s fertility startups
A number of promising women’s health tech companies have popped up in the last few years, from fertility apps to ovulation bracelets — even Apple has jumped into the subject with the addition of period tracking built into the latest edition of the watch. But there hasn’t been much in the way of innovation in women’s sexual health for decades.
In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is now a 40-year-old invention and even the top pharmaceutical companies have spent a pittance on research and development. Subjects like polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis and menopause have taken a backseat to other, more fatal concerns. Fertility is itself oftentimes a mysterious black box as well, though a full 10% of the female population in the United States has difficulty getting or staying pregnant.
That’s all starting to change as startups are now bringing in millions in venture capital to gather and treat women’s health. While it’s early days (no unicorns just yet) interest in the subject has been jumping steadily higher each year.
To shine a better light on the importance of tech’s role in spurring more innovation for women’s fertility, we asked five VCs passionate about the space for their investment strategies, including Sarah Cone (Social Impact Capital), Vanessa Larco (NEA), Anu Duggal (Female Founders Fund), Jess Lee (Sequoia) and Nancy Brown (Oak HC/FT).
Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital
Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital
We’re interested in companies that create large data sets in women’s health and fertility, enabling personalized medicine, clinical trial virtualization, better patient outcomes, and the application of modern AI/ML techniques to generate hypotheses that discover new targets and molecules.
Powered by WPeMatico
Daye, a startup developing a ‘cramp-fighting’ tampon, raises $5.5M from Khosla, Index and Kindred
Daye, a “femcare” startup developing a new type of tampon that uses CBD to help tackle dysmenorrhea, has quietly raised $5.5 million in funding from high-profile investors in the U.S. and Europe, TechCrunch has learned.
Backing the seed round is Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, along with London’s Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. The investment sees Khosla’s chief of staff Kristina Simmons, Khosla venture partner Tim Westergren (who also founded Pandora), and Hannah Seal, principle at Index, join Daye’s board.
Other investors in the London-based company include Sophia Bendz (former global director of Marketing at Spotify and now a partner at VC firm Atomico), Irina Havas (a principle of Atomico), David Schiff (founding partner at United Talent Agency) and Kristin Cardwell (VP of International Business Development at Refinery29).
Founded by 24-year-old Valentina Milanova and launching later this year, Daye has set out to build a new brand for female health products “designed with women in mind.” The startup’s first product is a newly developed tampon that uses CBD to help tackle period cramps (or dysmenorrhea) as an alternative to traditional painkillers (CBD is the extract derived from the flower of the industrial hemp plant, a legal relative to marijuana). Daye also claims its product will be more hygienic and sustainable than legacy tampons, and if successful could be a wake-up call to the incumbent and stagnant tampon industry, which has seen little innovation in decades.
“Our goal is to raise the standards of women’s hygiene products by tackling three primary issues: dysmenorrhea, manufacturing standards and sustainability,” Milanova tells TechCrunch. “Women have largely been left out of medical innovation. In fact, until 1993, researchers banned women from participating in [early] clinical trials, as it was believed female hormone fluctuations polluted medical data. To this day, most medications, including those for pain relief, depression and sleeping aids, have not been tested on women. We’re redefining localised cramp-relief, relying on an ingredient that we’ve tested on women first.”
Milanova says she first had the idea for a cramp-fighting tampon in November 2017 and initially used her salary from a day job and credit cards to fund product development. In September 2018, she quit her job to work on the business full-time and build a team, and to finalise clinical trials for the product.
Describing CBD as “having its 15 minutes of fame,” Milanova says the company doesn’t believe cannabidiol should be added to everything, from dry shampoo to cocktails. However, she says CBD is much safer than over-the-counter painkillers, and that the vaginal canal has the highest concentration of cannabinoid receptors and is also the fastest route of absorption into the bloodstream when it comes to pain relief.
“Unlike most CBD products on the market today, our product does not contain any tetrahydrocannabinol (THC),” she explains. “This is why we believe we’re going to be attractive to every consumer who experiences menstrual discomfort.”
Beyond the novel idea of a cramp-fighting CBD tampon, Milanova says Daye wants to raise the bar for tampon production standards and sustainability.
“In Europe, tampons are not classified as medical devices, which means there are no manufacturing guidelines — for context, plasters are more regulated and better sanitised than tampons,” she tells me, to my astonishment. To address this, Daye is introducing pharmaceutical-grade standards and will keep manufacturing in-house.
Period care is also “wreaking havoc” on the environment. “Over the course of her lifetime, the average woman uses enough tampons to fill two double-decker buses. That waste either ends up in our oceans or landfills. We want to relieve the burden period care has on the environment, and offer a product that is equal parts body-safe, effective and as sustainable as possible.”
To begin to answer the question of why something like this hasn’t been done before, Milanova says that menstrual discomfort in general is a massively overlooked problem and that “even the mention of the word tampon makes most people feel uncomfortable.”
The existing market is also monopolised “to the point where innovation suffers.” All tampons on the market today perform and look the same, using the same materials and the same manufacturing processes. Yet, because there’s barely any product differentiation, the Daye founder says most women remain loyal to the first tampon brand they ever tried.
“What we’re bringing to market is a completely novel product, and we’re operating in a very sensitive, intimate area of consumer goods. As a newcomer, we have to gain consumer trust by ensuring we’re in constant contact with our users, taking note of their feedback and iterating on our proposition fast.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Femtech’s billion-dollar year
There are a lot of people who never thought they’d see the day venture capitalists would funnel millions into femtech businesses, direct-to-consumer tampon retailers no less. But that’s our new reality and Cora is proof.
San Francisco-based Cora, which develops and sells organic tampons, pads and other personal care products, has just closed a $7.5 million Series A led by Harbinger Ventures. Cora is one of many femtech startups to raise funding this week alone, in what is turning out to be a red-hot year for VC investment in the space.
Femtech, defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health, has attracted at least $241 million in VC funding so far this year, according to PitchBook. That puts the sector on pace to secure nearly $1 billion in investment by year-end, greatly surpassing last year’s record of $650 million. For more historical context, startups in the space brought in only $62 million in 2012, $225 million in 2014 and $231 million in 2016.
“Investors have realized there is a huge pent-up demand in the market for healthier products for women,” Cora co-founder Molly Hayward tells TechCrunch. “The way in which the VC world is structured, there just has not been a lot of representation. It’s really difficult to understand the value of a product you aren’t ever going to use or to understand a problem you aren’t ever going to have, particularly around period care. This isn’t something we were talking about as a society five years ago.”
The four-year-old startup operates a little differently than your run-of-the-mill D2C company. Like TOMS, the popular footwear brand, Cora donates a month’s supply of products for every month’s supply sold. To date, Cora has donated 5 million pads to girls in India and Kenya and 100,000 products to women in the U.S.
“To me, [Cora] was this incredible, holistic opportunity to change the way that women experience their period,” Hayward said.
Investors must be excited about Cora’s growth. Though she didn’t disclose specific numbers, Hayward says the brand has expanded 400 percent year-over-year, a metric they are expecting to sustain with this new bout of funding. Cora’s products are sold on a subscription basis, with prices ranging from $8 per month for six tampons to $16 per month for 24. For those unfamiliar with the costs of such products, $8 for six tampons comes at quite the premium. A box of 50 Playtex tampons, for example, retails for around $9.
In Cora’s case, customers are shelling out extra cash for millennial-inspired branding, a soothing unboxing experience and a general ease of access to its products, as well as Cora’s organic, hypoallergenic and compostable materials, which aren’t characteristic of many similar products on the market.
Cora plans to use the capital to put more of its items in Target stores, where it already sells its tampons and pads, and expand its portfolio of products. As part of the funding, Cora has added two more women to its board of directors: Lisa Bougie, the former GM of Stitch Fix, and Andrea Freedman, the former chief financial officer of Method. Its board is now 80 percent female.
Powered by WPeMatico
A startup trying to detect endometriosis through ‘smart tampons’ just landed $9 million in Series A funding
There’s no shortage of so-called femtech startups raising money right now, and little wonder why.
Aside from the growing market opportunity — the global fertility services market is expected to reach $31 billion by 2023, says the consultancy Allied Market Research, nearly double where it stood in 2016 — more women are clamoring for information about their reproductive health, and 15-minute doctor visits aren’t doing the trick.
The newest recipient of venture dollars: NextGen Jane, a 4.5-year-old, Oakland, Calif.-based company that’s hoping to use blood wrung from tampons to find early markers of endometriosis and, later, if all goes well, cervical cancer and other disorders.
The company disclosed just today that it has secured $9 million in Series A funding led by Material Impact, a new fund focused on materials technology that we reported on last November. Other participants in the round include Access Industries, Viking Global Investors, Liminal Ventures and numerous notable angels, including PhDs from Harvard Medical School and Stanford University.
Its approach is far more palatable than the option women have long suffered, which is to have a small camera inserted into their pelvic cavity in search of endometrial cells. (Note: Women typically wind up in this position only after enduring bewildering pain that drives them to see their doctors.) The idea with NextGen Jane instead is for a custom-made tampon to be worn for roughly two hours, placed inside a test tube as part of a home kit and sent to a lab for further analysis.
Of course, it needs to work first, and the technology hasn’t been approved by the FDA. In fact, it hasn’t been proven at all.
The funding could, potentially, make the difference. In an interview with Technology Review last month, NextGen CEO and co-founder Ridhi Tariyal said that a clinical trial is designed and ready to go, but that NextGen Jane needed capital to run a trial on roughly 800 women in order to establish the diagnostic efficacy of menstrual blood. With funding, she’d said, it would take the company about two years to collect a meaningful amount of data.
Reproductive specialists seem torn generally on the trend of startups producing home kits aimed at helping women understand their fertility. While they see some value in the information they provide, they also fear that even home kits that have already been proven to accomplish their intended goal, such as measuring anti-Müllerian hormone, or AMH, may confuse women as much as they help them.
NextGen Jane had previously raised $2.3 million in funding. Meanwhile, TechCrunch has been reporting extensively on the broader uptick in femtech investing. You can find a much deeper dive regarding who has raised what lately and why right here.
Powered by WPeMatico