London-based femtech Hormona has raised a $6.7m seed round led by Finnish deeptech VC Voima Ventures and UK-based SuperNode Global VC. DLF Ventures, as well as previous investors Nascent Invest and Techstars, also participated in the round.
Founded in 2020 by Karolina Löfqvist and Jasmine Tagesson, the startup offers at-home testing to help women monitor their hormone levels, track symptoms and forecast their cycles.
While traditional hormone tests are completed using blood samples, Hormona’s test sticks act similarly to a pregnancy test, using urine. Instead of sending the sample off to a lab, Hormona’s test sticks have a QR code which is read by a smartphone giving the user the results of the three most common hormones — estrogen, progesterone and FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) — in seconds, according to the company.
“We scan the test and read the test line using AI and image processing, so you don’t need any hardware,” says Löfqvist.
The seed round was oversubscribed, but “it wasn’t an easy raise,” according to the founders.
“We’re very proud that we have managed to fundraise in what’s still a pretty tough climate, especially as female founders building a company for females,” Tagesson says. “It’s like a double whammy.”
The capital will be used to launch the tests, grow its current 12-person team and expand globally.
Wooden stick instead of hardware
The idea behind the startup came as Löfqvist was struggling with her own hormone levels a few years back. She spent lots of time and around $5k to understand what was happening in her body.
“I started to read up on it and realised that every single woman will have a hormone-related issue. It can be when you’re trying to get pregnant, or when you’re going into perimenopause and you get a decline in your hormones, or if you, just like me, were on different contraceptives and your hormones got all over the place,” Löfqvist says.
“What became really, really essential to us was to give access to the data to women, because it is not really sustainable to draw blood once a week to really map out your hormones.”
Hormona has spent the last four years developing its hormone test and says its wooden test sticks show over 90% accuracy.
Testing astronauts in space
When visiting NASA last year to showcase the company, Tagesson had a conversation with a female astronaut working for SpaceX who used hormonal contraceptives to suppress her periods when she went to space. Understanding how her hormones were affected by the contraceptives became the starting point for a project between Hormona and SpaceX to measure women’s hormone levels in space.
“SpaceX was really excited to bring a women’s health-focused project onboard; women’s health has been very understudied, especially in space. There aren’t even that many female astronauts,” Tagesson says.
“We did lots of trials and errors and peed in many adult diapers over the last year, trying to figure out the best way to take this test in space, but I’m happy to see that it was successful.”
The outcome of the project that was finalised last month is yet to be analysed, but it has been a good way to show that Hormona’s technology works, according to the founders.
Monthly subscription
Hormone testing for women can be done under national health insurance policies, but it can be difficult to get access to. And to test privately, each hormone test can cost over €100.
Hormona instead offers four tests a month on a monthly subscription of €39, without the user having to leave the house. A premium app subscription (without the tests) with tailored cycle predictions and health programmes to reduce hormonal imbalance symptoms costs £10 a month. It also offers a freemium app.
Hormona is also looking into partnering with insurance companies and companies that offer employee benefits.
Data for women’s health
The femtech founders point out that women’s health has been overlooked in the past, with women rarely included in clinical trials before 1993. Using AI and at-home testing, Hormona wants to amass more data on women’s hormones to help close the knowledge gap about female health.
By only testing the three key hormones for women, the system can already help the user detect clues about serious health issues, according to Löfqvist.
“For example, a woman having higher estrogen levels for a long time may be an indicator of breast cancer, or women going into perimenopause way too early suffer a bigger risk for dementia,” she says. “So there’s a lot of things that we can connect to your hormones with more data in the future.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/uk-femtech-hormona-raises-6-7m/
