How femtech startup Inne rebooted its hardware launch after COVID-19 chaos

The pandemic also called a halt to a major piece of research work the startup had lined up with a US university to study its hormone-tracking method for a key contraceptive use-case — a product it had intended to prioritize but could not bring to market ahead of the study which is required to gain regulatory approval.In a matter of weeks, Inne was forced to freeze its big launch as it tried to figure out how best to move forward — and, indeed, whether it should launch the product at all in such a challengingly reconfigured environment.“Due to COVID-19 we’ve had to really shift around our plans,” says Rapti, talking to TechCrunch via video chat. But rather I think what our job is — as female health companies — is to defend the rights of our users and also make the data as anonymous as possible so it cannot be traced back to the actual user.”Rapti argues there is a clear way to separate profile data that is used for marketing from health data generated by usage of the product — and says Inne’s approach for the latter is currently to use double encryption and split usage data and also where it’s processed (some of which she says happens on the user’s device) so that it’s not all sitting in a single repository which it could be easily ordered to hand over.But she also says the startup would be prepared to create further protections for user data in response to any changes to the law that threaten women’s rights.“We need to be legally on top of things and make sure that whenever there is a law that is passed we change our product fast in order to guarantee this anonymity as much as possible,” she tells TechCrunch. That will put it into competition with the likes of Natural Cycles‘ basal-temperature based ‘digital contraceptive’ (which got regulatory clearance in Europe back in 2017); and period tracking app Clue’s more recent cycle-tracking system which gained FDA clearance for contraception in March 2021, to name two existing products.So, demand willing, the pieces needed to scale Inne’s hormone-tracking femtech business do finally look to be slotting into place.“I think it was the right thing to do,” adds Rapti, returning to her decision to go ahead and launch in the middle of the pandemic — to “see who buys the product” and “connect with the customers” — even if that choice meant delaying the launch of the contraceptive product.Image credits: InneImage credits: Inne“It took me a long time to find especially the science and data science team that losing them over a crisis like this would have been, in the longer term, the worse ordeal,” she adds. But she emphasizes that usage is “fluid” and “a bit of a journey” as women’s needs also change.“We have two modes in the app: You can choose it either to cycle track, basically, but with hormones or to get pregnant,” she explains, adding: “It is such a fluid journey for a women in our product because the data tells me that some women are starting to track their cycle and then they will change their goal in a couple of months so it looks like maybe they’re preparing or they just came off the pill etc.”Rapti’s wider vision is for the product to be able to “offer something all the way from the first period to the last period” — which is why she’s so keen to get the contraception product launched (asked if she thinks it’ll be the bigger market she says she’s not sure — but, just in pure numbers terms, there are obviously more women of fertile age seeking to avoid pregnancy than wanting to get pregnant at any given moment); as well as to build out utility elsewhere, such as by expanding into cortisol tracking.The forthcoming cortisol test will provide users with the ability to understand whether they are going through a prolonged period of stress that has chemically affected their body, per Rapti — which she says may in turn be impacting their fertility or sports performance.Users will be able to specify whether they want to include cortisol tracking in their Inne subscription and, if so, they will be sent a mix of progesterone and cortisol testing strips. No, it’s really that you’re building a chemical profile of your day and then you look at that over a period of time to try and understand if you really are under sustained stress and it has chemically affected your body or not.”The thinking behind adding a second hormone test is not to address a broader range of users but rather to give women more reasons to get the minilab into their lives, per Rapit, by encouraging them to “trust these hormonal insights”.Inne founder and CEO, Eirini Rapti (Image credits: Inne)Inne founder and CEO, Eirini Rapti (Image credits: Inne)A major update to the next release of Inne’s app will bring a raft of self-reporting options — around what it’s calling “symptoms and events” — which is intended to help users link their daily activity/feelings with hormonal changes they can track using the product.“We are launching 41 symptoms and events that people have asked for but which will also help us give more specialist insights because we will correlate them with hormones in the coming months,” she says. And a consumer may feel more inclined to try something experimental on the off-chance they could discover a helpful correlation if it only requires them to moisten a some test strips in their mouth a few times a month, rather than — in the case of CGM-based glucose tracking — having to live with a biowearable and its metal filament under the skin of their arm for weeks at a time.Rapti says Inne’s plan is not to break out a totally separate service around cortisol tracking — although she stresses the test itself does involve a completely different user experience — rather the goal is to serve users who want to gain a deeper understanding of how hormones affect their bodies.“Instead of selling new strips to a different woman what I’m trying to say is this is going to be your subscription and then you tell us what you’re interested in.