To da moon: Emm goals to innovate on the menstrual cup

Menstrual cups (typically generally known as “moon cups”) have been round since the 1930s, and it’s been a bloody lengthy interval since we’ve seen a lot innovation in that class. Emm simply closed a $1 million spherical of funding so as to add some smarts. The firm provides an applicator and an app monitoring function to assist control issues.

We spoke with the corporate’s founder to be taught extra about the place she sees the market going within the close to future.

“What drives me is the firm belief that information about your body can make a life-altering difference to your health outcomes. That’s why what we’re doing at Emm is important — we’re addressing health with our sensing platform and we’re also addressing quality of life with product performance. And that combination of innovation in technology with design is magic,” says Emm founder & CEO Jenny Button in an interview with TechCrunch. “My vision for the next generation of consumer health technology makes me the perfect person to run Emm, and it means that my team (who help bring that vision to life) and I are working to deliver meaningful impact in what’s one of the most important sectors in the world.”

The Emm and the accompanying app. Image Credits: Emm.

The £891,000 spherical ($1.1 million) got here from a mixture of angel teams and the federal government org Innovate UK. The purpose of the spherical is to rent the core workforce, and work towards broader market validation. The firm is at the moment in a stage of beta testing, and is planning a product launch subsequent 12 months. The firm has been engaged on creating and testing its product for the previous two years.

Emm isn’t the primary sensible menstrual cup available on the market. Most notably, Looncup took a stab at the market with a Kickstarter project again in 2015, which raised $160,000 or so, and was scheduled to ship its merchandise in 2016. From the backer comments, it seems that the product by no means shipped, and the last update from the Looncup team was that the corporate obtained FDA approval in 2019. Looncup didn’t reply to a request for a remark for this text.

“Our ultimate goal is to progress individual and collective health through new and unique bio-data. And if it all goes to plan, consumers will have access to tools that don’t currently exist that will provide unique insight into how their body is working and their state of health,” explains Button. “This means they’ll be able to manage their healthcare better thanks to this next generation of wearable technology.”

Like many companies, the corporate had a variety of wobbles over the previous couple of years, largely as a consequence of provide chain disruptions.

“My favorite thing about working on Emm is working with a brilliant team of designers, researchers, engineers and scientists who are equally passionate and committed to improving health outcomes,” Button says.