Hormones play a massive role in when and how easily women can get pregnant, but research and resources in this area are lacking. Mira is looking to change that.
Mira is an at-home, palm-sized hormone testing device women use to test their urine for their hormone levels. Mira’s corresponding app deciphers their results and spots patterns which help women better plan for the right time to try to get pregnant or know when it’s time to bring up potential issues with their doctor.
Sylvia Kang, the co-founder and CEO of Mira, said on a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Found podcast that she was inspired to launch the company because she thought there should be a better way for women to plan fertility that wasn’t just an ovulation tester, which tests if you are currently ovulating, or costly IVF. Kang got further conviction when she realized how little the medical industry knew about the space.
“There were so many activity trackers, like a Fitbit for your general health, and also we’re already sending people to moon, you know, it’s the 21st century, but the female hormone tracking and the fertility understanding was still really, really lacking,” Kang said.
Kang said she decided to make Mira an at-home testing device because when she launched Mira in 2017, it was the peak two trends: building internet-of-thing devices and direct-to-consumer products.
When she launched, many investors struggled to get it. Kang said that if an investor had experienced fertility issues themselves or through a partner, they understood it, but if they hadn’t, this issue just didn’t make sense to them.
“Our consumer, you know, the education is there,” Kang said on women understanding their hormonal cycle. ” We could understand our data. Just like you go to see a doctor, you should own your test results. You should understand what’s happening so I can control my body. And so that was the the goal and was kind of like a driving force behind this.”
Kang said that Mira’s future will go beyond just being an IoT consumer device company. The company tracks and anonymizes every users’ results which means it’s building up a database of information on women’s health that could potentially fill the data void that helped inspire the company.
“This will really drive women’s health to the new level,” Kang said. “It’s not just like, oh, consumers tracking this at home, and then they just, it’s good to know. It’s not just good to know. It’s what you must have, what you must understand. So we’re actively working on that and this.”