Femtech pioneer Ida Tin launches €40M continuous hormone monitoring challenge

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Publication Date: 2026-07-24 09:00:00

Europe’s First Government-Backed Biosensor Challenge Selects Eight Teams

A jury convened in Leipzig has selected eight teams to compete for the €40 million SPRIND Continuous Hormone Monitoring Challenge. It is Europe’s first government-backed race to develop biosensors capable of measuring at least four hormones continuously over seven days.

Leading the effort is Ida Tin, the Danish entrepreneur who founded the period-tracking app Clue in 2012 and coined the term “femtech” in 2016—a word that helped establish women’s health as a recognized investment category.

For Tin, this challenge represents a theory of change that extends beyond software. “Hormones have somehow stayed in a black box,” she observes. “We simply don’t have the technology to take these molecules and turn them into a data stream.”

She argues that this gap explains why a decade of femtech investment has not materially closed the diagnostic divide for the most common women’s health conditions.

Continuous Hormone Monitoring: The Operating System Nobody Can Read

The implications of this data gap extend far beyond reproductive health, making continuous hormone monitoring a high-stakes frontier. “Hormones are kind of the operating system of the body,” Tin explains. “They’re relevant not just to reproductive health, but cardiovascular health, bone health, cognitive health, and mental health. The list is actually almost like all of it.”

She points out that modern medicine was built around a different baseline entirely: “We have built modern medicine based on this image of a male with a steady backdrop with hormones, and that’s not what we have.”

The result is a system that treats hormonal variability as a complication rather than a core data source.

The cost of that blind spot is concrete:

• Endometriosis affects roughly 190 million women worldwide, yet diagnosis takes an average of seven to 10 years.
• Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS) —renamed in May 2026 from polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) to better reflect the condition’s hormonal and metabolic complexity—currently takes an average of three years to diagnose, even under its new name.
• IVF, which requires up to 10 clinic visits and repeated blood draws per cycle, offers success rates between 15% and 32%, largely because clinicians make decisions from hormonal snapshots that are already a day or two stale.

Tin points to the timing of interventions as one immediate application of continuous hormone data. Knowing not just whether to intervene but precisely when, she notes, “would lower the cost and lower the disappointments and the pain and the discomfort…and all the rest.”

Betting on the Race, Not the Horse

The SPRIND Challenge is structured around a deliberate departure from how venture capital typically bets on emerging technology. “We bet not on a horse, but on the race,” Tin notes. Eight teams are pursuing different technical approaches simultaneously, from biosensor patches to wearables to implants.

The technical mandate is demanding. Teams must directly measure at least four hormones from a defined panel—including estrogen, progesterone, LH, FSH, testosterone, and cortisol—continuously over at least seven consecutive days, within a biological matrix such as interstitial fluid, sweat, or saliva. Proxy signals like heart rate or skin temperature do not qualify. Each team must also demonstrate a concrete women’s health use case in which continuous data enable clinical decisions that single-point measurements cannot support.

The most underreported element of the challenge is not the biosensors themselves. It is the shared reference dataset SPRIND is building alongside them. This is the first standardized collection of continuous hormone data across ages, ethnicities, life stages, and health conditions. Tin argues that no single startup could build it alone. That dataset is the equivalent of the reference genome for hormones.

Jano Costard, head of challenges at SPRIND, frames the institutional logic plainly: “At SPRIND, our imperative is to fund technologies that...