Jenny Button first thought of Emm during the COVID lockdown. She was using an Oura ring and the Whoop tracker and was receiving information about her body, but there was no device that could provide data on one of the most important aspects – reproductive and menstrual health.
“I thought it was crazy, because these are things that every woman wants to be able to watch and understand better,” she told TechCrunch. She thought to herself: Why not make a wearable device that can tell someone more about their reproductive health? He wrote a letter to one of the engineers at Dyson, made a connection, and began testing the idea.
“Five years later, after thousands of designs and iterations and extensive user testing, we’ve unveiled the world’s first smart menstrual cup,” said Button.
The UK-based company has also raised a $9m (£6.8m) round, led by Lunar Ventures as it prepares to officially launch its product next year.
The product works like a normal menstrual cup — designed to store menstrual blood instead of absorbing it. But Emm’s medical-grade silicone is “equipped with ultra-thin, advanced sensor technology.” This sensor collects data that will help users understand patterns about their cycles. Button hopes it could “transform the research, diagnosis and treatment of menstrual and reproductive health conditions.”
She’s not the only one who thinks so. Other femtech founders told the Guardian a few months ago that menstrual blood was a “missed opportunity for women’s health” that could provide information not available from circulating blood-based health tests.
It could, for example, help diagnose painful and often misdiagnosed medical conditions like endometriosis.
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“One in ten women today suffer from endometriosisButton said. “A condition that, like many in reproductive health, takes an average of seven to 10 years to be diagnosed.”
This delay “is largely due to a lack of meaningful data and poor characterization of menstrual health in clinical settings,” Button believes. “There have been no reliable tools to accurately and objectively monitor this aspect of health until now.”
Beyond endometriosis, he added that one in three women face “serious reproductive health problems” throughout their lives.
Data collected by the Emm app is encrypted and stored securely with two-factor authentication. “They are also always anonymized or pseudonymized,” meaning personal identifiers are removed or replaced with codes, “and will only be accessed by the people at Emm who really need it,” he said.
Button used the word “strategic” to describe her funding round and said she connected with her lead investor through her network. Others in the round include Alumni Ventures (which backed Oura), The Labcorp Venture Fund and BlueLion Global. The money will be used to launch the product in the UK market next year, he said, adding that the waiting list has already exceeded 30,000 pre-orders for it to be released soon.
The capital will also be used for research and development. Button hopes to enter the US market in early 2027.
“Menstrual health is just the jumping off point for Emm,” Button said. “Ultimately, I think we’ll have a profound impact on women’s health more broadly,” she continued, adding that she hopes to expand the product one day, perhaps into diagnostics, other digital care tools, and even therapeutics.
“Our mission is to accelerate diagnosis, equip people with the data to advocate for themselves and ultimately help them take control of their bodies and their health journeys,” she said.
