It has been a tough few years for Berlin-based femtech hardware startup Inne which came out of stealth R&D in the fall of 2019. Eirini Rapti told us that she was busy making final inspections before the launch of its debut product, a connected device it calls a minilab.
Hardware startup are not always smooth sailing. Rapti and her team had to contend with a cascade of new challenges around supply chain and logistics. The startup had lined up a US university to study its hormone-tracking method for a key contraceptive use-case, but it could not bring the product to market because of the swine flu.
Inne was forced to freeze its big launch as it tried to figure out how to move forward in a challengingly reconfigured environment.
Rapti says that they had to shift around their plans due to the issues with the supply chain. What happened is unbelievable.
I remember our last interview in October, I was very optimistic, and I'm looking forward to getting all of our tech out to the world. When I spoke to you, we were setting up our production line. The contraceptive study was agreed to by John Hopkins. I came back from a last inspection of the goods coming off the production line in January 2020 and we were not really aware of what was happening in China but we were busy with pre-sales.
We didn't know if we were going to get raw materials from China. We didn't know if the factories in Europe would be able to have people in the factory.
Femtech startup Inne takes the wraps off a hormone tracker and $8.8M in funding
The planned contraception study was delayed as the US research institution which had agreed to conduct it prioritised work related to COVID-19 itself.
Rapti kicked off R&D to get the at- home hormone testing product to market after she founded Inne, but the business was hit with a shock freeze on its best laid plans.
We got our approval to sell the device in Europe and we are launching pre-sales. I think we had 200 people buy the product and then we had to stop because we didn't know if we could deliver them.
Inne doubled the size of its team to prepare for scaling after having to suspend its production line. Rapti was told that the investment world wanted to slow everything down.
The supply chain and logistics disruption forced Inne to concentrate most of its effort on the German market because we wanted to.
She explains that the electronic chip shortages are affecting everyone, but it is also as simple as the back-up on logistics. It was the first time in my career that I had no idea what I would be able to show in the next six months, and I was sitting there for a few months.
Rapti was facing a big decision over how to move forward in the summer of 2020 as it still hadn't found a replacement partner to do the study, and there was no new date on when it would be able to launch contraception.
It was not clear when the startup would be able to raise more funding. She needed to consider burn rate and decide whether to let staff go to give the startup the best chance of surviving.
The choice was between cutting everything back, keeping a bare minimum of staff to extend the runway, or reducing cash burn and launching the minilab.
Rapti said she was keen to keep the team she had built up. Even though Inne had to limit the number of devices shipped to make sure they could provide the full service to the first buyers, she saw an opportunity to learn about the market.
The first year we could circulate, I think, 500 devices. Rapti says that they closed last year with close to 2,000 customers.
The launch of Inne has been much different than Rapti had thought it would be.
She may not have expected the US Supreme Court to overturn the constitutional protections for abortion in the US, which was leaked earlier this month.
Rapti says she is horrified by what is happening to the US. I think it would be foolish to give women access to and understanding of their own data, instead of scrapping it because it could be used against them.
I think this would be a step backwards. As female health companies, our job is to defend the rights of our users and also make the data anonymous so that it cannot be traced back to the actual user.
Rapti argues that there is a way to separate profile data that is used for marketing from health data generated by usage of the product, and that Inne's approach for the latter is currently to use double encryption and split usage data.
She says the startup would create more protections for user data if the law threatens 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 anonymity as much as possible. I see it as our job. If we want to protect our users, we need to be on top of legislative lobbying, and make fast changes to our product in the way that data is structured.
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The extension to the Series A round was closed in 2019. It is taking an additional $10 million so it can stock up on raw materials and retool its production line. The expansion to the Series A is led by DSM Ventures, with Borski Fund and Calm Storm Ventures also participating, along with a number of angels.
Rapti plans to expand its product offering to include another hormone test for cortisol, which can be useful for athletic performance, as well as for links to wider.
The first steps outside Europe will be via a US partnership with a women's health brand called Phenology. The tie-up will be focused on perimenopause, so Inne will be getting a toe in the water in that major market while it waits for regulatory clearance for its digital contractive.
The US partner will offer Inne's device to a subset of its users as a way to track changes in their hormones during the early stage of the menopause. Hologram Sciences, the parent company of Phenology, shares an investor with Inne, the venture arm of DSM.
It was clear that there was a synergy between the US and Europe and that they were not interested in contraception.
She says that Inne will be able to launch a contraceptive product in the first quarter of next year because of the contraceptive study that will be done this year with a new partner in Europe. That will put it in competition with Natural Cycles, a digital contraceptive, and a period tracking app.
The pieces needed to scale Inne's hormone-tracking femtech business look to be in place.
Rapti decided to go ahead and launch in the middle of the Pandemic because she wanted to see who buys the product.
Inne is one of the image credits.
It took me a long time to find the science and data science team that would have been worse off in the long run.
When Inne finally launches its rival contraception, it will face more competition. In a novel space where women must be convinced they can trust new entrants, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Going ahead and launching with just fertility and cycle tracking allowed Inne to road-test its team as it transitioned into commercial operations. It had a chance to iron out operational and service issues with a small customer base, as it expands both its production capacity and the product's feature set with the help of the extra Series A funding.
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We attract women who have had several miscarriages or have had hormonal issues because they are on the less regular side of the cycle. Rapti says that the data is biased towards irregularity and that users tend to be computer savvy and active on social media.
Ages of users range from 18 to 50s, but with a peak age of 28 to 38.
Inne can tell users if they have ovulated or not, which in turn could help them detect a month when they have not ovulated, which could help them understand challenges they may be having. For some, hormone tracking may be helpful to navigate irregular menstrual cycles.
Rapti says that the beauty of progesterone is that it can really tell you if you're going to have a baby.
She says the majority of Inne's users are using it for fertility tracking to help them get pregnant, with a smaller proportion last year, but so far this year it's getting closer to 40%. She emphasizes that usage is fluid and a bit of a journey as women's needs change.
She explains that there are two modes in the app, one of which is to cycle track, but with hormones, or to get pregnant.
Rapti wants the product to be able to offer something all the way from the first period to the last period.
Rapti says that the forthcoming cortisol test will give users the ability to understand if they are going through a long period of stress that may be affecting their fertility or sports performance.
If users choose to include cortisol tracking in their Inne subscription, they will be sent a mix of testing strips. The cortisol test is different because it needs to be done multiple times per day, unlike the daily test, which should be taken within a three hour window in the morning.
Rapti says that you build the profile daily with cortisol. I do a test today and I do a test tomorrow to see how my stress is. 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.
Adding a second hormone test is not intended to address a broader range of users, but rather to encourage them to use the minilab more often, according to Rapit.
Eirini Rapti is the founder and CEO of Inne.
A major update to the next release of Inne's app will bring a raft of self- reporting options.
She says that they are launching 41 symptoms and events that people have asked for but which will also help us give more specialist insights because they will correlate them with hormones in the coming months. They go from exercising to eating. There are different types of body pain.
The beauty of hormones is that you can see the chemical change, can we really link hormones to self-reported symptoms? She confirms that it is a long term correlation project. We didn't want to start with it because we wanted to make sure that hormonal data was always at the center stage so we needed a large data pool first to establish what we're doing and then try to see if it can correlate.
Here Inne's products looks as if it could push into quantified self, with potential utility overlap with a recent wave of biosensing startups and companies that are seeking to commercialise continuous glucose monitoring. There are similar questions over the wider consumer utility of that sort of biosensing.
One advantage Inne has is that it is non-invasive. If it only requires them to take a few test strips in their mouth a few times a month, then they will be more inclined to try something new.
Rapti says Inne's plan is not to break out a totally separate service around cortisol tracking, but rather to serve users who want a deeper experience.
Instead of selling new strips to a different woman, what I'm trying to say is that this is going to be your subscription and then you tell us what you're interested in. If you are interested in both stress and cycle tracking or fertility, we will send you strips of both every month and give you instructions on when to do it. We don't want to make upselling with new strips, we want to keep the price the same. She says that you will get a combination of strips for the same monthly price.
I had a lot of people in this raise who said that it would be great for men. I think it would be great for men, but how about we just give it to women?
There is more that Inne could do. How to create a clear marketing message around a product of this complexity is an obvious challenge.
Rapti says that women want to get specific about the benefits, which means finding a place where they can discover the product but also ask their own questions.
It is a very early market. I feel that women know that they can learn a lot about their bodies and that we should be able to track their hormones. That gap is our mission. Rapit says that they are like this is great but what exactly can you do for him?
What I can tell you is that the way we have been approaching it is to be very precise on what benefit they can get. Women get the chance to ask questions and to really understand if this will serve them or not, that's why social media works.
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