A jury convened in Leipzig and selected the eight teams to compete for the €40 million SPRIND Continuous Hormone Monitoring Challenge in Europe’s first government-backed race to develop biosensors that measure at least four hormones 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 make women’s health a recognized investment category.

For Tin, this challenge represents a theory of change that goes beyond apps. “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.”

That gap, she argues, 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 that data gap extend far beyond reproductive health, which is precisely what makes continuous hormone monitoring such 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.”

Modern medicine, she points out, 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, or PCOS, to better reflect the condition’s hormonal and metabolic complexity rather than its most misunderstood symptom; 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 are making 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, each pursuing a different technical approach 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. It is the shared reference dataset SPRIND is building alongside them. It 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 the market won’t—either because they are too technologically complex, or because they require long-term financing that traditional venture capital has no incentive to provide. For far too long, women’s health has been such a sector par excellence.”

The funding structure reflects that logic, with up to €6 million available per team across three stages.

The eight Stage 1 teams illustrate exactly why SPRIND backed multiple approaches at once: MoleSense’s sweat-based aptamer platform, sThesis’s non-invasive mid-infrared optical sensing, Level Zero Health’s skin-worn electrochemical patch, Kāhu SiliconBio’s silicon chip powered by living molecular machinery, Biomarq Health’s year-long implantable sensor, Oxense Bio’s glucose monitor-inspired enzymatic system, Impli’s needle-based device targeting PMOS, and PHOEBE—a photonic wearable patch from a team currently in stealth mode.

Femtech Has A Funding Gap. Awareness Is The Real Problem

Ask Tin where the real bottleneck is—capital, research design, regulatory structure—and her answer is more uncomfortable than any of those. “I think it’s an awareness problem,” she states. “I think it’s a cultural problem before anything else. The second people put their minds to it, they’ll get things done.”

The commercial market has been building out, with companies across Europe, the US, and Australia racing to develop wearable and minimally invasive biosensors for direct hormone measurement. The continuous hormone monitoring market, valued at $325.7 million in 2025, is projected to reach $716.2 million by 2035, within a broader hormonal health opportunity estimated at $600 billion, which includes expert-informed data to be scientifically evaluated and cleared by a regulatory body.

Yet structural capital remains scarce at the stage that matters most. “There’s literally not a single later-stage venture fund for femtech,” Tin points out. “We have the data, we know you can make money and save money.” Once proof exists, she argues, the math changes entirely: “Once some of these things are shown to work, then we don’t need 40 million, then we need 400 million to get this going.”

The Leaking Infrastructure And What Comes Next

Tin’s closing argument is the one she offered unprompted, and it is the most direct translation of this problem for anyone who has not lived it. “Women’s bodies are the infrastructure that our energy runs through,” she argues, “and right now this system is leaking, and it’s very costly.”

The mind shift she is working toward is equally direct. “I would like it if we had a mind shift where we went from thinking of women’s health as a burden on society and rather thought of it as an incredible investment area where you would get a return.” That return, she adds, flows not just to private investors but to society; through lower IVF costs, faster diagnoses, more precise hormone therapies, and AI models trained on data that actually reflects how women’s bodies work rather than how medicine assumed they did.

The SPRIND challenge is also a hedge against the next risk Tin identifies: the reproduction of existing gender biases inside AI. Without intentional data collection and labeling across gender, the new digital baseline will mirror the old male one, at scale and at speed.

The goal is not a single winning product but a functioning ecosystem; shared data, scaled platforms, and the reference dataset that may ultimately matter more than any individual biosensor.

The operating system, Tin believes, is finally getting its first real read.