Listen to this articlekegg is an egg-shaped connected device made by medical silicon and gold that senses women’s cervical fluid and shows real time fertility insights on a phone app (available for Android and iOS). Below is our recent interview with Kristina Cahojova, CEO at kegg:
Q: Kristina, can you tell us something more about your core competence and technology behind kegg?
A: kegg is a 2-in-1 fertility tracker built to detect a woman’s fertile window. kegg can also be used by women when exercising their pelvic floor.
By using a technology called impedance, kegg senses changes in the vaginal environment and cervical fluid, so it is as precise as a woman’s body.
kegg is sensing the electrolyte levels in the cervical fluid to detect the hormonal switch from estrogen to progesterone dominance that accompanies ovulation. A minute electrical impulse at a specific frequency is emitted from the gold plated electrodes on the kegg and received by the other (this process is then reversed). By sensing the changing trends in the impedance, we’re able to detect the hormonal change and make a prediction to the user.
The entire process takes approximately 2 minutes daily. As a bonus, you can opt in to perform kegel exercises to help you strengthen your pelvic floor muscles.
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Q: Who would be your ideal customer and why?
A: Our ideal customers are women in their reproductive age, living in the United States (kegg is FDA-registered and available in the US only at the moment).
Our early adopters were mainly from California, Florida and Texas. Now that our e-commerce is officially launched, we have orders from every state in the USA. Most of them are in long-term relationships or married and likely to have been actively trying to conceive for more than 3 months. 50% are trying to conceive their first child, while the remaining are already mothers. Our customers have experience with BBT (body basal temperature charting) or LH tests (ovulation tests); what they like about our product is the convenience of kegg over other methods that either need to be worn throughout the night or used more frequently. Women from our community are overall interested in holistic fertility and wellness, not in medication.
Q: You’ve recently raised your new funding round; can you tell us something more?
A: We did Crowdfunding but as a sales channel and we don’t count it in the overall funding.
Majority of our investors are institutional ones. We are part of SOSV and we got a lot of connections from our participation in TMC (Texas Medical Center Accelerator for Innovation). Also, we are part of Start100 that helps consumer IoT companies kick-start their sales.
Being an immigrant woman raising money for a medical hardware that goes into vagina and vibrates is hard and most investors are men! They usually don’t question the size of the opportunity, but if ‘women really use something that goes into vagina daily’. Women most of the time have already an answer: we do insert kegg because it’s user friendly and it gives you instant insights that are crucial to know your fertility better.
Despite all of these ‘difficulties’, we raised convertible debt from femtech friendly funds and we also have many female investors.
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Q: What are your plans for the future? Do you have any new features in the pipeline?
A: Our company, Lady Technologies Inc., will continue to innovate in the science of fertility predictions as kegg collects more data from its many many users. We are continually improving our algorithms and app based on users’ feedback. We hope to expand beyond fertility to encompass perimenopause, menopause, postpartum and more as we collect more data. We are conducting ongoing research and studies to be able to always improve our product and to finally close the data gap about cervical fluid.
For kegg itself, we have plans to enhance its sensing capabilities and expand our partnerships in the fertility field. Moreover,kegg is currently being sold for a fixed price. In the future, we want to offer more to our users e.g.: connecting them to specialists to review their cycles or view of additional layers of information. Once we have enhanced services ready, we’ll look at switching to a subscription model.
Last Updated on November 22, 2020
