Eli Health Raises $3.6 Million To Improve Women's Health With Saliva

Thomas Cortina and Marina Pavlovic Rivas, cofounders of Eli Health

Hormone fluctuations affect a broad range of conditions, transitions, and symptoms experienced by women from puberty to post-menopause. These fluctuations impact not only menstrual cycles but also various aspects of women's physical and mental health.

Apart from being related to reproductive health - menopause, fertility, and contraception, hormones are behind endocrine conditions, which means that hormones impact much more than reproductive cycles. They drive conditions, transitions, and symptoms women experience daily. They influence how we feel, yet, in many cases, they remain a black box for most of us - our access to data on this topic is infrequent and incomplete at best.

"Despite the popularity of at-home hormone urine tests for people trying to conceive, the only options for people outside of fertility remain limited to traditional labs or send-out tests. Those options are not appropriate for high-frequency and long-term testing, due to high costs and waiting time. It's like the difference between checking your heart rate once a year during a doctor's visit, versus having that information readily available on your wrist at all times. This white space on the market leaves women with no other choice than to rely on anecdotes instead of data when making many of their health and wellness decisions," starts her story Marina Pavlovic Rivas, cofounder of Eli Health, a women's health company on a mission to improve lifelong health through continuous hormone monitoring. Eli Health provides real-time insights into hormone levels through saliva testing, which can be continuously tracked over time, unlike traditional testing methods or tests, which only provide a single snapshot of hormone levels.

Today the company announced the closing of a $3.6 million ($5 million CAD) seed round with a diverse group of healthcare and technology investors, including longtime supporters. Led by Muse Capital, a Los Angeles-based venture capital firm that focuses on underserved markets such as women's health, the round also included participation from San Francisco-based firms RH Capital and Cake Ventures. RH Capital is focused on improving clinical outcomes for all women, while Cake Ventures’ focus includes the increased spending power of women and aging/longevity. Based on data from Femtech Canada, Eli's funding to date (a total of $6.6 million or $9 million CAD) represents the largest amount ever raised by a women's health company led by a female CEO in Canada and is the second-largest overall in the women's health category in the country.

"The profile of our investors speaks to the promise of Eli. Many have strong thesis around women's health and have extensively monitored the space for years," shares Pavlovic Rivas.

Together with her cofounder Thomas Cortina, Pavlovic Rivas started the company out of a personal need. Like many women, she was looking for a hormone-free and non-invasive contraceptive method that makes no compromise on effectiveness and was stunned by the few options available to her (and the number of women who shared the same dissatisfaction with the methods available).

"My life partner and I, each having founded our respective technology startup prior, realized that we could create a solution by combining our strengths: his expertise in developing sensor-based technologies as an engineer and mine applying machine learning for decision-making as a data scientist," she adds.

In their conversations with hundreds of women, physicians, and researchers, they soon realized that the contraception problem was in fact a subset of a much broader one and that the data they needed to meet their contraceptive needs was also the data that women needed across all stages of life – and that was missing.

"The idea for Eli arose after I stopped dismissing the side effects I was experiencing from hormonal contraception. However, it wasn't until I listened to the stories of countless women to build the right solution that I realized I had been disregarding symptoms resulting from hormonal fluctuations in other areas of my health. Like so many women, I had normalized these symptoms as a regular part of life that we should simply accept, when in fact, there is much we can do to optimize our health with access to the right information."

Eli Health's team is composed of 80% of women, including the scientists and engineers who developed the breakthrough technology behind the product. According to Pavlovic Rivas, they had to develop a technology from the ground up, so Eli's scientific breakthroughs are a result of years of R&D.

"From the outset, we placed user experience at the center, recognizing that seamless integration into everyday routines is crucial. Our benchmark was teeth brushing: it had to be at least as easy for users, if not easier. That's why we chose saliva. Measuring salivary hormones in the order of magnitude of a trillionth of a gram is incredibly challenging," explains Pavlovic Rivas.

Eli Health makes continuous hormone monitoring possible with three simple steps: collect saliva, ... [+] insert the test into the reader (pictured left), and get results on the app (pictured right)

During the years that lead up to menopause, hormones fluctuate immensely. Women spend more than a third of their lives in different stages of this transition, and by 2030, a projected 1.2 billion women worldwide will experience it. 93% of menopausal women are interested in tech solutions to alleviate symptoms, AARP estimates.

"Our mission is to enable women to understand how hormone fluctuations influence their symptoms daily and provides guidance on how to address them. Use of Eli creates a continuous feedback loop where women can receive recommendations, implement them, and measure results," says Pavlovic Rivas. By measuring how an individual's lifestyle and healthcare choices affect their hormonal health goals, the company aims to enable users to understand the importance of hormones as a fundamental aspect of overall health and longevity and how their choices affect their hormones in real time.

The company's initial launch will focus on menopause, fertility, and general health needs, with the plan to expand in other areas such as contraception and endocrine conditions in a future phase, once the additional regulatory and clinical work required is completed.

"We are starting with the hormones progesterone, estradiol, and cortisol and have developed a fully integrated R&D infrastructure in our Montreal facilities that will allow us to expand this test pipeline rapidly."

Part of Eli's R&D team at their Montreal facility

So far, the company has conducted several research partnerships with academic institutions, including a collaboration with McGill University to confirm the validity of saliva for hormone monitoring. Beyond its direct-to-consumer strategy, Eli Health aims to leverage this partnership approach to ensure greater access to its product and aims to team up with companies that have a substantial existing user base. "This way, we can accelerate the adoption of continuous hormone monitoring and make it accessible to more individuals," adds Pavlovic Rivas.

All investors in this funding round, especially females, were extremely positive when talking about Eli Health's innovation. Rachel Springate, Founding Partner at Muse Capital, shared how she believes "Eli's groundbreaking approach will have a transformative impact on the lives of millions of women worldwide," while Dr. Alice Zheng, MD, Principal at RH Capital added how this technology will "allow for daily testing with timely results that have never been possible before."

"Female longevity is directly tied to a woman's hormonal health and for far too long, women have had to make hormonal health decisions based on anecdotes and not data," shared Monique Woodard, Managing Director at Cake Ventures, with me in an email. "Today, Eli Health is delivering the scientific breakthroughs that make hormonal health tracking easier and help women (alongside our chosen medical professionals) decide what to do with that data. Its team is well positioned to scale this innovative approach and we are honored to support them."

Collecting hormonal data continuously and over a lifetime, Eli Health aims to create "the first large-scale, longitudinal data set on daily hormone levels in history", as per Pavlovic Rivas. By making this happen, medical and research communities would be provided with the means to address unmet needs in women's health that were impossible to meet without this data, as well as a scalable, low-cost method that enables collecting it.

One of the reasons often cited for the lack of female representation in clinical trials is the increased cost and complexity associated with controlling for hormonal fluctuations in women. Facilitating the easier inclusion of women in clinical trials, whose results can impact all aspects of our health, could be transformative in filling a historical data gap.

"We believe Eli will one day become the next toothbrush. How many of us really think before we brush our teeth? We just do. Similarly, we hope it can become commonplace to just check your hormonal levels and aid your decisions based on them. Imagine a personal dashboard that can enable you not only to identify the root cause of your symptoms but also to prevent future conditions. This knowledge could enable a personalized and proactive approach that can benefit everyone's health at scale," concludes Pavlovic Rivas.