The German Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, known as SPRIND, is launching a three-year challenge focused on continuous hormone monitoring, with a total budget of €40 million and up to €6 million in non-dilutive funding per team, with the broader goal of building out an industry from what today consists largely of isolated, underfunded research efforts.
The challenge is being designed and led by Ida Tin, the Clue founder who coined the term femtech. After repeated conversations in which Tin pushed SPRIND to address women’s health, which it had not done before, the agency asked her to scope a challenge in the space. She spent three months on the design before being hired to run the program she had built.
Why this can’t come from venture capital alone
Tin is candid about how hard the underlying science is. Sex steroid hormones are difficult to detect: They are small molecules that fold on themselves, metabolize quickly, and circulate at extremely low concentrations. “Imagine a sugar cube in an Olympic-size pool,” she said. “That’s the level of sensitivity required.”
The technical challenge is solvable, in her view. “I’m confident we can make the technology work within the next five years,” she said. The harder question is the system around it: Data interpretation, model-building, the basic research required to understand what continuous hormone data actually means physiologically, the regulatory pathways, business models, and clinical adoption. “It’s an enormously complex system.”
What concerns her is the structural mismatch between how this work currently gets funded and what the science actually requires. Venture-backed companies in the space are under pressure to ship something to market quickly. Several have raised capital on the vision of continuous monitoring and are now launching products that are not, in fact, continuous, while continuing to develop the underlying technology in the background. “It actually slows down the continuous part,” she said. “It’s a symptom of the funding environment.”
The case, in her framing, is for non-dilutive public capital that can move on a research timeline rather than a market one.
The program structure
The Continuous Hormone Monitoring Challenge has just opened applications, with a jury selecting up to eight teams to enter Stage 1 on July 13, 2026. Over three subsequent twelve-month stages, the field will narrow to six teams, then four, with the program concluding in June 2029. Selected teams will be at Technology Readiness Level 3, meaning their core technology is close to functional in a lab environment.
Each team is required to develop a biosensor capable of continuously measuring at least four target analytes from a defined panel that includes estrogen, progesterone, luteinizing hormone, follicle-stimulating hormone, testosterone, cortisol, and the thyroid panel, over at least seven consecutive days.
Teams will receive mentorship, meet in person twice a year, and be embedded in an industry network that SPRIND is assembling around the program.
A central element of the program is a shared reference data pool: A validated dataset on hormone levels, fluctuations, and concentrations across population groups, life stages, and health states. No such dataset exists today. The intent is for the pool to outlive the program, eventually housed in a European biobank or similar institution as an open resource. “This is something that one company cannot build alone,” Tin said. “It requires collaborative work.”
Ethics, by design
Continuous hormone data is, by definition, deeply sensitive, with obvious risks of misuse. Tin treats ethics as foundational to the program rather than a downstream consideration. Every participating team will be required to set out the ethical framework covering the data protection and governance implications of the technology and its eventual business model. “It has to be built into our DNA as we develop solutions in this space,” Tin said. “Where does the data go? Who decides? How do we control it?”
Why Europe
Tin’s case for Europe is both structural and strategic. The regulatory environment is suited to sensitive health data, manufacturing capacity is in place, and the scientific expertise is present. Beyond those practical foundations, she frames the work itself as a competitiveness question for the continent. “Europe is extremely well positioned to be the place for this industry to be anchored,” she said.
The challenge itself is open to teams from across Europe and Israel, though Tin is explicit that the eventual ecosystem is meant to be global, with Europe as the starting point rather than the limit.
The bigger picture
The ideal outcome of the challenge is not a single winning product but a functioning ecosystem: Teams that go on to raise additional capital, industry partnerships that scale promising platforms, and researchers who build on the shared reference data pool.
The sensors are the foundation. A reliable continuous hormone biosensor is the breakthrough everything else depends on, and the reference data pool is what that breakthrough makes possible. Once the data exists, it becomes the empirical ground for re-examining a body of clinical knowledge that was largely built on a male physiological baseline.
“Female physiology is fundamentally different,” Tin said. “That means we have to rethink a lot of medicine and make it gender-specific. That’s massive.”
By the time the program concludes in 2029, the four remaining teams will need to demonstrate not just that their technology works, but that the data it produces is robust enough to begin that rethink.
