UK healthtech company Hormona has been awarded a £99,972 grant from Innovate UK to develop AI-powered clinical decision support tools for perimenopause diagnosis across the NHS. The funding will transform the company’s consumer platform into clinical tools for healthcare providers.
The grant addresses a healthcare gap affecting 13 million UK women currently experiencing perimenopause or menopause. Despite this scale, 41% of medical schools report having no formal menopause training, leading to delayed diagnoses and misattributed symptoms.
Hormona’s solution uses AI-powered smartphone analysis of at-home hormone tests to detect reproductive hormones in urine, delivering results within 15 minutes. The technology will generate clinical reports aligned with NICE guidelines to support healthcare providers during standard 10-minute appointment slots.
“Half of GPs say they don’t have enough support to properly treat women with menopausal symptoms, and women are stuck having multiple appointments over months just to get the most basic level of help,” said Karolina Löfqvist, CEO and Co-founder of Hormona.
The economic impact is substantial. Unemployment due to menopause symptoms costs £1.5 billion annually, while lost productivity adds another £1.88 billion per year.
“Current perimenopause diagnosis is essentially guesswork – we’re asking women to describe complex hormonal changes to time-pressured clinicians without any objective data,” said Dr. Anna Targonskaya, Medical & Research Lead at Hormona.
The 12-month feasibility project will validate the platform for NHS integration and establish commercial models for adoption across public and private healthcare systems. Hormona aims to pilot the clinical platform with NHS providers by 2026.
The company recently raised $6.7 million in Series A funding.
