Oova turns a urine strip and a phone camera into quantitative hormone testing - and it is quietly changing how women navigate fertility, PCOS, and perimenopause.
Aparna "Amy" Divaraniya was finishing a PhD in genetics and genomic sciences at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine when a doctor told her she had polycystic ovary syndrome. The diagnosis was wrong. What followed was 18 months of trying to conceive with the same tools available to every other woman in America: a calendar app that guessed and an ovulation stick that answered yes or no. For a scientist who spent her days building biomarker strategies in oncology and immunology, the gap was absurd. Her lab could quantify almost anything. Her bathroom could quantify nothing.
Oova, the company she founded in 2017 as a spinout from Mount Sinai's Institute for Next Generation Healthcare, is her answer to that gap. The premise is plain to state and hard to execute: measure real hormone levels, at home, every day, and let the numbers - not population averages - tell a woman what her body is doing.
The product looks unassuming. A woman urinates on a test strip, scans it with her phone camera, and the Oova app converts the strip's chemistry into quantitative readings of three hormones: luteinizing hormone (LH), an estrogen metabolite (E3G), and a progesterone metabolite (PdG). The company says its readings deliver lab-quality sensitivity, and its algorithms - trained on more than 30,000 menstrual cycles - build a personal baseline for each user rather than assuming her cycle matches a textbook.
That last detail is the quiet radicalism of the thing. Most cycle-tracking software is built on the mythical 28-day cycle. Oova's system is built on the assumption that your cycle is yours, which is precisely why it works for the women other tools fail: those with PCOS, irregular cycles, or bodies in the long hormonal weather system of perimenopause.
Oova's technical wager is that the smartphone camera is good enough to be a lab instrument. The strips use immunoassay chemistry; the app reads the result optically and translates it into a number. Each hormone tells a different part of the story.
Luteinizing hormone. Its surge signals that ovulation is imminent - the classic fertility window marker, but here as a measured curve rather than a yes/no line.
An estrogen metabolite. Oova's perimenopause kit introduced what the company calls a first-of-its-kind at-home E3G biomarker for tracking the menopause transition.
A progesterone metabolite. Rising PdG after the LH surge confirms that ovulation actually happened - the difference between predicting and knowing.
A morning urine sample on an Oova test strip - no blood draw, no lab appointment, no wearable to charge.
The app reads the strip with the phone camera and converts the result into quantitative hormone values.
AI compares today's numbers to a personal baseline and delivers daily insights, cycle predictions, and pattern alerts.
The competitive field is crowded on paper. Calendar apps like Flo predict cycles from historical dates. Drugstore ovulation kits detect an LH surge as a binary event. Hardware rivals such as Mira, Inito, and Proov also read strips at home. Oova's differentiation is a stack of choices: multi-hormone quantitative data, a personal baseline instead of a population average, a second product line for perimenopause, and - unusually for a consumer femtech brand - deep clinical distribution. The company's platform is recognized by ASRM, ACOG, and The Menopause Society, and its provider dashboard lets a fertility doctor watch a patient's hormone curves between appointments.
*Company-reported increase in successful pregnancies among fertility patients using Oova. **Oova's 2024 State of Perimenopause report: share of women who weren't sure they were in perimenopause. Figures are company/report claims, not independent audits.
Oova runs a hybrid model that most startups are warned away from. On the consumer side, it sells the Fertility Hormone Kit and the Perimenopause Hormone Kit direct-to-consumer - the perimenopause kit launched at $159.99 with 30 tests - plus a membership introduced alongside the 2023 Series A that bundles discounted monthly kits, one-on-one expert consultations, and community access. On the clinical side, the HIPAA-compliant dashboard turns the same daily data into a remote patient monitoring tool for fertility practices and women's health clinics.
The two channels feed each other. A woman who starts with a retail kit can share her data with her doctor; a clinic that prescribes Oova creates a retail customer. It is a small company doing this - roughly 14 employees on an estimated $2 million in annual revenue, per Apollo data - but the strategy shows in the cap table. The $10.3 million Series A, led by Spero Ventures in June 2023, brought in US Fertility (a clinical network), Virgin Group and Spanx founder Sara Blakely (consumer brand power), Samsung Next (hardware and sensors), plus Jefferson Health, Connecticut Innovations, and investor Hannah Bronfman.
Partnerships follow the same logic. A 2019 pilot with supplement maker Thorne Research put the fertility mapping tool in homes early. The 2024 State of Perimenopause report arrived with collaborations across Midi Health, Evernow, and Kindra - three companies that treat the symptoms Oova measures. And in 2025, an Oura Ring integration began syncing sleep and recovery data alongside hormone curves in the Oova app, a small but telling step toward a connected women's health data layer.
The newest act is pattern recognition. In September 2025, Oova announced that analysis of its 30,000-plus cycle dataset lets it identify 15 distinct perimenopause hormone patterns and connect them to symptoms - hot flashes, insomnia, mood changes - before they arrive. If fertility was the acute problem that built the dataset, perimenopause is the chronic market the dataset now unlocks.
| Round | Amount | Date | Key Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEED | $1M | Mar 2019 | Special Situations Life Sciences Innovation Fund (lead), Company Ventures, angels |
| SERIES A | $10.3M | Jun 2023 | Spero Ventures (lead), US Fertility, Virgin Group, Samsung Next, Jefferson Health, Connecticut Innovations, Sara Blakely, Hannah Bronfman |
| TOTAL | ~$13.7M | - | Across all rounds to date |
Amy Divaraniya spins Oova out of Mount Sinai's Institute for Next Generation Healthcare after her own misdiagnosis and fertility struggle.
A $1M seed round closes; a pilot with Thorne Research brings the fertility mapping tool into homes.
The FDA-registered kit and AI-powered app reach consumers, measuring LH and PdG daily.
Spero Ventures leads a $10.3M round; Oova launches its membership model the same news cycle - and debuts the Perimenopause Hormone Kit with the E3G biomarker in December.
Oova publishes survey data showing widespread perimenopause uncertainty and announces collaborations with Midi Health, Evernow, and Kindra.
Sleep data meets hormone curves via Oura, and Oova unveils technology identifying 15 distinct perimenopause hormone patterns.
For a woman trying to conceive, Oova identifies the real fertile window and confirms ovulation happened - the company reports a 46% increase in successful pregnancies among fertility patients using the platform. For someone with PCOS or irregular cycles, it replaces failed calendar math with measured data. For a woman in her 40s wondering whether her insomnia and mood swings are perimenopause, the kit can put a number and a stage to the question her doctor may have answered with "wait and see." And for clinicians, it turns the space between appointments - where most of the hormonal story happens - into visible data. Oova's cycle-day research has also reached the peer-reviewed literature, in the journal Medicina in 2023.
Divaraniya's founding logic still holds the company together: the tools existed to measure everything except the thing half the population most needed measured. Oova's fix was not a moonshot device. It was a test strip, a camera, and the stubborn insistence that women deserve numbers.