Unravel Health raises £2.5M pre-seed for at-home hormone testing

Unravel Health, a London femtech founded in 2024, has raised a £2.5 million pre-seed round co-led by Conduit EIS Impact Fund and Wrightwood to bring the Micro Lab, its palm-sized saliva hormone reader, to first users in 2027.

Hormone testing in Europe still means a blood draw, a waiting room and a result that captures exactly one day of a system that moves every day. And yet the cheques to change that keep landing – small, early and increasingly pointed at hardware rather than another tracking app. Below, I lay out the round, the decade of Glasgow science behind the device, and the market this £2.5 million is walking into.

Two co-leads and a first close above £2 million

The round, announced on 16 October, is a £2.5 million pre-seed co-led by Conduit EIS Impact Fund and Wrightwood, joined by Leo Capital, Embryo Ventures, Hermesa and returning investor Zinc, the London venture builder where the company first took shape. More than £2 million of it has already closed, with the remaining investors expected to be onboarded in the coming weeks, per the company’s announcement.

The money has three jobs: external studies comparing the device’s readings against established lab methods, development of additional hormone markers, and the start of the regulatory approval process. First early-access devices are planned for 2027, reaching users through partners in pharmacy, digital health and clinical research rather than a direct consumer launch.

“Women’s hormonal health is one of the largest under-served markets in healthcare,” said Eva-Maria Dimitriadis, managing partner at Conduit EIS Impact Fund, in the announcement. An impact fund built on the UK’s EIS tax relief co-leading a diagnostics round is a very British way to finance hardware this early – and it works.

Ten years of Glasgow science in a palm-sized box

Unravel Health was founded in 2024 by Veronika Bridgman (CEO), Liza Levy (CCO) and Dr Alexandra Oti (CMO). The Micro Lab reads oestradiol – the main form of oestrogen – plus three other key hormones from a saliva sample in minutes, at home. The underlying technology was developed over ten years at the University of Glasgow and is protected by three granted patents, the company says. The pitch sits in the gap between two imperfect options: blood tests that capture a single day, and wearables that only estimate what hormones are doing.

Before this round the team had raised more than £1 million from Innovate UK, the Medical Research Council, SBRI and strategic angels alongside Zinc – the patient, grant-fed route UK deep tech knows by heart. A Slush 100 selection this year added the visibility that pre-seed hardware rarely gets. “Reading hormones in saliva outside a lab has been our Everest,” Bridgman said in the announcement. Everest is the right scale: repeated, reliable hormone measurement outside a lab is something European healthcare systems simply do not offer today.

A $45.6 billion market that still runs on lab visits

The global femtech market was worth $45.6 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach $145.5 billion by 2033, a 15.5% CAGR from 2026 (Grand View Research, July 2026). No reliable sizing yet exists for saliva-based hormone diagnostics as its own segment – it is too new – but a 15.5% growth rate on the broader category means the market more than triples while a company founded in 2024 grows up inside it.

Our fundraising data shows how early this corner is. Flouria Health, another women’s hormonal health startup in our records, raised a €1.5 million round led by Healthy.Capital at the start of October; Unravel’s £2.5 million is only the second hormonal-health round we have tracked this month. Compare the week’s other UK health story, Microbiotica’s £36 million Series C, and the pattern is plain: the later-stage money still goes to therapeutics, while diagnostics is being rebuilt from pre-seed up.

EIS money and femtech’s hardware turn

So what does a £2.5 million pre-seed actually signal? Three things we are seeing across Europe. First, women’s health is moving from the app layer to measurement: the last generation of femtech asked users to log symptoms, this one builds sensors. Second, the investor mix matters – an EIS impact fund, a cluster of early-stage firms and a venture builder doubling down is a syndicate shape that keeps showing up in UK health hardware, where grant money from Innovate UK carries companies to the point venture can price them. Third, the round is staged honestly: equivalency studies before claims, partners before consumers, regulatory work before scale.

The good news is the proof point is already defined. The thing to watch is not a launch event but a dataset: the external studies putting the Micro Lab’s saliva readings against established lab methods. If those hold, a device founded on Glasgow chemistry starts to look like infrastructure for a market the size of the one above.

Remember: the goal is not another wellness gadget. It is lab-grade measurement moving into the home, for a half of the population that healthcare has measured one snapshot at a time. Watch the 2027 data – this corner of femtech will not stay a corner for long. The opportunity is clear.