Clue, a Berlin-based period tracker and reproductive health companion, have raised €7 million in a funding round led by London-based Balderton Capital (also backed Brigad) and New York-based Union Square Ventures.
The German company will use the funds to scale Clue’s innovative digital family planning offering, expand the product portfolio, and continue research efforts to close the gender data gap.
Crowdfunding to bring the community closer
Besides funding from investors, Clue, for the first time in its history, will also extend an invitation to its user community to become investors via Crowdcube.
Consequently, community investors will be able to participate in and influence the Clue app’s development through feature polls, testing, and forums directly with the Clue team.
According to the company, Clue users will have exclusive access to participate ahead of the Crowdcube community on the 18th of April 2023, before the Crowdfund opens to the general public.
Anyone in the UK and EU can invest and become an owner for as little as €10 or as much as €100 000, at the same terms as Clue’s institutional investors.
Period tracker and reproductive health companion
Founded in 2012 by Ida Tin, Hans Raffauf, Mike LaVigne and Moritz von Buttlar, Clue helps women to better understand their menstrual cycle patterns and learn about their reproductive health.
While basic period tracking features are available for free, the premium subscription called “Clue Plus” offers subscribers additional evidence-based features and advanced insights.
Further, subscribers can also access modes like Clue Conceive, a CE-marked Clue feature to accompany users on their conception journey.
“The new mode has been warmly received with uptake growing by over 50% in the last three months, now accounting for 12% of paying Clue Plus users,” claims the company.
The company is focusing on scaling its digital female health and family planning tools. Clue intends to expand its product portfolio to include underserved life stages, including menopause, to become a true companion app for life – from the first period to the last.
Since launching ten years ago, users have tracked over 530 million cycles and contributed to groundbreaking research with carefully selected research partners at institutions like Stanford and Oxford.
Audrey Tsang, co-CEO of Clue, comments: “So many of us still end up hacking our solutions to health needs. Despite making up half the world’s population, the most common female health conditions still go unrecognised, under-researched, and underserved. We constantly hear from our community that they feel their experiences are unheard of or dismissed – except in Clue. We created Clue because health empowerment starts with a better understanding of your body. Having the language, and data, to describe your experience and advocate for yourself has a profound impact. The fact that it still takes an average of seven years to get an endometriosis diagnosis is just one example of how much work there still is to do in this space. We believe Clue is uniquely positioned to lead the change that’s needed, at scale, by leveraging our technology, deep community insights, and research to create empathetic, effective, and accessible solutions for the most frequently experienced challenges in female health.”
Carrie Walter, co-CEO of Clue, comments: “Clue has always been supported by some of the world’s leading investors, who understand that empowering women with knowledge and data to take charge of their reproductive health is a huge opportunity. Not just an opportunity to build a strong and sustainable business, but also for overdue social change. Today, we’re taking that one step further, by being the first menstrual and reproductive health app to invite our community to invest and become co-owners. After all, Clue only exists to serve this community, and because of their trust. So we see this as an exciting chance to connect with them in another way, benefitting from the depth of their engagement and diverse perspectives. We feel it closes an important circle to allow Clue users to participate in our success, also as investors.”
