Unravel Health raises £2.5M to put lab-grade daily hormone testing in the home

Unravel Health (London) has raised £2.5M — approximately €2.96M — in a pre-seed round. Conduit EIS Impact Fund and Wrightwood co-lead; Leo Capital, Embryo Ventures, Hermesa, and returning investor Zinc VC participate. The round completed a first close of over £2M on 14 October; a final close with remaining investors is expected in the coming weeks. The capital adds to more than £1M in prior non-dilutive grants from Innovate UK, the Medical Research Council, and SBRI.

The company — founded in 2024 by Veronika Bridgman (CEO), Liza Levy (CCO), and Dr. Alexandra Oti (CMO) — is developing the Micro Lab: a palm-sized device designed to read multiple hormones simultaneously from a saliva sample in minutes.

The problem: a blood test sees one day; a wearable can only estimate

Hormones drive a large share of women's health outcomes — PCOS, perimenopause, endometriosis, fertility, mood, metabolism — yet the available diagnostic tools are structurally mismatched to the problem. A blood test provides a single snapshot: informative but static, and dependent on a clinic visit. Wearables track the body continuously but cannot directly measure hormones; they infer them from proxy signals like basal temperature. The gap between "one reading a year" and "daily estimates with no direct measurement" is where Unravel is building.

The Micro Lab is designed to sit between those two tools: real hormone readings, at home, day after day. The initial application reads oestradiol — the main form of oestrogen — alongside three other key hormones simultaneously, in a single saliva sample. The technology was developed over ten years at the University of Glasgow and is protected by three granted patents.

The science, the round, and the regulatory clock

Bridgman's founding motivation is direct: she built her own hormone tracker fifteen years ago to manage her own PCOS because the tools available told her too little. The co-founders bring commercial experience (Levy as CCO) and clinical depth (Oti as CMO) alongside the scientific foundation.

The pre-seed's use of funds is tightly scoped. Equivalency studies will prove the device's saliva measurements against established blood-test benchmarks — the evidentiary baseline regulators require. Additional hormone markers will be validated in parallel. The regulatory approval process, once opened, is a multi-year commitment. Unravel's stated target is first early-access devices with pharmacy, digital health, and clinical research partners by 2027, conditional on the science clearing its gate.

Eva-Maria Dimitriadis, Managing Partner at Conduit EIS Impact Fund, described the investment as backing a hard technical problem: "Women's hormonal health is one of the largest under-served markets in healthcare, and the bottleneck has always been data. Unravel is solving a hard technical problem that many are trying to address: measuring multiple hormones accurately, longitudinally, and affordably. And they are doing it via saliva, at home, aiming for lab-grade sensitivity."

The technology platform extends beyond women's hormones — the University of Glasgow work has already been applied to markers for heart health and prostate cancer — though these remain future applications. The near-term focus is the hormones application, cleared through regulatory review.