Unravel Health, a spinout built on research from the University of Glasgow, has raised £2.5m in a round co-led by Conduit EIS Impact Fund and Wrightwood. The money will take its palm-sized Micro Lab to first early-access devices in 2027. The company has now raised more than £3.5m in equity and non-dilutive funding combined.
Unravel Health is now based in London. It is developing a handheld device that reads several hormones from a saliva sample at home within minutes. The technology comes from about ten years of research at the University of Glasgow and is protected by three granted patents.
The device targets a gap in women's health diagnostics. A blood test measures hormone levels on a single day, while wearables collect data every day but can only estimate hormone levels. Unravel's Micro Lab is designed to give actual hormone readings at home every day, at any life stage from puberty to perimenopause.
The round
The £2.5m round was led by Conduit EIS Impact Fund and Wrightwood, the investment vehicle of Henry Engelhardt, founder of Admiral. Leo Capital, Embryo Ventures and Hermesa joined as new investors, and Zinc VC returned.
The company did not disclose the valuation or the type of instrument. Because the lead is an EIS fund, at least part of the round is likely to have been ordinary equity that qualifies for EIS relief.
Before this round, Unravel had raised more than £1m from Innovate UK, the Medical Research Council, the SBRI programme, strategic angels and Zinc. A large share of the company's early funding was therefore non-dilutive, which has limited dilution for the founders before the first institutional equity round.
Use of funds
The money will pay for three things: external equivalency studies to compare the device's readings with laboratory testing, development of further biomarkers, and the start of the regulatory approval process.
The first product is designed to measure oestradiol, the main form of oestrogen, alongside three other key hormones at the same time. Unravel plans to reach users through partners in pharmacy, digital health and clinical research, rather than going straight to consumers at first.
Co-founder and chief executive Veronika Bridgman began the work 15 years ago, when she built her own hormone tracker to manage a hormonal condition. She described reading hormones in saliva outside a laboratory as the company's central technical challenge.
Eva-Maria Dimitriadis, managing partner at Conduit EIS Impact Fund, called women's hormonal health one of healthcare's largest under-served markets. She said the main bottleneck had been accurate, repeated and affordable measurement of several hormones at once.
What's next
Women's hormones are the first use case, but Unravel says the platform has already worked on markers for heart health and prostate cancer. That would give it a broader home-diagnostics business beyond femtech.
The next milestones are the equivalency study results and the first early-access devices in 2027. Both are likely to determine the size and pricing of a later seed or Series A round.
Original source: BusinessCloud — https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/unravels-palm-sized-lab-to-track-womens-hormone-data-daily/
