Unravel Health, a startup developing a palm-sized saliva hormone testing device, has raised £2.5 million in a seed round led by Conduit EIS Impact Fund and Wrightwood, with participation from Leo Capital, Embryo Ventures, Hermesa and returning investor Zinc VC. The funding will support external equivalency studies, development of additional markers and the start of the regulatory approval process.
Hormones shift throughout the month, and Unravel Health positions the Micro Lab between traditional blood tests and consumer wearables. A blood test captures hormone levels on a single day, while wearables track every day but can only estimate hormone levels. The Micro Lab is designed to give real hormone readings at home, day after day, across life stages from puberty to perimenopause. Saliva carries the hormones the body uses, but in quantities so small that only a lab could previously measure them. Unravel Health’s technology, developed over ten years at the University of Glasgow and protected by three granted patents, aims to bring that lab into the home.
Women’s health rarely comes down to one hormone, so the Micro Lab is being built to read oestradiol, the main form of oestrogen, alongside three other key hormones simultaneously. The round builds on more than £1m from Innovate UK, the Medical Research Council, SBRI, strategic angels and Zinc. Unravel Health completed a first close of over £2m on 14th October and plans to close with final investors in the coming weeks.
New funding takes the Micro Lab to its first early-access devices in 2027, through partners in pharmacy, digital health and clinical research. Women’s hormones are the first application, but the underlying technology has already worked on other markers, such as those for heart health and prostate cancer, and could bring many more lab tests into the home.
Perimenopause can creep up on you without you realising what's happening. For me it went on for some time. If what Unravel is building had existed five years ago, I could have seen it coming and been better prepared. I could have managed my symptoms, and maybe even stayed in a job I loved.
People said nobody could climb Everest without oxygen, until someone did. Reading hormones in saliva outside a lab has been our Everest. Fifteen years ago I built my own hormone tracker to manage PCOS (now PMOS), because a blood test told me almost nothing about what my body was doing. Soon anyone will be able to bring the lab home to understand their symptoms.
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 team pairs deep science with a clear view of what women and clinicians actually need. We're proud to lead this round and back them from a very early stage.
I invest in founders who are fixing problems that have been ignored for too long. Hormone-related conditions shape the daily lives of millions of women, yet the tools to understand them have barely changed in decades. Unravel's approach could change how these conditions are diagnosed and managed, and I'm delighted to support the team.
