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Олег ОнопрієнкоStartup
27 September 2025, 09:00
2025-09-27
Ukrainian startup with hormonal tracker for women Ovul reached the finals of IT Arena 2025. How the gadget that determines fertility works
Ovul CTO Ihor Kovalenko explained in a conversation with dev.ua why artificial intelligence technologies are becoming the key to the future of women’s health. The startup is developing a hormone tracker that analyzes saliva and accurately determines the level of estrogen, which is critical for women’s health. Ovul has already been recognized by the IT Arena 2025 jury, which included the gadget in the finalists of the startup competition.
Ovul CTO Ihor Kovalenko explained in a conversation with dev.ua why artificial intelligence technologies are becoming the key to the future of women’s health. The startup is developing a hormone tracker that analyzes saliva and accurately determines the level of estrogen, which is critical for women’s health. Ovul has already been recognized by the IT Arena 2025 jury, which included the gadget in the finalists of the startup competition.
As the company’s CTO Ihor Kovalenko noted, Ovul is the world’s first hormonal tracker for women that helps them live in balance with their bodies. Faced with the inconveniences of outdated methods, the Ukrainian founders created a smart device that uses advanced technology and artificial intelligence to track ovulation and hormonal changes without pain, without injections, and without test strips.
From a personal problem to a global solution
The idea for Ovul came, as is often the case, from a personal story. One of the co-founders, Serhiy, was planning his third child with his wife when they encountered extremely inconvenient fertility testing methods, such as Urina Stix. This led to a simple question: why is it so difficult to do in the modern world?
The available methods were inconvenient, unclear, and required too much attention from the woman. Serhiy began to research this issue and found a well-known and researched method that is already 100 years old: saliva crystallization analysis. Although this method is highly accurate, it never gained widespread popularity because it required skills in recognizing crystals and using a microscope.
The Ovul team approached the problem creatively, combining science with modern technology.
A drop of saliva and the power of AI. How Ovul works
The basis of the device is that saliva contains information about hormones. Estrogen is a hormone on the level of which literally everything in the female body depends. Each period of the cycle corresponds to a certain level of estrogen, which affects the composition of saliva. Ovul is, in essence, a digital microscope.
The testing process is as simple as possible:
Open the device;
Apply a drop of saliva;
Close the device and wait 40 minutes.
The analysis result is sent to the user in the application. The key innovation is the use of artificial intelligence. Ovul analyzes the patterns of the saliva sample after drying using a unique algorithm. AI recognizes the pattern of saliva crystallization, accurately determining ovulation and the fertile window.
In a comment to dev.ua, Igor Kovelenko noted that the company has a unique intellectual legacy. Ovul is the only company in the world that owns a dataset of over 10,000 photos of dried saliva. This dataset was collected and labeled independently over two years, including by distributing prototypes and devices to real users to receive feedback.
«We are the only company in the world that has a stage of over 10,000 photos of dried saliva. Accordingly, we have three levels of AI models for image recognition,» noted Ihor Kovalenko.
The device tracks cycles based on a real biomarker, which eliminates the errors of calendar methods that do not take into account the individual specifics of the body. This makes Ovul ideal for women with irregular cycles.
Based on the dynamics of estrogen levels, the system can correctly design the phases of the cycle and provide personalized recommendations:
How to plan activity (brain and physical);
What to eat (for example, recommendations to eat pumpkin on a specific day of the cycle phase to balance the vitamin composition).
The company collaborates with nutritional clinics to provide these recommendations.
Team, development and scaling.
Ihor Kovalenko has extensive experience in electronics development, in particular he worked as an embedded developer at Siemens Healthineers. In addition to Igor, the founding team includes:
Serhii Zatsarynin — CEO of Ovul with 10 years of experience in medical diagnostics;
Kateryna Andrieva — responsible for marketing, serial entrepreneur;
Roman Godz is responsible for finances.
Today, the device is the first production version, but more than 30 prototypes were developed before that. The service center noted that the serial device went into production without any critical errors.
The startup’s primary funding stream is bootstrap, and they are currently raising a seed round. The company has already received recognition in the startup space, winning Google for Startups, the first cohort of Generation H, and the L’Oreal Startup Hub.
Ovul is actively targeting foreign markets, particularly the US, where they are currently actively marketing. The devices are also manufactured in the US to optimize logistics. The most expensive components of the device are the high-quality camera and optics (microscope).
The business model involves purchasing the device along with a 12-month subscription. While the device is permanent, the subscription, which includes data decryption and recommendations, will need to be renewed.
Future plans: from tracker to platform
In the near term, the team is focused on scaling sales and increasing brand awareness, as they have inventory and the ability to scale quickly.
However, fertility and ovulation are just the beginning. The main goal is to turn Ovul into a full-fledged platform. The more data is collected, the more correlations can be found. There are already developments that help find dependencies that go beyond just hormonal and estrogen indicators.
