SPRIND's Continuous Hormone Monitoring Challenge open for applications
This July, I will be a jury member for SPRIND — Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen's Continuous Hormone Monitoring Challenge in Leipzig, proudly alongside Ida Tin. Applications close June 26th — if you're building in this space, don't miss it.
The problem the Challenge is built to solve
Hormones control nearly every major process in the human body — metabolism, immune function, cognition, reproduction — yet how we measure them has barely changed. A blood draw gives you a single static snapshot, when the underlying biology never stops moving. Women are particularly affected by that gap: hormonal systems show the greatest variability of any physiological system, and have been structurally underrepresented in research for decades. Diagnoses today are still built on reference ranges that account for neither cycle phase, nor time of day, nor individual baseline — and the AI models increasingly used to support diagnosis are trained on that same incomplete data.
The consequence is that conditions like endometriosis, PCOS — recently renamed PMOS, polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, as of May 2026 — autoimmune disorders, and hormone-driven cardiovascular disease are chronically detected too late, or not properly understood at all.
What the Challenge is asking applicants to build
Founders and early-stage innovators with a proof-of-concept — not full solution maturity — are invited to apply and define a use case: an application built on clinical-grade data that enables a medical advancement structurally unattainable without continuous monitoring. The technical bar is genuinely difficult. Teams must build sensors capable of measuring at least four hormones continuously over a seven-day wear period, directly in a biological matrix such as interstitial fluid, sweat, or saliva. Crucially, the Challenge's criteria require teams to measure the hormone of interest itself, not a surrogate physiological signal like heart rate or skin temperature — a meaningfully higher bar than most existing wearables clear today.
SPRIND's own framing of why this needs public funding rather than venture capital is worth repeating: the agency's mandate is to fund technologies the market won't, either because they're too technologically complex or because they require long-term financing that traditional VC has no incentive to provide — and for far too long, women's health has been exactly that kind of sector.
How the Challenge is structured
This is a three-year, three-stage programme with a total budget of €40 million and up to €6 million in non-dilutive funding available per team across all stages. Stage 1 begins in July 2026: the jury selects up to eight teams, each receiving funding of up to €1.5 million, to spend twelve months developing their technology. After that first year, the jury reconvenes to decide, based on interim evaluations, which teams continue as finalists into Stage 2 — another twelve months to drive the project forward. The strongest teams then get a further twelve months in Stage 3 to comprehensively demonstrate their breakthrough. Ideas that show genuine promise for market breakthrough can continue to be supported by SPRIND even after the Challenge itself concludes.
Rather than backing a single company or technical approach, the programme is deliberately designed to support multiple approaches in parallel, while encouraging collaboration across the emerging ecosystem — reflecting a belief that no single startup could carry a field this early-stage on its own.
Beyond the sensors: the dataset nobody is talking about
The most underreported part of this Challenge isn't the biosensors themselves — it's the shared reference dataset SPRIND is building alongside them: the first standardised collection of continuous hormone data across ages, ethnicities, life stages, and health conditions. No single startup could realistically build that alone. It's the closest thing this field has to a reference genome for hormones, and it will likely outlast and outvalue any individual team's specific sensor technology.
The opportunity to serve
I can't wait to meet and help select the teams that will get started on this journey. Being on this jury, alongside Ida Tin and a genuinely excellent group of clinical and scientific voices, is going to be an enriching experience at the frontier of tech and R&D — for me and, I hope, for everyone involved. I'm grateful to have been offered the opportunity, and I mean that without the usual LinkedIn gloss: this is exactly the kind of early-stage, technically uncertain, high-conviction work I find most energising to be part of.
Best of luck to all applicants. If you're building sensor technology anywhere near this space and you're reading this before June 26th, apply.
References
Femtech Insider, Inside SPRIND's Push to Build a Continuous Hormone Monitoring Industry in Europe, May 2026
Methodology note: This article is based on my original LinkedIn post (link), reflecting my experience serving as a jury member for SPRIND's Continuous Hormone Monitoring Challenge. AI assisted in elaborating the topic into a broader article by integrating background research on the Challenge's structure, funding mechanics, and scientific rationale. All personal reflections and professional perspectives are my own, and all content has been reviewed by me for accuracy.
SPRIND Continuous Hormone Monitoring Challenge Webinar
References
SPRIND, Continuous Hormone Monitoring Challenge — official challenge page and jury listing
Femtech Insider, Inside SPRIND's Push to Build a Continuous Hormone Monitoring Industry in Europe, May 2026
Forbes, Ida Tin Coined Femtech. Now She's Funding Continuous Hormone Monitoring, July 2026
Munich Startup, coverage of sThesis GmbH's selection as a Stage 1 finalist, July 2026
Methodology note: This article is based on my original LinkedIn post (link), reflecting my experience serving as a jury member for SPRIND's Continuous Hormone Monitoring Challenge. AI assisted in elaborating the topic into a broader article by integrating background research on the Challenge's structure, scientific rationale, and the outcome of the Stage 1 selection process. All personal reflections and professional perspectives are my own, and all content has been reviewed by me for accuracy.
