Level Zero Health banks $6.9M to prove wearable medtech can take the strain out of hormone testing
February 18, 2025
Level Zero Health, a female-founded medical device startup that’s aiming to break new ground by developing a device for continuous hormone monitoring, has closed an oversubscribed $6.9 million pre-seed funding round despite being only a little over a year old. The startup wants to do away with the need for invasive blood draws and support research which could lead to new treatments for conditions linked to hormone imbalances or even new healthcare innovations, such as individual dosing for hormone-based contraception.
“One of our investors told us there are companies who build fundamental technologies and there are companies who build wrappers around that technology; you guys are creating new technology here,” says co-founder and CEO Ula Rustamova, discussing the company’s development since we last check in with them last fall when they presented on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt as part of the Startup Battlefield competition.
“The goal is to create a whole new market out of this, right? The same way CGMs [continuous glucose monitors] did. They literally, out of nothing, created a multi-billion dollar market,” she goes on. “This is, by definition, a whole new product category of its own — that hopefully will inspire people to use the device and the data to create a lot of companies on top of that and have a ripple effect in the next few decades.”
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The current prototype wearable contains tiny needles that allow it to take samples just under the skin to detect trace amounts of hormones.
This is a step towards the hormone monitoring wearable they ultimately hope to bring to market — tentatively slated for 2028 — that’s able to pull a continuous measure of things like progesterone, estrogen and testosterone from the wearer’s interstitial fluid. (That is fluid that fills the spaces around cells, acting as an intermediary between blood plasma and cells — hence why biochemical compounds in the blood can also be detected in interstitial fluid.)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/18/level ... e-testing/
