Technology

The fertility market is projected to be worth more than $30 billion by 2025, and today on the Disrupt Startup Battlefield stage, a new device called the Kegg, a Bluetooth-connected silicone kegel ball that monitors mucus to help determine a womanfertility by being inserted for no more than two minutes every day, is launching a device it hopes will make some waves in it — literally and figuratively.

The device, when shipped in the near future, will sell for less than $200.

For the uninitiated, a kegel ball is an object that a woman places in her vaginal passage. Designed to be held in place by a womankegel muscles (also known as the pelvic floor), holding a kegel ball in place helps to exercise those muscles and strengthen them — which can be useful to help recover after you&ve given birth, to keep yourself from involuntarily peeing as you age and (yes) to make sex more enjoyable. (Itnot a completely glamorous list, but one that I&d argue is pretty useful for many women.)

Keggproduct takes that one step further and creates another use case by using it to measure mucus viscosity, with the daily, two-minute measurements producing a cycle that looks something like this:

In doing so, it is also exploring another aspect of fertility thatnot typically a part of many consumer-focused assistants: the viscosity of the mucus in a womanvaginal passage.

We have seen a wave of startups (and more traditional female health businesses) emerge in the last several years that are focused on tracking metrics like pulse and body temperature oryour ovulation cycle to determine your fertility window. (There is even a kegel ball-based device on the market that measures your temperature, alongside other connected kegel balls.)

Mucus is another important determinant of what is going on. As an egg gets released from a womanovary, the consistency of the mucus changes. Not only does the viscosity give you an indication of where the egg is in its travels out of the ovary, but the more viscose it gets, the more viable it is for holding sperm to survive for longer before they connect with the egg. (Typically sperm do not survive for that long, and so the thicker the mucus, the bigger window you have for that sperm getting to the egg to fertilize it.)

The Kegg comes with two gold bands on it that emit electric pulses that are used to measure the thickness of the mucus.

Usinganalyzer chips on a custom-designed PCB inside the Kegg, the device monitors the response from the mucus surrounding the Keggsensors. It then &reads& theelectro-chemical properties in the mucus to detect which electrolytes are present in the mucus. And this in turn is sent to the cloud for further processing through Keggalgorithm, ultimately determining the consistency of the mucus.

Kristina Cahojova, the CEO and founder of Lady Technologies (the startup behind the Kegg), says her team chose to focus on mucus because ittoo difficult, if not impossible, to use the other metrics to determine fertility if a woman has an irregular cycle, there are already a lot of products out there that are already measuring those metrics for those who are regular and there weren&t any products like the Kegg on the market already today.

&The tech has been around for 50 years,& she said, in reference to the ability to measure the viscosity of the mucus and tie that to a specific womanfertility. And yet, there have been very few products created based on it up to now.

Indeed, the most well-known consumer-focused product on the market today that measures a womanmucus is the OvuCue, which retails for more than $200 and is a larger and more complex probe.&I think you have to be a woman to invent something like this,& Cahojova said of the Kegg.

Right now, the Kegg is only using its measurements to help define the window for when you might be most fertile, but of course there are potentially many other areas of womenhealth that could be informed by way of the diagnostics it is picking up, provided the startup finds the funding and manages to make it through the regulatory hoops to do so.

The bigger picture that we should all find encouraging is that the rise of connected devices, big data analytics and ever-more medical research is coming together to give us a much better idea of what is going on with our bodies, and what we can do differently to help influence the outcomes. Cahojova also sees the benefit of that competition.

&Itvery nice that users have a lot of options,& she said. &For me none of the existing options happened to work because I am very irregular. We are trying to address how to reduce fertility stress for other irregular women.&

23andMe is testing a $749 &premium& service for deeper health insights, according to several customers who saw a test page for the new product and posted about it on Reddit.

First spotted by CNBC, the company served up a test web page to several customers telling them about a service that would allow them to look at their &whole genome data.& However, when they clicked on the link provided, nothing happened.A few Redditors even posited the notification may have been a mistake as the link led nowhere.

But, according to the company, thereno error here. 23andMe later confirmed to TechCrunch it sent out a test page to some customers to &gauge interest& in such a product. However, there¬hing planned& at this time for such a service, according to a 23andMe spokesperson.

The consumer DNA company charges $299 for its highest package right now, and includes a breakdown of both health and ancestry using all 23 of your chromosomes (hence the name). The cost to sequence your whole genome is currently just under $1,000 so itnot clear if 23andMe would lower the price to sequence all of a customerDNA or if they would offer a comprehensive analysis of a good chunk of your genome.

One other possibility is that the company was exploring diving back into next-generation sequencing, which it abandoned in 2016.Next-generation sequencing was regarded as too complex at the time and the company wanted to focus on a technique that would expedite research efforts as it was cozying up to the drug research market.

However, 23andMe tells TechCrunch thatnot the case, and that it has no plans to get back into next-generation sequencing, instead sticking to genotyping, which offers much richer data on specific traits consumers may be interested in, such as if they&re prone to get fatter than average or if they&re a carrier for Alzheimerdisease.

We don&t know if 23andMe will produce this particular product, but we do know the company is thinking up other streams of revenue in the future and, according to the company, working onsomething more comprehensive than genotyping. We&ll be sure to let you know if and when they can tell us more about what they&re spinning up.

Myki, a startup based between Beirut and New York which offers both a consumer and enterprise identity management solution to store sensitive information offline, today announced at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco that itraised a $4 million Series A to scale its operations.

The round was led by Dubai-based VC BECO Capital with participation from Beirut-based LEAP Ventures and B-Y Venture Partners, all of which are returning investors. Myki plans to expand its U.S. operations with its &decentralised Identity Management& solution for enterprise.

Priscilla Elora Sharuk, who co-founded the startup with Antoine Vincent Jabberer in 2015, said: &Online security and data privacy is not a privilege, it is a right, and that is why at Myki we empower our users with the tools to securely manage their digital identity.&

Myki actually launched on the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield stage in September of 2016, and has since gone on to win several plaudits from tech industry outlets for its free and powerful password management, and amassing more than 250,000 users worldwide.

Back in May, on the TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin stage, Myki announced a partnership with self-sovereign identity application Blockpass to combine self-sovereign identity and offline password security.

Myki is going after the consumer password space, with biometric authentication such as touch ID and Face ID; the enterprise with &Myki for Teams&; and a solution for Managed Service Providers.