When Amy Divaraniya began her career as a scientist, she believed the age-old story told to ambitious women: You can have it all. She had her whole life planned out : PhD, marriage, pregnancy, and a lucrative career as a woman in STEM.
"The goal was that I'd set my dissertation date in nine months, I'd get pregnant, my water [would break] at my defense — I'd get my baby and a PhD in the same day, and we're all good," she said. "It didn't happen that way."
With nine months left until her graduation, Divaraniya and her husband began trying to get pregnant. She soon found what many before her have come to know all too well: having a baby can be much more difficult than expected. As a scientist and a problem solver, Divaraniya started to examine why she couldn't get pregnant.
Early on, she discovered that she had an irregular cycle. "Every product on the market was designed for women who had a perfect 28-day cycle, and that just wasn't me," she recalled. "I quickly started unpacking the system as best as I could. I started collecting every data point I could about my body. I paid attention to every symptom."
The more she documented her body's cycles, the more Divaraniya realized she didn't fit the prepackaged mold for womanhood. "It was a heartbreaking and dark period for me, because I just felt like my body was failing me," she said.
"It wasn't until I kind of hit a breaking point that I realized that some women just aren't given enough data about their bodies and we're at the mercy of all these subpar solutions, if that... I wanted to change that," she said. "I wanted to inform women so they could get actual, objective data and then go to their doctor's office and not combat them but just be able to advocate for their health. That's really where the concept of Oova was born."

Tracking hormones at home
Divaraniya developed an at-home hormone testing kit that can be used by anybody to track their body's cycles. Oova has proven useful for people attempting to start families but has also shown significant benefits for those who struggle with hormonal imbalances and Transgender people wanting to closely monitor the hormones they take.
Oova's at-home testing kit provides customers with easy-to-use instructions so they can test their hormones in privacy. Along with a helpful app, the product provides them with quick results.

The kits have yielded incredible results. Thanks to Oova's hormone testing, more people have gained the knowledge they need to accurately plan their pregnancies. Moreover, not only has Oova helped opposite-sex couples get pregnant, but it is also a powerful tool for same-sex couples who use IVF. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on multiple rounds, future parents can rely on Oova to track a surrogate's cycle to determine how to best proceed.
Even though Oova's hormone testing kits work with an app and include cute messages and prompts, the company is still serious about how it uses medical data and about ensuring the privacy of all its customers.

"Especially after Roe was overturned, people got even more nervous about what information they're putting into these digital platforms," Divaraniya said, "so even though we are HIPAA compliant, we're very sensitive to what questions we ask during the registration process, in your profile. We do not ask explicitly what your orientation is or anything like that."

Future plans
"Right now we have two primary use cases set up: fertility and perimenopause, but we're quickly growing that to include a lot more things based on demand we've gotten," Divaraniya explained. The app asks customers to input their reason for hormone testing and provides them with the best advice from there.

Currently, Oova functions by monitoring estrogen and progesterone. "Are you trying HRT, tracking symptom management, or cycle synching? What is the use case? Based on that, we decide on a scanning plan for you, and we tell you exactly what day to use what test," Divaraniya said. "You're not guessing.

"On the testing day, you provide a urine sample in a cup, dip this in there, and you'll know... which hormone to test. They're all in these individual packages, and they're labeled to make you smile. There are little phrases on all of them that are kind of cute."

One of Divaraniya's goals is to make Oova as inclusive as possible. Early beta-testers helped her restructure some of the language around the app to make sure it was inclusive of people of all genders and sexualities. She also hopes to eventually progress Oova's data collection capacities to help cis and Trans men track testosterone as well.

While Oova is still working toward creating more tailored experiences to specifically serve Trans and Nonbinary customers in the future, its products still provide customers with quantitative hormone data — something few other companies have yet to do. Divaraniya welcomes anyone in need of better hormone data to try Oova.

Divaraniya's other goal is to transform the way the medical field understands and monitors hormones. Often seen as a more "female" issue, hormones are understudied and not always taken into consideration by primary care physicians. "I hope that if we raise the bar, every company that comes after us has to do as well as Oova, if not better, to succeed," Divaraniya said.

Customers can learn more about Oova, download the app, or purchase their hormone testing kits at http://www.oova.life .