WoW Woman in FemTech I Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, founder and Creative Director of Jennis
Jessica Ennis-Hill achieved global recognition and fame after winning Olympic gold in the heptathlon at London’s 2012 Olympics. She boasts 3 World Championship gold medals and a silver medal at the Rio Olympics and continues her inspirational legacy with her work as Jennis’s founder and creative director.
Jennis is a hormonal-intelligent women’s health platform. Thanks to the company’s hormone-intelligent AI, they’re able to serve up personalised fitness, nutrition, recovery, de-stress and lifestyle recommendations that are proven to help women get fitter and stronger, reduce symptoms, build lean muscle and boost confidence – all by tuning into the power of their hormones.
Created using research, data and insights from the Jennis team’s in-house women’s health scientists, the company is on a mission to give women the hormone intelligence and tools to improve their health, performance and body literacy at every life stage.
Tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.
I spent over 10 years as a professional athlete, surrounded by some of the best physios, sports scientists, psychologists and physiologists in the world. Although your wins on the track are attributed to you as an individual, the reality is that there’s a whole team pulling together to help you find the marginal gains that can shave off a millisecond, give you extra explosive power and put you in a winning mindset.
After I retired in 2019, I set out to establish a women’s hormonal health platform that gives women the tools they need to understand their hormones and optimise both their performance and health. In the same way that I approached my athletics career, to make that happen I set about assembling a world-class team of experts – and Jennis was born.
Our first hormonal health product is CycleMapping, an app that helps women map their fitness and lifestyle to what’s happening hormonally across the 4 phases of a woman’s natural menstrual cycle. This uses an in-house-built, custom algorithm that serves up daily personalised recommendations based on a woman's unique hormonal patterns. It then uses machine learning to personalise the recommendations and content for the app based on user behaviour and data inputs.
Created in tight collaboration with our scientists, movement experts, physiologists and nutritionists, the intelligence behind the algorithm pulls together years of studies and academic research to provide our women with recommendations that are accessible and actionable and proven to improve mood, motivation, symptoms, consistency and performance.
Our goal is to serve women at every life stage, so our next target is on supporting women across Perimenopause. That’s an exciting focus for us because 1.2bn women will be peri or post-menopausal by 2023 and it’s a massively underserved audience, with 25% experiencing debilitating symptoms and 10% giving up work because of their symptoms. The solution we’re launching will provide lifestyle interventions that will reduce symptoms, give our women a greater understanding of what’s happening to their bodies and ultimately improve the quality of their lives.
How did you get into this industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?
To build Jennis, we’ve never struggled when it comes to vision, PR, or assembling the world-class experts who provide the science behind what we do, so we’re very lucky in that respect. But I think we were initially quite green when it came to understanding the costs, time and development required to realise our vision, build our algorithm and keep an app up to date. Finding good engineers has been an ongoing process and hasn’t been without its challenges. I think we have the strongest team we’ve ever had right now, but it’s definitely not been easy to get here.
How long did it take you to be where you are now? What was the biggest obstacle?
The Jennis MVP launched in June 2019 and, very soon after, the global pandemic hit. From a customer acquisition perspective, we were really fortunate because women were looking for ways to stay healthy at home - and we had a unique solution available to them. Growing a team during a global pandemic was quite challenging, but I think our ability to move fast while working remotely has really set us up for success.
The biggest ongoing obstacle, as with a lot of female-founded businesses, has been funding. As with all start-ups, our team is small, but our ambition is great, so our resources have to go a long way. It often feels like the senior team is on a permanent fundraising cycle, which obviously takes a lot of time and energy.
What are the challenges of being in the industry you are in?
A lack of research into women’s hormonal health in general and the complexity of understanding women’s individual hormones mean that building our product is quite complex. A lack of general awareness when it comes to women’s hormonal health and the life stages we experience can also make it challenging when you’re looking for funding.
Unlocking years of ignorance isn’t something that can happen overnight, but we're doing our part! I like to look at it this way: if it was easy, someone would have done it already. We’re leading the way, breaking new ground - and that inevitably comes with challenges.
What are your biggest achievements to date?
The biggest achievement must be the reception to Jennis CycleMapping. The fact that women are subscribing to it and finding it genuinely life-changing really is amazing. Low churn is another thing we’re really proud of.
What are the projects you are currently working on?
Jennis Perimenopause is due to launch in Q2 2023. There’s a huge market opportunity there, we’ve learned a lot from our previous launch and the work we’ve done behind the scenes is set to make this a really exciting product.
Probably our biggest project right now is fundraising for Jennis. We're funding a £3m seed round, we want to substantially grow our subscriber base and product offering through the end of 2024, then we’re planning to launch in the USA in 2025.
Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why?
Absolutely, firstly because I want to see more women represented in this industry and secondly because our perspective is pivotal to the evolution of women's health and closing the gender data gap.
What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see them heading?
In the women's health-tech industry, I think attention to hormone science and hormone intelligence will only continue to grow. Our hormones literally impact everything we do, so a deeper understanding of our body chemistry looks very much to be on the agenda - from saliva testing to predictive health outcomes, the more we understand, the more we can do to maximise our health and wellness and overall health outcomes.
In terms of technology, the ability to analyse, understand and parse through data with tools such as chatGPT and the ability to test hormones with saliva, urine, and blood in ever simpler ways will be two big wins for women that will make access to insights and understanding faster and more meaningful to the individual.
What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?
Make sure you have a really robust business plan from day one and a realistic view of the funding required to deliver on your vision from an engineering perspective.
We’ve also been lucky to work with mentors who have experience in the tech space. That would be another recommendation: get mentors who have done something similar and leverage their experience so that you can learn from them and move faster.
Who are three inspirational women in your respective industry you admire?
There are some amazing women our team has had the fortune to work with - some of the most impressive in the health and tech space that have been supportive as well as inspirational to Jennis include:
Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram - CEO and Founder of Proximie and Consultant Plastic Surgeon and Director of Clinical Innovation and Strategic Partnerships at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS
Dr Michelle Tempest - worked as a hospital doctor for over a decade. She is a partner in a strategy consultancy company, Candesic, which delivers R&D-level insight with CEO-level clarity in specialist sectors – life sciences, healthcare, digital, medtech and education.
Dr Emma Ross - sports scientist with a masters in sports exercise physiology and PHD in exercise neurophysiology - an all-round women's health and performance expert. Her mission is to empower women with the knowledge and wisdom they need to achieve health, happiness and high performance.
If you want to share your story with us and be featured on our WoW Women blog, get in touch.
This interview was conducted by Marija Butkovic, Digital Marketing and PR strategist, founder, and CEO of Women of Wearables. She regularly writes and speaks on topics of wearable tech, fashion tech, IoT, entrepreneurship, and diversity. Follow Marija on Twitter @MarijaButkovic and read her stories for Forbes here.