WoW Woman in FemTech - Elīna Pīka-Lepere, co-founder of anna app

Elīna Pīka-Lepere spent fifteen years making complex things feel effortless, in outdoor advertising, enterprise retail, and helping business leaders figure out what AI can actually do for them. She's always been drawn to sharing what she knows, whether teaching at university or sitting with a small business team making sense of new technology. Now, as co-founder of anna app, a perimenopause health intelligence app launching in the UK in 2026, she's building the tool she wishes existed: one that turns smartwatch data into personalised daily guidance, so women can stop tracking and start living. Elīna's connection to the UK goes back to her university years in Glasgow, with executive education at Cambridge along the way.

anna app is a perimenopause health intelligence app that takes the mental load out of managing your health. Designed for women aged 35 to 65, it works entirely in the background. No symptom diaries, no daily questionnaires. Instead, anna app connects to Apple Health and uses the smartwatch data you're already generating. It analyses those biological signals and delivers simple, highly personalised, actionable daily guidance for sleep, exercise, nutrition, and stress. Built on a rigorous research framework with medical advisors, anna app is the effortless, everyday support that women actually need, so they can focus on living, not logging.

Tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.

My path to femtech started with billboards. Literally.

I spent years at JCDecaux Latvia, the local arm of the world's largest outdoor advertising company, where my job was to make one of the most technically complex media types in the industry feel simple for advertisers. Audience measurement systems, marketing strategy, and industry conferences. Then I moved to The Customization Group, where I ran enterprise partnerships with retailers like Aldi and Lidl across Europe and built an e-commerce platform from the ground up. Along the way, I taught at a university and started helping small businesses figure out what AI can genuinely do for them, because I've never been able to resist breaking something complicated down and handing it to someone in a way they can actually use.

Fifteen years of that, and you develop an instinct. Not for how people behave in a research lab, but for what they'll actually do at six in the morning when they're exhausted and the school run starts in forty minutes. That instinct is everything anna app is built on.

How did you get into this industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into, or have you had many challenges?

I need meaning behind my work. That's not aspirational. It's non-negotiable. I could have stayed in corporate marketing and done well. But I reached a point where the work wasn't connected to anything that kept me up at night in a good way. Femtech changed that.

What drew me in was a collision I couldn't ignore: a genuine business opportunity and a deep social purpose, occupying the same space. Perimenopause affects some of the most experienced, capable women in the workforce, and it can quietly erode their confidence, their cognitive sharpness, and their professional identity. Most of them don't even have a name for what's happening. That's not just a personal struggle. It's a systemic loss.

As a Latvian woman, I come from a society where women are accustomed to being equal decision-makers. But even in Latvia, there's a striking silence around perimenopause. One of my deeper goals with anna app is to dismantle that, to treat it as what it is: a universal life stage, not a secret to keep.

Getting into health tech hasn't been easy, and honestly, I think that's how it should be. I'm not a clinician, and I don't pretend to be. But this space doesn't just need more doctors building apps. It also needs people who know how to build products women will actually use, backed by the right clinical expertise. That's the gap I fill.

How long did it take you to be where you are now? What was the biggest obstacle? What are the challenges of being in the industry you are in? 

I've been building anna app since July 2025, though the instincts behind it were shaped over fifteen years. But here's the obstacle that still frustrates me: perimenopause profoundly reshapes women's daily lives, yet the market has barely invested in solving it. Not tracking it. Solving it.

Think about who we're talking about. Many women in perimenopause are part of what's called the sandwich generation, simultaneously caring for ageing parents, supporting children, and managing peak career responsibilities. Their cognitive and emotional bandwidth is already stretched to its limit. Now imagine handing that woman an app that asks her to manually log forty symptoms every day. That's not support. That's homework.

That disconnect is the core problem anna app exists to solve. Your smartwatch is already collecting the data. We just make it useful.

What makes this even more urgent is that increasing life expectancy means women will remain professionally active far longer than previous generations. Perimenopause won't be a brief interruption. It will span a significant portion of their working lives. The scale of this problem is growing, not shrinking.

The encouraging sign is that employers are waking up to it. Organisations are beginning to recognise that losing experienced women, or watching their performance decline because of unmanaged symptoms, has real, measurable costs. When you frame perimenopause as a workforce retention issue, investors and partners start paying attention.

The other challenge specific to health tech is pace. You can't rush clinical credibility. Anna app isn't a medical device and doesn't give medical advice. We focus on lifestyle guidance, with strict red flags built in: when a user's data goes beyond what lifestyle adjustments can address, we direct her to a doctor. Getting that boundary exactly right takes time. But that rigour is what makes the product trustworthy, and I wouldn't shortcut it for anything.

What are your biggest achievements to date?

The moment I'm proudest of happened in a room with practising clinicians.

We had spent months building anna app's research foundation. It started with deep interviews and quantitative surveying: real women telling us what perimenopause actually does to their days, their sleep, their ability to think clearly. Then we went deep into existing clinical research on perimenopause symptom domains. From there, we mapped everything against the health signals available through wearables and built the logic connecting that data to genuinely personalised lifestyle guidance. Not a chatbot. Not generic wellness tips. A structured, evidence-based system built from the ground up.

Then we put it in front of doctors. And their response changed everything. They told us they see real value in patients arriving with a better understanding of their own perimenopause patterns, and that they'd welcome the kind of insights anna app provides. When practising clinicians validate your framework's rigour, you know you're building something that matters. That was the day anna app stopped being a promising idea and became something real.

Professionally, I'd also point to leading Latvia's first digital outdoor advertising network at JCDecaux. It taught me something I use every day now: how to bring something genuinely new to a market that doesn't yet know it needs it.

What are the projects you are currently working on?

My entire focus right now is anna app's UK launch: finalising the product, building early user traction, and developing B2B partnerships with employers and workplace wellness providers.

Why the UK? Having lived in Britain, I experienced firsthand how open and proactive British women are about seeking health support. The UK is also ahead in workplace menopause policy, with legislation now requiring organisations to consider support for employees going through menopause. It's the ideal proving ground: a market already receptive to the conversation, before we expand to regions where perimenopause is only just emerging from the margins into mainstream awareness.

In parallel, I continue running my AI consulting practice with Latvian businesses. It sounds like a different world, but the thread is identical: helping people adopt technology that genuinely serves them rather than overwhelming them. Both projects, at their core, are about the same thing: making powerful tools feel effortless.

Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why? 

Deeply. Because visibility creates permission.

Every time a woman sees someone who doesn't fit the stereotypical tech founder mould, someone who came from advertising, who pivoted after 35, who isn't an engineer, building something real, it widens the door. I want to be part of widening it.

There's a particularly damaging narrative that says women's most ambitious career moves should happen before 35, that after that, you're managing what you've already built, not starting something bold. I refuse to accept that. Some of the most important problems in the world, including women's health, need founders who've lived enough life to understand the problem from the inside. Experience isn't a limitation. It's a superpower.

What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see them heading?

Three shifts will define the next chapter in my industry field.

The end of symptom logging. Women are exhausted by apps that demand their time and give back charts. The next generation of tools won't ask you to track anything. They'll work passively with data you're already generating and deliver guidance that actually changes your day. This is exactly what anna app was built to do: insights that come to you, integrated into your life, not another task on your list.

AI as the real breakthrough. We're only beginning to see what AI can do for women's health. Pattern recognition across complex symptom profiles. Guidance that adapts in real time. Connections in health data that would take a human provider weeks to spot, delivered daily, at scale, to every woman who needs them. The companies that combine strong clinical foundations with intelligent, adaptive AI will be the ones that genuinely move the needle.

Perimenopause is recognised as a lifestyle transition, not a medical event. It's a hormonal shift where the body adjusts, and so must your daily habits, to maintain quality of life. That affects not just the women themselves, but their families, their colleagues, their organisations. The tools that help women make smart, actionable adjustments throughout this journey, not just at the doctor's office, but every morning at home, will be the ones that truly succeed.

What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?

Don't wait until you feel like you belong. I came from billboards and enterprise retail. Not exactly the CV you'd expect behind a health tech company. But if you care deeply about the problem and bring something the team doesn't already have, you belong.

Start with a problem you've felt in your own body, your own life. That lived experience keeps you honest when market pressures tempt you to cut corners.

Build clinical credibility early. Surround yourself with the right advisors and be transparent about what you know and what you're still learning. In health tech, honesty is what earns trust.

And don't be afraid to think commercially. The best mission in the world doesn't help anyone if it can't sustain itself.

Who are three inspirational women in your respective industry you admire?

I know I won't be the first person to say Ida Tin, but there's a reason everyone names her. She coined the term "femtech," and before she did, there was no word to rally around. That single act of framing opened the door for every company building in this space today, including ours. As a fellow Nordic woman, that makes me deeply proud.

Dr. Elina Berglund Scherwitzl, co-founder of Natural Cycles. A particle physicist at CERN who followed her curiosity into women's health and proved that rigorous thinking from outside medicine can produce something genuinely transformative. Her journey from the Higgs boson to fertility tracking gives me real confidence in my own unconventional path.

Dr. Louise Newson, who has done more than perhaps anyone in the UK to bring menopause into mainstream conversation. What I admire most isn't just her clinical expertise; it's her relentlessness. She refused to let the topic be sidelined, even when the system pushed back. That balance of rigour and warmth is something I aspire to in everything we build.

Find out more about anna app on their website.