SAMPLE: Brand Mission

Why Your Health App Knows More About You Than Your Doctor  (And What We're Doing About It).

By Sarah Chen, founder and CEO of Aura Health

When I founded Aura three years ago, I did it because I was tired of being a data point in someone else's study. I'd spent years tracking my cycle, my sleep, my mood, my energy, feeding information into apps that sent it straight to advertisers and told me almost nothing useful in return. 

The data economy around women's health was booming. Women's health outcomes were not.That paradox sits at the center of everything wrong with femtech right now.

We are living through an unprecedented moment in women's health. For the first time, the technology exists to give women genuinely personalized, longitudinal insight into their own bodies. Continuous glucose monitors, wearable hormone trackers, AI-driven cycle analysis: tools that would have been science fiction a decade ago are now sitting on nightstands across the country. The data we're generating is extraordinary in its volume and intimacy.

The question is who it's actually serving.

The honest answer is: not often the woman wearing the device. 

The femtech industry has a trust problem. Apps have been caught sharing menstrual data with Facebook. Fertility trackers have faced scrutiny over how they handle data in a post-Roe legal landscape. Women are being asked to share the most sensitive information about their bodies with platforms whose business models depend on leveraging that data elsewhere.

At Aura, we made a decision early on that has shaped every product choice since: the data our users generate belongs to them. We don't sell it, we don't share it, and we don't use it to train models without explicit, informed consent. It costs us revenue, but we truly believe it's the only way to build something worth building.

But privacy alone isn't enough. The deeper problem is that most femtech products are still collecting data without meaningfully closing the loop back to the user. A woman can track 18 months of cycle data and still walk into a doctor's appointment with no structured way to share what she's learned about herself. The gap between consumer health tracking and clinical care remains vast, and women are falling into it every day.

Closing that gap is the work. Not just for Aura, but for the industry as a whole. That means building products that generate insights a clinician can actually act on. It means designing for the full complexity of female biology beyond normative menstrual cycles: perimenopause, postpartum, PCOS, endometriosis. And it means being honest with users about what the technology can and cannot tell them, rather than overpromising in the name of engagement metrics.

Women have spent too long being told that the tools available to them are good enough. The technology we have right now is genuinely capable of something better. The question is whether the industry has the integrity to build it.

I think we do. But we're going to have to earn that trust one data point at a time.