Persperity Health raises £1 million for sweat-sensing technology

Persperity Health, a new company spun out of The California Institute of Technology, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate the development of its sweat-sensing technology that provides real-time, non-invasive hormonal insights.

The technology enables real-time hormone monitoring through device-based sweat analysis, enabling non-invasive hormone monitoring for women ad providing personalised health insights.

Sweat contains a wealth of information about hormonal health, including critical hormones like estradiol, progesterone, and luteinizing hormone (LH), which are vital to women’s reproductive health and overall wellbeing.

Persperity’s technology leverages a non-invasive process called iontophoresis to induce sweat on demand, allowing women to monitor their hormone levels anytime, anywhere—without strenuous exercise or invasive procedures.

“If you look at what’s commercially available, devices can track heartbeat and steps, but they aren’t capable of studying your health at a molecular level,” said Dr. Wei Gao, co-founder and inventor of the core technology at Persperity Health.

“By analysing sweat, our device provides detailed information about what’s happening inside your body. Once you realise the potential of sweat for health monitoring, it’s hard to go back to conventional methods.”

Persperity Health has also announced its involvement in a $3 million ARPA-H Spark Award aimed at accelerating innovation in women’s health. Spearheaded by Principal Investigator Dr. Wei Gao at Caltech, the project was one of only 23 awardees selected from over 1,700 global applicants to advance a wearable sweat-sensing system for chronic pain assessment, especially benefiting women.

Dr. Pauline M. Maki, co-investigator on the grant, commented: “This innovative technology has the potential to transform women’s health research by enabling, for the first time, the non-invasive collection of biological markers in sweat, including oestrogen—a crucial factor in numerous health conditions that disproportionately affect women, such as migraine.”

With the new capital, Persperity Health has stated it will accelerate product development, pursue strategic partnerships, and navigate the regulatory approval process, with the long-term goal of expanding its platform to analyse additional biomarkers, with potential applications in mental health, stress management, and early detection of other women’s health issues.