Design-led platform technologies tackling fertility and early childhood health

By Laurent van Lerberghe, Founder and Managing Partner, KELES

In my years working in life sciences investment, I’ve encountered brilliant minds developing next-generation medical technologies, from AI-driven therapeutics to advanced diagnostics.

We now see these going one step further, delivering even greater impact on women’s and family health by integrating design with cutting-edge, AI-enabled science – making meaningful strides in care, particularly in complex areas such as women’s health and fertility.

Digital platform technologies, accessible via smartphones, provide women and families with more tools to understand their health, track changes, and take earlier action.

Moreover, because these technologies can be quickly updated, improved, and scaled, they enable faster adoption and smoother integration into care practices.

Companies like Elixir Health and Heloa are demonstrating the practical potential of this approach, merging scientific credibility with thoughtful design to meet patients where they are and help clinicians deliver more precise, responsive care.

Predicting fertility treatment outcomes and making care more personal with machine learning

Fertility is an emotive and deeply personal area of medicine, yet treatment dosages and timings are often based on guidelines, rather than the unique biology of each patient.

Elixir Health is changing this.

By leveraging causal machine learning, they provide personalised insights based on individual patients, enabling more informed decisions about treatment timelines and options.

Their algorithms analyse critical clinical data, such as age, antral follicle count, AMH levels, and past responses, to recommend the optimal initial dose and the ideal ovulation trigger window for IVF.

These models identify correlations and pinpoint which variables actually influence treatment outcomes.

Importantly, all the data is delivered through a user-friendly platform, accessible by both clinicians and patients.

Elixir’s platform is in use at France’s largest fertility centre, supporting over 8,000 patients to date.

Their collaboration with INRIA ensures scientific rigor, and their recent presentation at ESHRE 2024 shows that the wider medical community is taking notice. It marks a step toward a better experience and more effective outcomes.

Bringing together critical health data for entire family tribe, in one central place

You could call this the ultimate platform tech – Heloa offers an impressive approach to family-first design.

The app provides personalised health monitoring across the entire family, from pregnancy through early childhood, allowing parents to track both their own health and their children’s in one central place.

The data helps monitor development, nutrition, and general health, while the system flags potential risks and suggests next steps.

The app offers developmental check-ins and screening tools for mental health and cognitive delays, available at any time – whether at night, during moments of doubt, or when something feels off but does not yet require a medical visit.

This kind of support addresses a gap rarely covered by traditional systems.

With input from over 30 medical experts, including paediatricians and neuropsychologists, and built to French HDS standards, the platform ensures personal data security while already reaching more than 200,000 families in France.

Technology design for patients is the future

We live in a design-first world, with technology at our fingertips and more medical insight than ever before.

Elixir and Heloa may serve different stages of the family journey, yet both deliver tools that are scientifically grounded, clinically validated, and rooted in day-to-day use.

This is exactly the advance women’s health needs – not just new technology, but solutions created for women and families, and, above all, designed with excellence. Intelligent design is fast becoming the baseline expectation in healthcare, and these companies are certainly raising the bar.