Entrepreneur
Interview: Closing the gap in care for high-risk pregnancies
Pregnolia is on a mission to transform pregnancy care by bringing an often-overlooked biomarker into clinical practice. Stephanie Price speaks to founder and CEO Dr. Sabrina Badir to find out more.
Paying closer clinical attention to cervical stiffness could hold the key to better outcomes for high-risk pregnancies.
That is according to Pregnolia, a Swiss university spin-out founded in 2016, which is working to improve pregnancy care through the detection of cervical changes that contribute to the risk of preterm birth.
Its technology measures the stiffness of the cervix to aid pregnancy management, providing quantitative data to support clinical decisions quickly.
The company emerged out of research at ETH Zürich university and the University Hospital in Zürich into changes in cervical stiffness during pregnancy.
“During our research, we identified cervical stiffness as a critical yet overlooked biomarker in pregnancy,” says Pregnolia founder and CEO, Dr. Sabrina Badir.
“This insight became the foundation for the Pregnolia system – a CE-marked and patented medical device that enables objective and precise measurement of cervical stiffness.
Badir says that one in 10 babies are born too early, resulting in consequences such as higher risk of death, underdeveloped lungs, neurological impairment and chronic illness – causing high costs for families and healthcare systems.
Driven by a mission to improve prenatal care and tackle some of the most pressing unmet needs in obstetrics, Badir explains that Pregnolia’s goal is to detect changes in cervical stiffness earlier and accurately measure the changes.
According to Badir, the Pregnolia system outperforms traditional methods, which focus on evaluating cervical length and dilation using ultrasound techniques, and reduces the risks associated with preterm births, as well as assessing cervical readiness for labour induction.
“With this platform technology, we support clinicians in making earlier and better-informed decisions in pregnancy care, ultimately improving outcomes for mothers and babies worldwide.
“Our long-term vision is clear: to bring cervical stiffness into clinical routine – not only to improve care for high-risk pregnancies, but ultimately to enable universal screening and make pregnancy monitoring more precise, proactive, and equitable.”
As the world’s first CE-marked and patented medical device for measuring cervical stiffness, Badir explains that the system consists of two components including a reusable control unit and a sterile, single-use probe.
“The system uses a gentle aspiration technique,” says Badir. “When the probe is placed on the cervix, it gradually applies a controlled vacuum that gently lifts the tissue.
“Once the cervix lifts by four millimetres, the system records the pressure needed to reach that elevation. The stiffer the tissue, the more pressure is required. This value is shown immediately as the Cervical Stiffness Index (CSI).
“The Pregnolia system provides a fast, easy-to-use, and objective measurement. Cervical stiffness has shown promising diagnostic performance, even outperforming cervical length measurement by ultrasound in certain clinical situations.
“The technology is scalable and suitable for use in both high-resource and low-resource settings.”
Badir explains that Pregnolia is now working with OBGYN experts to integrate cervical stiffness assessment into clinical practice by developing digital companion tools, expanding clinical validation, and preparing for inclusion in national guidelines and reimbursement frameworks.
The Pregnolia system originated from Badir’s doctoral research at ETH Zurich in collaboration with the University Hospital Zürich which led to the development of a new method to quantify cervical stiffness.
“This interdisciplinary environment – where engineering met obstetrics – was the perfect setting for innovation.
“Together with clinicians, we identified the lack of objective tools to assess cervical readiness as a major limitation in prenatal care.
“I’m proud that what began as an academic idea is now a certified medical device with the potential to redefine standards of care in obstetrics.
“We’re also proud to have secured over [USD$3.77m] in non-dilutive funding to support our development efforts. In 2019, Pregnolia was awarded a prestigious €1.5m grant from the European Union under the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument, which is now part of the EIC Accelerator programme.
“This support enabled us to scale up production and prepare the Pregnolia system for market introduction in Europe.
“Beyond the financial contribution, the EU’s backing was also a strong endorsement of the impact and innovation behind our technology, and it played a key role in helping us raise over [USD$12.58m] in equity funding to date.”
With preterm birth being one of the leading challenges for maternal health and newborn health, Pregnolia is working to support the unmet need for sufficient risk measuring tools.
Badir says that despite decades of research and various public health initiatives, current tools for assessing the risk of preterm birth remain insufficient.
“Ultrasound-based cervical length, digital exams, and biochemical markers often lack sensitivity and reproducibility,” says Badir.
“Many at-risk women go undetected, while others receive unnecessary treatment due to false positives.
“The Pregnolia system addresses this gap by providing an objective, point-of-care measurement of cervical stiffness, a new biomarker for the risk of preterm birth.”
The Pregnolia system supports clinical decision-making in both symptomatic women, helping triage patients more precisely and avoiding overtreatment, and in asymptomatic high-risk women, helping to detect mothers that may benefit from early interventions.
“In the future, cervical stiffness could also become an important parameter for guiding induction of labor, which is becoming increasingly common and complex,” says Badir.
“By improving risk stratification and supporting clinical decisions, Pregnolia has the potential to reduce unnecessary interventions, allocate resources more efficiently, and improve outcomes, especially in health systems with limited capacity.”
Pregnolia was the winner of the Femtech World OBGYN Innovation of the Year Award 2025, sponsored by elitone by Elidah.
The award, says Badir, recognises not the technology and the collective effort behind it.
“It energises us for the next phase of our journey. Pregnolia is CE-marked and ready for market entry in Europe. But through our collaborations, especially with clinical leaders in the UK, we’ve learned that the value of our innovation can be expanded even further.”
Badir explains that Pregnolia is now investing in additional clinical studies to support broader adoption, reimbursement, and integration into clinical routines.
“At the same time, our business development efforts are focused on identifying the right strategic partner, ideally one with established commercial operations, who can help maximise the value and reach of Pregnolia.”
This year, the company will also be advancing new clinical indications based on cervical stiffness, progressing its US regulatory strategy, including FDA discussions and raising further funds.
“Bringing a new diagnostic technology into clinical practice is never a solo effort. At Pregnolia, one of our greatest strengths is the global network we’ve built,” says Badir.
“This collaborative ecosystem has been instrumental in advancing our clinical research, generating the evidence needed to build trust, shaping regulatory strategies, and exploring adoption pathways in diverse healthcare settings.
“But it’s also a reflection of how we work: we listen, we learn, and we co-develop with those closest to patient care.
“We believe this network-driven approach is not only key to Pregnolia’s success, but a model for how innovation in obstetrics can and should evolve: rooted in science, focused on clinical impact, and built through global collaboration.”
In countries where the gender playing field still steeply tilts toward male advantage, women-led businesses that participated in accelerators showed no financial improvement, or even did worse, compared to ventures that applied but weren’t accepted, a study revealed.
The researchers drew on data for more than 1,400 ventures across 65 countries that had applied to 33 different accelerators between 2013 and 2015.
The study built on data from the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative, which tracks follow-on impacts of accelerator programmes around the world, including comparative information between applicants admitted and rejected from programmes.
Sarah Kaplan is professor emerita in strategic management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management as well as founding director for its Institute for Gender and the Economy.
She said: “Ironically, this was especially true for those that participated in accelerators focused on women’s empowerment.”
Prof. Kaplan wanted to know whether promises that accelerators could help narrow the gender divide in entrepreneurial success were bearing out.
Joined by Nilanjana Dutt of Bocconi University, the researchers honed in on social innovation accelerators because these tend to attract more women over more Silicon Valley-style programmes.
At first glance, the researchers found that women-led businesses did not benefit as much from accelerator participation as male-led businesses did.
But a more nuanced picture emerged once they layered in other information about the contexts in which accelerators were operating, including a World Economic Forum index on gender equality and surveys to get at details about the accelerator programs.
“In more gender-egalitarian countries, accelerators were doing a great job of supporting women entrepreneurs and especially when they focused on women’s empowerment,” said Prof. Kaplan.
In financial terms, “it was a pretty dramatic difference and one that should make everyone pause.”
In less gender egalitarian settings, accelerators may not be benefitting women-led ventures because, the researchers wrote, they may not have delivered programming women could really use, given the context in which they would be operating.
In countries with starker gender inequality, “oftentimes women can’t even get a loan without their husband signing,” said Prof. Kaplan.
“When accelerators go in, they can’t treat it like a one-off intervention but need to also work on the ecosystems that surround the ventures.”
Still, even in more egalitarian contexts, women entrepreneurs had lower acceptance rates into accelerators than men and that was true even when the accelerator prioritised women’s empowerment, or where it had higher numbers of women on selection committees.
Whether the selection criteria were biased or the female selectors were better at identifying which women entrepreneurs would benefit most is an open question for future research, Prof Kaplan said.
As for women entrepreneurs, her advice is to treat accelerator applications as a two-way street: be just as choosy about which programs to commit to:
“Focus on what specifically this accelerator would help me achieve and whether it’s a match from your side too.”
The women’s health sector is no longer just building a case for itself.
Capital is moving, consolidation is accelerating, and the companies that understood the opportunity early are now focused on one thing: scale.
The conversations happening at Women’s Health Week USA on May 13-14 at the New York Academy of Medicine reflect exactly that shift.
Three sessions in particular cut to the heart of where the industry is right now, and where it’s going next. Here’s a closer look at what’s on the full programme.
Key Panel Discussions
Who’s Backing the Boom: Inside the Capital Surge in Women’s Health
Capital is flowing into women’s health at record levels.
The question is no longer whether the sector will attract institutional investment, but where that capital is coming from, who it’s going to, and what it takes to unlock the next wave of commercial growth.
This session puts those questions to a panel with direct experience of deploying and raising capital in the sector.
Nicole Mooljee Damani (EY-Parthenon) moderates a conversation between Tara Bishop (Black Opal Ventures), Trish Costello (Portfolia), and Ramiz Khan (Wellcome Leap), three investors with distinct mandates and a shared focus on what actually moves the needle.
For founders and operators in the room, this session is a direct window into how the people writing the cheques are thinking.
What they’re backing, what they’re passing on, and what the current capital environment means for the companies building in women’s health right now.
Mergers & Acquisitions: Who’s Buying, Who’s Building, and Why
The M&A landscape in women’s health is heating up. Strategic acquisitions, consolidation plays, and corporate partnerships are reshaping the competitive map, and the decisions being made now will define the structure of the industry for years to come.
This panel examines the logic behind who’s acquiring and who’s holding, from the perspective of people operating at the sharp end of those decisions.
Oriana Papin-Zoghbi (AOA Dx), Monica Cepak (Wisp), Gabrielle de Briey (Hologic), and Johanna Grossman (New York Stock Exchange) bring a combined view that spans diagnostics, digital health, medtech and the capital markets infrastructure that underpins it all.
For anyone building a company with an eye on strategic exits, partnerships or acquisitions, this is the session that maps the terrain.
The Economics of Equity: How Inclusion Equals Growth Strategy
Inclusion isn’t a tickbox. It’s a growth lever. And the data increasingly backs that up.
This session makes the commercial case for equity in women’s health, examining how addressing underserved populations and closing health disparities doesn’t just serve social goals, it creates the biggest commercial opportunities in the sector.
The shift from impact metric to market strategy is already underway. This panel is where that argument gets made in full.
Annie Theriault (Cross Border Impact Ventures) moderates a conversation between Sharon Meers (Midi Health), Lauren Makler (Cofertility), Tanvi Patel (Amazon Pharmacy), and Julia Berenson (World Health Organisation). The breadth of that panel, spanning venture, fertility, pharma and global health policy, is itself a signal of how far the conversation has moved.
These three sessions are part of a broader two-day programme bringing together 700+ senior decision makers across investment, innovation, policy and medtech.
The event is built around curated 1:1 matchmaking, with introductions structured around each attendee’s commercial priorities.
Early Bird Pricing for Women’s Health Week USA is ending Friday April 17, to save up to $600 on your ticket to the Global Stage for Scale, book now!
Secure your place at Women’s Health Week USA
The women’s health sector is no longer just building a case for itself.
Capital is moving, consolidation is accelerating, and the companies that understood the opportunity early are now focused on one thing: scale.
The conversations happening at Women’s Health Week USA on May 13-14 at the New York Academy of Medicine reflect exactly that shift.
Three sessions in particular cut to the heart of where the industry is right now, and where it’s going next. Here’s a closer look at what’s on the full programme.
Key Panel Discussions
Who’s Backing the Boom: Inside the Capital Surge in Women’s Health
Capital is flowing into women’s health at record levels.
The question is no longer whether the sector will attract institutional investment, but where that capital is coming from, who it’s going to, and what it takes to unlock the next wave of commercial growth.
This session puts those questions to a panel with direct experience of deploying and raising capital in the sector.
Nicole Mooljee Damani (EY-Parthenon) moderates a conversation between Tara Bishop (Black Opal Ventures), Trish Costello (Portfolia), and Ramiz Khan (Wellcome Leap), three investors with distinct mandates and a shared focus on what actually moves the needle.
For founders and operators in the room, this session is a direct window into how the people writing the cheques are thinking.
What they’re backing, what they’re passing on, and what the current capital environment means for the companies building in women’s health right now.
Mergers & Acquisitions: Who’s Buying, Who’s Building, and Why
The M&A landscape in women’s health is heating up. Strategic acquisitions, consolidation plays, and corporate partnerships are reshaping the competitive map, and the decisions being made now will define the structure of the industry for years to come.
This panel examines the logic behind who’s acquiring and who’s holding, from the perspective of people operating at the sharp end of those decisions.
Oriana Papin-Zoghbi (AOA Dx), Monica Cepak (Wisp), Gabrielle de Briey (Hologic), and Johanna Grossman (New York Stock Exchange) bring a combined view that spans diagnostics, digital health, medtech and the capital markets infrastructure that underpins it all.
For anyone building a company with an eye on strategic exits, partnerships or acquisitions, this is the session that maps the terrain.
The Economics of Equity: How Inclusion Equals Growth Strategy
Inclusion isn’t a tickbox. It’s a growth lever. And the data increasingly backs that up.
This session makes the commercial case for equity in women’s health, examining how addressing underserved populations and closing health disparities doesn’t just serve social goals, it creates the biggest commercial opportunities in the sector.
The shift from impact metric to market strategy is already underway. This panel is where that argument gets made in full.
Annie Theriault (Cross Border Impact Ventures) moderates a conversation between Sharon Meers (Midi Health), Lauren Makler (Cofertility), Tanvi Patel (Amazon Pharmacy), and Julia Berenson (World Health Organisation). The breadth of that panel, spanning venture, fertility, pharma and global health policy, is itself a signal of how far the conversation has moved.
These three sessions are part of a broader two-day programme bringing together 700+ senior decision makers across investment, innovation, policy and medtech.
The event is built around curated 1:1 matchmaking, with introductions structured around each attendee’s commercial priorities.
Early Bird Pricing for Women’s Health Week USA is ending Friday April 17, to save up to $600 on your ticket to the Global Stage for Scale, book now!
Secure your place at Women’s Health Week USA
Female-led startups are growing despite a support gap and limited structured help, according to new research.
Research from Small Business Britain, in partnership with Starling Bank, found that more than eight in 10 women, or 82 per cent, aim to grow their business in the next 12 months.
More than half, 53 per cent, said revenue had increased since 2025.
However, the findings also point to weaker income security.
Just over half, 51 per cent, do not plan to hire in the next year, while 51 per cent said their household income is lower than before starting their business.
Some 44 per cent said they had never received financial education, while more than half, 56 per cent, rated themselves as beginner or intermediate in financial confidence.
Many female entrepreneurs are turning to different sources for financial advice, with 26 per cent relying on accountants, 15 per cent on Google, 12 per cent on AI tools such as ChatGPT and six per cent solely on their own judgement.
Two in five, or 40 per cent, are unaware of or have not used government support systems to help grow their business, the research found.
The findings also point to the role female entrepreneurs play in the UK economy, where they lead many of the country’s 5.6 million small businesses.
However, with just over half, 52 per cent, of female solo entrepreneurs not planning to hire, the report says tailored support is needed to help turn ambition into scalable growth.
Based on the findings, Small Business Britain recommends prioritising financial education, introducing targeted support to help women move from sole trader to employer, and promoting digital financial tools to support productivity.
Michelle Ovens, CBE, founder and chief executive of Small Business Britain, said: “Female entrepreneurs play a vital role in the UK’s economic ecosystem and across the country, their ambition and contributions, often alongside significant caring responsibilities, do not go unnoticed.
“However, our research demonstrates a growth gap holding women back.
“There is a huge opportunity to support female entrepreneurs to scale their businesses with confidence and unlock financial success through clearer pathways to support.
“By providing women with the right tools and resources, we can level the playing field, boost entrepreneurship and enable more women to grow their businesses while continuing to benefit from flexibility and freedom taking the leap into entrepreneurship offers.”
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