Meet Luna, a health and well-being app for teen girls that is designed to help them navigate teenhood. The app lets teens ask questions about their health and wellness and get responses from experts. It also lets them track their periods, moods, and skin. The London-based startup presented today at on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 to detail its mission to educate and support teen girls.
Luna is the brainchild of best friend duo Jas Schembri-Stothart and Jo Goodall, who came up with the idea for the startup as part of an assignment during their MBA program at Oxford.
As part of their coursework, Schembri-Stothart and Goodall were required to form a team, find a problem, come up with an idea, and then pitch it to mock investors. They were allowed to choose their own teammates, and Schembri-Stothart told TechCrunch that she wanted to ensure she formed a team of talented women.
After forming a team with a few other women from around the world, the group got to talking about the women’s health issues they were experiencing in their late 20s and early 30s, and the conversation kept coming back to the fact that they had lacked information about their health in their adolescence.
They all agreed that if they learned more about the red flags around women’s health when they were teenagers, they would have been able to navigate teenhood and young adulthood more easily.
The group came up with the idea of an app that would help teenagers with their health and well-being journeys throughout puberty. After pitching the idea to their professors, they received positive feedback. Although the duo remained focused on their studies and set the project aside, they revisited the idea over their summer break and thought about bringing it to life.
Schembri-Stothart and Goodall decided to revisit their old high schools to set up focus groups with teens to learn about their perspectives on their idea. The teens told the duo that they were facing a misinformation crisis and didn’t know what was fact or fake because they were getting most of their information from TikTok.
They also noted that the education system was not helping them learn about their health and bodies.
“We left these sessions and people were emailing us, like ‘Hey, where can we download the app’?” Schembri-Stothart said. “We were like there’s clearly a demand for this and there’s a massive opportunity here that no one’s tapping into, and if we don’t do it, someone else will and we’ll be shooting ourselves in the foot. So, we decided to just go for it.”
After graduating from their MBA program in 2021, the duo built the app and launched a simple version of it in November 2022 that they shared with the teenagers who attended their focus groups. Since then, the company has been building out the app and adding new functionality based on responses from users.
Luna lets users ask anonymous questions and get responses from experts like general practitioners, gynecologists, dermatologists, academics, and more. All of the questions are anonymous, and you can check out and read questions asked by other users on the app.
To date, nearly 45,000 questions have been asked on the platform by 100,000 members. The startup is using AI to quickly field answers for questions that have already been asked on the platform.
For instance, if a user asks how to get better skin and a dermatologist on the app responds, their response will automatically be used to respond to other users who have asked the same question. This way, medical experts don’t have to spend time responding to each question individually and can focus on providing new advice and insights.
The app features a series of questions that it asks users each day to start tracking how they feel, while also logging their periods, skin, sleep, and more. Each month, Luna provides users with a report that gives them insights based on what they logged. The app will nudge users to form healthy habits and consider chatting with their doctor about certain things, such as consistently heavy periods.
Luna also features a “Learn” section where users can get information about specific topics around things like body positivity, work anxiety, relationships, and more through articles and videos from experts.
“I would like Luna to be in the pockets of teens everywhere, enabling a more educated and empowered generation of women, and not only helping teen girls, but helping their parents as well, because I think there’s a massive untapped opportunity for supporting parents. We see a lot with prenatal and newborns, but then it sort of drops off when it comes to high school.”
The app operates on a freemium model where users can access all parts of Luna for free, but then get capped at a certain point of usage. Users can pay €2.99 per month for unlimited access to the app.
The startup has raised €1.4 million in funding to date, and has received investments from several angels and funds, including Syndicate Room, Octopus Ventures, Moonstone, Jade Ventures, and Incisive Ventures.
Luna is available worldwide, except the United States. The company wants to launch in the States next year after ensuring it has the best product possible in order to take advantage of the massive market opportunity.