Ava Raises $30 Million for Fertility Tracking Wristband
*By Christian Smith*
Ava, the medtech company that makes wristbands for women tracking their fertility, announced Wednesday that it raised $30 million in Series B funding, money its co-founder said would be used to continue the company's research.
"Women's health and women's health research has been underfunded for the last decade," Lea von Bidder, Ava's co-founder, said in an interview with Cheddar. "We want to do a lot of research in different fields of women's health ー be it pregnancy monitoring, be it contraception, be it menopause ーand hope to give women insights about their body and health."
Ava conducts its research through clinical trials with the University Hospital of Zurich, where the company was founded in 2014.
Its wearable tracker is like a Fitbit for fertility, monitoring nine physiological metrics including heart and breathing rates, skin temperature, and heat loss to determine a woman's fertility cycle. Von Bidder said the company's research shows that the device is 89 percent accurate in predicting the 5.3 fertile days in a woman's cycle. In addition to the tracker, Ava also offers an app, which tracks a woman's health during her pregnancy.
So far, 10,000 babies have been born to mothers using the Ava tracker, the company announced on Wednesday.
Ava's founder said they want to offer contraception and family-planning products, too, but the company doesn't have a time frame for these types of products.
"Ava at this point is not a contraceptive yet," von Bidden said. "We are working really hard on making that happen."
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/fertility-tracking-company-ava-raises-30-million-in-series-b-funding-round).
Dan Ives, Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst at Wedbush Securities dives deeper into a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) that Apple has ended Samsung's 12-year reign as the world's largest smartphone seller.
Artificial intelligence is the biggest buzzword at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. Advances in generative AI stunned the world last year, and the elite crowd is angling to take advantage of its promise and minimize its risks.
Smartphones could get much smarter this year as the next wave of artificial intelligence seeps into the devices that accompany people almost everywhere they go.
In an annual assessment of global inequalities, Oxfam International said the first trillionaire could emerge within the next decade — as the anti-poverty organization pointed to the growing wealth gap that skyrocketed globally during the pandemic.
The Biden administration proposed a cost drop for overdrawing bank accounts, which it says could particularly relieve Americans living paycheck to paycheck.
Americans stepped up their spending in December more than expected, closing out the holiday season and the year on an upbeat tone. The Commerce Department said retail sales rose 0.6% in December compared with a November’s 0.3% increase.
