How femtech founders are changing the menopause conversation in Hong Kong

If menopause was once the conversation no one in Hong Kong had, now it’s the one everyone’s trying to join. Thanks to a new wave of femtech founders who aim to give women the language – and data – to break the silence on the once-taboo topic, the shift is being fuelled by a bevy of new at-home tests and apps that help women decode the “fog” of mysterious midlife symptoms.

From the outside, Mayra Hurtado’s life was the picture of success. She enjoyed a career at Adidas as a Southeast Asia marketing director, structured wellness routines and high-performance exercise. Internally, though, something shifted. “My sleep became unpredictable. My stress response felt amplified. My energy was inconsistent in ways that didn’t match my lifestyle,” she recalls. Like many women, Hurtado initially chalked it up to burnout. And when she started looking into perimenopause as a cause, she found more questions than answers: not only does research on the topic lag far behind other areas of women’s health, such as fertility, but it’s often not taken seriously by doctors, making it difficult for women to obtain data about their own hormones.

Hurtado’s realisation about the dearth of data during perimenopause sparked Hormony. Co-founded with biomedical scientist Dr Sarita Kumble, the platform brings athlete-style hormone tracking to women’s homes through an at-home saliva cortisol test. Users swab at initial wake-up, 30 minutes later and again before bed and the artificial intelligence-powered app delivers instant results on daily rhythms, which links spikes or dips to sleep, stress and energy.

Recently made available at Mannings pharmacies across Hong Kong, it’s a small revolution in a city where chronic stress amplifies hormonal flux. “So many women spend years feeling ‘off’ without answers,” says Hurtado.

FemTech Future founder Maaike Steinebach, whose Hong Kong consultancy helped Hormony launch here, calls cortisol testing a game-changer. “A lot of women who are perimenopausal suffer from fatigue, anxiety and mood swings [but] they can actually manage it [via] simple lifestyle changes,” she says. While not meant to diagnose or replace medical advice, the app makes small suggestions such as increasing morning light exposure or shifting the timing of intense workouts.