Natural Cycles

Natural Cycles is the first app to be certified for contraception in Europe. The app predicts the days on which a woman is fertile and may be used for planning pregnancy and contraception. It was developed by CERN scientist Elina Berglund, who founded the company with her husband, Raoul Scherwitzl.

Berglund was a top physicist at CERN who was part of the Higgs boson discovery, which led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013, before Co-founding the company. Because the couple was in search of an alternative natural contraceptive themselves, Berglund used data analysis to develop an algorithm designed to pinpoint her ovulation.

The couple then decided to create an app with the underlying algorithm, Natural Cycles. Following several medical trials, the app became the first tech-based device to be certified for use as contraception in the EU, in February 2017 by the European inspection and certification organisation TÜV SÜD. In November 2017 Natural Cycles received a $30M investment in series B round led by EQT Ventures fund, with participation from existing investors Sunstone, E-ventures and Bonnier Growth Media (the VC arm of privately held Swedish media group, the Bonnier Group).

While the product is only currently certified in the European Union, where its users are concentrated in the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries, it is available worldwide. Natural Cycles offers a subscription product, which now has over 600,000 users across 160 countries (as of Nov. 16th, 2017). 75 percent use the app as a contraceptive, and the rest use it to try and become pregnant.

Natural Cycles offers an app subscription service which costs approximately £60 a year.

It works by taking your temperature each morning, under the tongue as soon as you wake up in the morning and logging it into the app. This is done with a basal thermometer which has a higher sensitivity than a typical fever thermometer as it displays two decimal places. The apps algorithm calculation is based on the observation that post-ovulation, progesterone warms our bodies by up to 0.45C. Natural Cycles algorithm then determines, based on the temperature, whether the user is fertile or not. A red day means fertile (which is when you should abstain or use a condom), a green day means not fertile.

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Wikipedia