Jennis, founded by British Olympic Champion Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, raised £1M in pre-seed funding for its fitness, wellbeing and Cycle Mapping app. The round was led by Maki.vc, and participation from existing investor Venrex as well as silent angel investors.
Jennis offers personalised daily workouts mapped to the four phases of your menstrual cycle using innovative CycleMapping technology. Through their science-backed expertise, Jennis helps users adjust their fitness program to their personal hormonal and menstrual cycle, supporting maximum physical and psychological benefits.
Aligning with the four phases of a woman’s menstrual cycle, recommendations are made for users personal fitness programs, with each fitness session taught by Jess Ennis herself. The app currently offers two plans: Training and Jennis CycleMapping. The training plan gives users access to the training library; those on the CycleMapping plan receive recommendations on how to best train according to their cycle.
Investment
Pauliina Martikainen, Investment Director for Maki.vc, spoke with us about the VC’s investment and the future for Jennis.
Pauliina told us, “a significant part of the investment will go into further strengthening the tech team at Jennis to build the product further. New senior hires will be brought in to build out the Jennis CycleMapping programme, integrate with relevant apps and wearables and enhance personalization features and tracking.”
A new and exciting opportunity for Jennis will be their movement into other sectors. Pauliina said the team at Jennis, “will also be building new elements which extend beyond training, such as sleep, nutrition, and stress reduction – key factors that play an important role in hormonal health and overall wellbeing.”
FemTech Opportunities
As Pauliina Martikainen told us, “it is refreshing to see a former athlete like Jessica bringing her passion for understanding women and her own experiences and network to life through tech, and I’m excited by the way the product’s evolution is being driven by a marriage of customer insights and pioneering scientific studies.”
The £1M in pre-seed funding for Jennis is obviously exciting for the FemTech industry, as another great raise for companies within the sector.
Pauliina Martikainen reflected on this and noted, “the more high calibre FemTech founders we see raising funding the more attention the FemTech industry as a whole gets and the closer we get to closing the gender data gap.”
We couldn’t agree more with Pauliina’s statement and look forward to seeing more FemTech companies bridging the data gap through innovative technology.
