de Gheldere has an educational background in Business Finance, and then moved on to work in the food technology space, and now has pivoted to founding her startup, Womco.

de Gheldere explained her pivot into nutrition and the journey surrounding the decision: “I've always been very interested, for personal reasons, about everything around nutrition. I've had a lot of hormonal health issues in the past, having dealt with many symptoms, and diagnosed with hormone imbalances. Finally, I have been able to take control of my symptoms through nutrition and with the help of dietitians and gynaecologists that have helped me understand the food-hormone connection.”

Hormones are responsible for many crucial physiological processes in our bodies, including growth and development, metabolism, and mood regulation. Although, hormonal health is often neglected. Today, 85% of women still suffer from hormonal imbalances with symptoms affecting their daily lives, from menstrual health all the way until menopause. On top of this, 70% of women are unaware of conditions like PCOS that may have manifested due to hormonal irregularities.

What is Womco?

So, Womco aims to help women navigate hormonal challenges from fertility until menopause. But how is this achieved, and what is it?

“Womco is a new solution that is helping women understand how they can live and eat in-sync with their bodies. It looks at everything to do with hormones, from women’s menstrual health, to fertility when trying to conceive, postnatal hormones, and even when women are transitioning through the menopause. Women have a lot of hormone fluctuations that sometimes cause unwanted and negative symptoms. In one out of three cases, hormonal imbalances can actually be chronic conditions, for example, PCOS, thyroid issues, endometriosis, and more serious conditions that are very hard to manage. Over the years, there have been many studies in the US, the UK, and Australia advancing this food hormone connection and demonstrating how different micro and macronutrients can support different symptoms and help women naturally. There are dietitians, nutritionists, and gynaecologist that are already adopting these practices with their patients of syncing their nutrition to their cycles into their bodies.

“With Womco, we’re creating this tool that combines not only nutrition, but also testing and consultations. Womco is specifically dedicated for women in the workplace. So instead of having a B2C approach, we have noticed how hormonal health really affects women in their personal lives but also affects their performance and their productivity at work so much that employers are looking for better solutions to support female employees. And we are now able to reach more women faster by going directly to the employer and offering the solution to their female workforce.”

Why was it founded?

Womco isn’t a one-woman army, and de Gheldere commented: “I got together with my Co-Founder based on the frustrations and personal struggle, but also the realisation that for us, nutrition really helped. We didn't have access to this knowledge in an easy, accessible, personalised solution before and so we built this together. My Co-Founder has a scientific background and was involved for many years doing studies around human body metabolic research.”

Together, as well as working with professionals in the field, has been invaluable: “We worked with dieticians, and gynaecologists from the very, very beginning. They helped us design the whole product, and then later on we decided to introduce consultations and testing, and right now we are also catering for more conditions and more health verticals.”

The competition

In a market as sensitive and important as hormone tracking and nutrition, competition is far from de Gheldere’s top priority, and the women the startup has set out to help are consistently being put first. “It’s important we don’t see others as competitors, and we don’t think competition is a bad thing, because in this space, the more solutions the better.

“We don’t have competitors in the sense that no one is doing what we do with the personalised nutrition. No one has built such an extensive recommendation engine for what to eat based on your symptoms. There are many other health apps that are doing cycle tracking and symptoms tracking, but they're only doing part of what we do, so it's not direct competition.

“Then when we look at B2B, there are some B2B players in digital health that have been emerging over the last year or so, for example virtual clinics or tools that are specifically matching individual practitioners for consultation. So, there are many of these apps or products going directly to the workplace, but then again, it's not any kind of direct competitor.”

Putting women first

Since the launch of Womco, the founders have been operating on a user centric basis, ensuring to put the wellbeing of women at the forefront. “We’ve spoken to so many of the users on the first product. We had a lot of feedback, and we really tried to build this product in a very user centric way and the development pipeline on the new product is based around the user's feedback and what they’ve seen was missing or lacking, or what they want to see, what they want to know, and what they want to access.

“Consultations and testing are things that are usually very expensive and time consuming. Getting a test in the UK isn't easy, and getting consultations is not affordable. So, all of these things, we're trying to make them as accessible as we can and providing data-driven, recommendation follow ups that you wouldn't get if you just had one consultation, or a test, and then you got test results, and you don't really know what to do with them.”

This approach even weaves through into what de Gheldere would class as one of the biggest highlights of the journey so far. “I think what is exciting me the most is how these B2B conversations with employers are going and how we're developing the new product, which is going to be so good and of value to female employees. That is, I think the highlights of the year.”

The future of Womco

The startup is currently in a great place with a solid mission to strive towards, so what’s next for Womco?

“In the next year, I think the main goals are really having more B2B sales and having the trust of more and more employers in the UK. Then potentially exploring partnerships with other employers abroad. And obviously trying to understand how we can best serve female employees and maybe come to a new realisation along the way that we can make the product even better.”