Where are they now: Samphire Neuroscience
“The users are behind the fuel to the fire,” said Emilė Radytė, Co-Founder of Samphire Neuroscience, in a neat summary of how the medtech startup thinks constantly about its user experience and adapts its product to meet their needs.
The product in question is Nettle, a medically certified wearable intentionally designed in the shape of a headband that works by using small electrical pulses to stimulate the prefrontal cortex and motor cortex, areas which are associated with menstrual pain and PMS.
Nettle was officially launched in June 2024 to a global wait list of users who’d signed up for priority and became more widely available in November 2024 to those in the UK and EU. These are just a couple of milestones Radytė has experienced in the year since Startups Magazine last spoke to her for the July/August 2024 issue. Other milestones of note include the company entering into the NHS Innovation Accelerator programme in March 2025 and releasing its subscriptions model in August 2025.
Radytė’s seemingly unlimited reserve of energy speaks to her wider belief that solutions for women’s health should be made more accessible, and that decades of medical research largely ignoring women should be a thing of the past.
Releasing Nettle
When we last spoke, Radytė had yet to launch Nettle, although it was an important representation of the culmination of several years of research – some of which was done in the dark, because there weren’t always enough research papers for Radytė to draw on.
I asked Radytė what the experience of finally releasing Nettle was like. When it was launched in June 2024, it sold out within the first day – which Radytė was quick to demur, clarifying that this was done to an existing wait list of over 15,000 people.
“Surprising, heartwarming,” said Radytė. “When you are doing research for such a long time on the product and getting all the certifications, we knew that the device worked from a technical perspective, but the big question for us was, were women willing to make that step towards their own wellbeing? Were they willing to invest into it, because we understand that … it’s [Nettle] £450 upfront … it’s still a relatively big investment for people to make.”
The answer, in short, was yes.
“When we saw it selling out, I think the thing that just went through our heads is recognising how much demand there was and how much people were just waiting for a product like this to come out,” she added.
What was valuable as well was that it was sold to a waitlist of what Radytė termed “loyal followers” who demonstrated their belief in the product before they could use it.
Nettle, their hardware solution, is also backed up by the app to provide personalisation for users in recognition that no one person is the same. It operates as a symptom tracker and offers suggestions of what symptoms are worth tracking, for instance if a woman is suffering from endometriosis or from PCOS. These symptoms could include heart palpitations or migraines, for example.
Radytė confessed that she always knew that personalisation was going to be an important aspect, but that she underestimated just how individual users can be: “We knew that if the personalisation didn’t come from the hardware, it needed to come [from] somewhere else and from the experience.
“But the reason we didn’t launch a product that was fully personalised is because we wanted the personalisation to be data-, evidence-, and women-led.”
The release didn’t mark the end of development, as the company is still continually adapting Nettle to ensure it meets the needs of its users. Radytė noted two iterations, on the hardware side and then the hardware and software side, in response to user feedback.
On the hardware side, they developed the Nettle loop, a piece of hardware that allows users to more securely attach the headband.
This came about because some users were saying that the headband was slipping while they were wearing it.
On the hardware and software side, they previously recommended a standard protocol – using Nettle once a day for twenty minutes for the five days before a period.
“We now have a fully personalised schedule. So let’s say, if you were to track that you know you have fatigue two days before, [a] migraine the day of, and then terrible pain the first three days of your period, your protocol would be different from someone who … has PMDD and has two weeks of low mood before their period,” explained Radytė.
Crucially, the more a user wears Nettle and collects self-reported health data on their symptoms, the more the app has to understand how it can provide them with personalised recommendations: “We adapt your schedule so that as you improve, we can change the number of sessions you need and the frequency, so that you’re always using your optimal dose.”
High barriers to entry for medtech startups
It’s no great secret that medtech startups face high barriers to entry, such as having to navigate strict regulation, manage long development timelines, and raise a large amount of money.
“The regulatory burden is very high,” stated Radytė. “Essentially, they require you to have run full clinical trials, have built an MVP, but also have manufacturable devices – fully supply chains and everything ready to go before they even consider you for certification.”
With this in mind, it took Samphire Neuroscience approximately a year and a half to two years to run clinical trials, and a year to set up their supply chain.
“We got approved within three years of operations, which to my knowledge is the fastest medical device has ever been approved in the European Union from beginning to end.”
Regulation is needed to safeguard consumers from products that could be potentially harmful, Radytė said, but there could be more done to attract founders to the sector.
“You don’t see that many founders in the medtech space, and I think that’s because the amount of money you need to spend to just be able to enter your market is so high.”
Radytė added that while the UK environment for startups excels in early research and R&D, it struggles with market access and commercialisation. This creates a situation where some startups may start out in the UK, but they shift their operations to the US; developing products which are funded by UK taxpayer money that then don’t always benefit UK consumers.
Informing women’s health
The story behind Samphire Neuroscience began with Radytė’s experience of working as an emergency medic in the United States and then studying what technologies could be used to address forms of depression and anxiety, such as postnatal, menopausal, and perimenopause anxiety. This was where she realised there were fundamental gaps in research into women’s health.
Which led me to my question: were they planning on using the data they got from their users to better inform women’s health?
“We do have a couple of different ways,” she confirmed. “One is continuing to run clinical research and share about it as much as we can … we currently partner with about seven labs globally, academic and medical institutions that are running research on different aspects … fibromyalgia and migraines to female specific conditions like PMDD and endometriosis.
“Number two is education. We just think that ultimately, so much power comes from empowering our users, one for their own decision making. But two, we know that a lot of our users are really baller women … some of them might be scientists, some of them might be journalists … as a result, they can push this idea and this understanding further into the public scene.”
The message she wanted to share was to “never lose sight of your users and why you’re doing what you’re doing. Because I think it’s easy to … get bogged down with clinical trials, with how your sales funnel works. As long as you keep going back to, who are we building this for? Why did we start this? It will always keep you grounded.”
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Startups Magazine. Click here to subscribe
