From physicist to founder: Elina’s Story

Growing up in Sweden I was fascinated by the stars from an early age. I don’t mean that in a poetic way, although there is beauty in something so big you can barely comprehend it. I mean that I wanted to know how the solar system worked, about all the different planets and how the universe was formed. 

My parents were scientists and entrepreneurs too, a combination that made them inquisitive yet ambitious and I believe that a large part of who I am was shaped during those early years. When I left home to go to university it made perfect sense that I would study physics.  

My birth control journey 

Maybe I was unusual, a female physicist in a male-dominated field, but I didn’t think much about that. In many ways, I was just an ordinary woman in her twenties. Like so many of you, I struggled to find the right birth control method for me. Despite being the most commonly prescribed option for women my age, the pill just didn’t agree with me.

I was insistent with my doctor that this option wasn’t working, so I was prescribed the implant instead. The implant, for those who don’t know, is a little plastic device that sits in your arm for about 3 years and slowly releases hormones. This long-acting method suited me great and I used it for almost a decade.

I was in my early twenties when I met my husband Raoul at the university library in the States. We were both studying on exchange programs. A physicist too, Raoul shared my curiosity about the world and my love for science - we hit it off immediately! 

A few years later we got married. We were both living in Geneva at the time, I’d completed my PhD and was working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). At CERN I was working on the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, a groundbreaking piece of research that led to the Nobel Prize for Physics the following year.

At the same time Raoul and I were talking about starting a family. We knew this was something we wanted to do in a couple of years. I knew it was the right time to come off hormonal birth control but looking around I couldn’t find any alternative options that we could use in the short term.

I started looking into the science behind traditional fertility awareness methods and learned how body temperature is linked to the menstrual cycle. The more I looked into it the more fascinated I became. I started taking my own temperature and recording my own data so I could learn the trends and understand exactly what was happening in my body, and when I was fertile.

Learning to build an app 

After the Higgs Boson discovery, my time at CERN was coming to an end. While my love of physics remained I felt the pull of a new adventure. I saw an opportunity to apply the skills I’d learned as a scientist to my own data. And so I spent the whole of the following year locked up in our apartment learning the skills I needed to code the Natural Cycles app. I had coding experience from working at CERN but this was new territory!

I wanted to make something that would work not only for my cycle but for all cycles. I built the Natural Cycles algorithm modeled on the data of our first 30 users (including my own), plus published cycle data from thousands of women. I’d created an app that made it easy to see where a woman was in her cycle and to know her daily fertility status. It was obvious that I had made something special, something that could cater to an unmet need: the effective non-hormonal birth control I’d been searching for. 

Raoul shared my passion for women’s health but he also wanted to take on the challenge of becoming an entrepreneur. We both knew that in Natural Cycles we had something great. It was time to offer this hormone-free option to more women. We moved to Stockholm in 2014 and officially launched to the Swedish market. 

Growing our business and our family 

After using Natural Cycles as birth control, we were excited to start our family. We switched to using NC° Plan Pregnancy and were delighted to get pregnant on the first try! After I gave birth to my daughter I became even more entrenched in the world of women’s health. I couldn’t believe the things we weren’t taught in schools. It baffled me how we could live our entire lives without understanding the basic biology of our own bodies.

In 2018 we got FDA Clearance, although we’d been an established option in Europe for a number of years, this certification meant we could bring Natural Cycles to the United States. That same year Raoul and myself made the move to New York City.

During this time we’d been trying for another baby, and sadly I’d lost two pregnancies. It was a difficult time and I came to understand just how complicated all of our fertility journeys can be. We took the time we needed and then we tried again. In 2019, I gave birth to our second child, a healthy baby boy! 

Since we launched in 2013, we’ve been tirelessly innovating so we can bring you the best experience possible. From new ways to measure to updates to the Natural Cycles app, we’re always striving to offer the best kind of natural birth control. It’s been quite a journey, and I can’t wait to share with you all the great things that are on the horizon! 

Thank you for reading up on my journey from physicist to Natural Cycles founder. If you haven’t tried our hormone-free birth control yet, you can use this referral link for a 20% discount plus a free thermometer.