Google Health on October 12, 2026 announced a multi-year partnership with Flo Health, the period-tracking app with more than 80 million monthly users, alongside an undisclosed strategic investment. Starting 2027, women will be able to link their cycle data to readings from Google’s wearables—if they pay a premium subscription.
But, just three days later, the window closed for Flo users to claim their share of a $59.5 million settlement over allegations that the app let Google, analytics company Flurry, and Meta record their period, ovulation and pregnancy data without consent from 2016 to 2019. Google is to pay $48 million of that bill, pending a federal judge’s final approval on October 29.
This time, Google says users will have to opt in, can withdraw consent at any time, and that their data won’t be used for advertising or sold. Though that may hold, the deal shows how a startup that once looked fiercely independent can end up inside the very ecosystem its users were warned about. As Bloomberg Law reported, many users are surprised to learn that apps like Flo sit outside HIPAA, which instead protects records held by certain institutions like hospitals and insurers.
And the pattern reaches far beyond period trackers. Online therapy platform BetterHelp also agreed to pay $7.8 million after the FTC alleged it had shared its users’ email addresses and mental health questionnaire answers with Facebook, Snapchat, and other advertisers, despite promising to keep them private.
For users, the stakes are personal; people hand health apps details they might not tell their closest friends, including symptoms, diagnoses, medications, moods, and sexual histories. For women in regions where abortion is a crime, data shared with a trusted app could lead police to their door. For someone living with mental health condition or chronic illness, data that drifts into an employer’s hands could shape what they pay, and whether they get hired at all.
Each company on this list was built from a real, often personal need, is open about protecting its users, and focused on the corners of medicine that big funding tends to skip. These are ten to watch.
AI Diagnostics
South Africa’s AI Diagnostics built Ostium, a digital stethoscope that listens to a patient’s lungs and uses AI to flag likely tuberculosis in under five minutes. The company says its model was trained on more than 50,000 lung recordings, and a community health worker can run the whole screening without an X-ray machine or a radiographer. It already has approval from South Africa’s regulator, SAHPRA.
On privacy, the company operates under South Africa’s data protection law and says it won’t pass personal information to third parties without consent, apart from service providers and legal requests. Sensitive health data is also anonymized through a de-identification process.
The company raised a $5.2 million pre-Series A this year, the largest healthtech round in Africa in the first half of 2026.
Tuberculosis is the world’s leading infectious killer, with an estimated 1.23 million deaths in 2024. Many clinics still screen with symptom checklists, which WHO guidance puts at around 71% sensitivity, meaning three in ten people leave with TB undiagnosed.
Ourself
Ourself helps women understand how their hormones shape everything from energy and mood to sleep, metabolism and focus. Its AI research partner Stella answers questions by combining women’s health research with each user’s unique individual history, and founder Adriana Torosian spent 20 years building businesses at Microsoft, Google and DigitalGlobe before her own health experience led her to start the company.
The company’s database stores users’ identity and data separately, and the key that links them lives on each users’ phone—meaning it couldn’t match health records to a specific person even under a subpoena. Its privacy policy also includes minimizing the personal information Ourself collects whenever possible and never selling users’ data.
Women live longer than men, but spend 25% more of their lives in poor health, and research has struggled to keep up. Only in May 2026, for example, PCOS, a hormonal disorder that affects a projected one in eight women of reproductive age, was renamed PMOS to reflect that it affects hormones and metabolism across the whole body, after decades in which a name focused on ovarian cysts contributed to delayed diagnoses—70% of affected women worldwide remain undiagnosed.
Outro
Outro is a virtual clinic that helps people safely come off antidepressants. Co-founder Dr. Mark Horowitz, a psychiatry researcher, helped develop hyperbolic tapering, a method that shrinks each dose reduction as patients get closer to zero to limit withdrawal. Patients get a trained clinician, compounded low doses delivered at home, symptom tracking and peer support. Some of its clinicians joined after going through withdrawal themselves.
Because Outro’s care is delivered through licensed medical groups, patient records fall under U.S. health privacy law, and its privacy policy also explicitly states it allows users to opt out of having their information used for advertising or shared for promotional purposes.
The company raised $7 million in pre-seed and seed funding on October 8, and now operates in 14 states.
An analysis last year found that the median American on antidepressants stays on them for about five years, even though the trials behind them typically last just eight weeks, and a 2024 paper found that one in three people report symptoms after stopping, ranging from dizziness and nausea to anxiety, insomnia and the electric-shock sensations patients call “brain zaps.” The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has since announced a plan to support tapering for patients who aren’t benefiting from psychiatric drugs.
Phantom GI
Tel Aviv-based Phantom GI is developing PercStoma, a device designed to create an ostomy through a single needle puncture instead of open surgery. CEO Ido Sadan, a medical device specialist, leads the company with surgeon and radiologist Dr. Eran Shlomovitz, and the startup says the procedure could take about 20 minutes, with patients going home in roughly three days.
As a surgical device maker, Phantom GI doesn’t run a consumer app or collect personal health data from users; any patient information it handles will come through clinical studies.
The company closed a $5 million seed round on October 8, led by Pitango HealthTech, to fund development and early U.S. clinical studies.
About 100,000 ostomy surgeries are performed in the U.S. each year—1.5 million globally just due to colon cancer—and each currently requires general anesthesia. Phantom GI estimates that up to 55,000 patients a year are too frail for that surgery at all, and it plans to start with them.
Peripear
Oxford-based Peripear makes a patented wearable that delivers gentle, hands-free warmth to the perineum during labor to help prevent tearing. Midwife Nina van Schaick came up with the idea after 14 years of watching these injuries happen, and built it with medtech entrepreneur Eviatar Natan.
Because Peripear is a physical device used in the delivery room, it doesn’t collect data about the women who use it.
In September, the company closed a £1.2 million ($1.5 million) pre-seed and Innovate UK funding round, backed by HERmesa, SyndicateRoom, Zinc VC and SIE Ventures. A first-in-human study with Singapore’s National University Health System is planned for the second half of 2027, and the company is working towards U.S. hospital pilots.
Perineal tearing has long been treated as an inevitable part of childbirth: up to nine in ten first-time mothers who give birth vaginally have some kind of tear, graze or cut, and around six in a hundred have a severe third- or fourth-degree tear. Peripear estimates the cost of these injuries at more than $10 billion a year in the U.S. alone.
Portaul
Portaul is a sexual health app that lets users store verified STI test results, share their status with a partner only when both approve, and get alerted if they may have been exposed. Founder Dr. Doyinsola Kuku, a UK-trained doctor, started it after a viral TikTok about a doctor who lost her license for warning a friend that a man she’d just met had an STI.
Privacy sits at the heart of the product. Portaul’s privacy policy says it does not use personal data for marketing or advertising, encrypts messages between users so that even the company can’t read them, and keeps all personal data inside the UK. Exposure alerts are sent anonymously.
Kuku argued last month that sexual health belongs at the center of women’s health. The WHO, meanwhile, shows more than one million curable STIs are acquired every day among people aged 15 to 49, most without symptoms, and an estimated 8 million adults were infected with syphilis in 2022 alone.
Kivira
Kivira helps primary care doctors diagnose mental health conditions. Patients fill in evidence-based screenings on their phones before the visit, and the platform combines their answers with digital phenotyping and AI analysis aligned with DSM-5 criteria. Afterwards, the doctor gets a report inside their existing health record that flags high-risk signs, including suicidal thoughts, and suggests conditions to consider; the final call stays with the clinician.
Kivira’s privacy policy details that it does not sell personal information, share it with data brokers, or use it for targeted ads. The company also says it doesn’t let service providers train general-purpose AI models on identifiable health information.
Primary care is where this is needed most. A 2024 analysis of more than 350 million primary care visits found that one in nine involved a mental health condition, ranging from depression and anxiety to sleep problems and substance use.
Routina
Puerto Rico-headquartered Routina builds AI agents that take on the routine work slowing down healthcare operators, which chase prescription refills with doctors, check insurance coverage before a patient reaches the pharmacy counter, complete lab requisitions, flag high blood pressure readings from home monitoring, and send patients reminders in their own language.
The company grew up inside Flexio, a healthcare logistics operator in Puerto Rico, and tests every tool there first. Its customers include specialty pharmacies and a comprehensive cancer center on the island.
On privacy, Routina says patient data stays in the customer’s own systems and never trains another AI model, every action an agent takes is logged in a full audit trail, and it signs HIPAA business associate agreements.
Physicians and their staff spend an average 13 hours a week on insurance approvals alone, and administrative work accounts for an estimated 15% to 25% of U.S. health spending. The squeeze is sharper in Puerto Rico, where over two-thirds of residents rely on Medicaid or Medicare, and a long-running doctor shortage leaves clinics with fewer hands to do the work.
Innmetec
Innmetec, from Colombia, designs and supplies patient-specific implants for the skull and face, and specializes in digital surgical planning, where surgeons run virtual simulations of an operation on a digital model of the patient, then receive 3D-printed anatomical models and custom guides to take into the OR.
When bone is missing, the implant Innmetec builds to fill the gap is designed from that patient’s own scans and made in medical-grade titanium, PEEK, PMMA, or porous PEEK with hydroxyapatite. The company says this porous type can even be used on children, so implants don’t need replacing as they grow.
The company grew out of a partnership between CES University and EAFIT University, designed to take research-based medical devices from the lab to the market. In March, Innmetec was named one of Colombia’s top five startups in the Hello Tomorrow Global Challenge, one of the world’s leading deep tech competitions.
Colombia relies heavily on medical technology made elsewhere. An analysis of the national regulator INVIMA’s device registry found that more than 80% of the country’s medical devices are imported, and in 2022 Colombia imported $627 million in medical instruments while exporting just $48 million.
The Latin American market for 3D-printed medical devices was valued at $332 million in 2025, and is projected to reach more than $3 billion by 2033, driven by demand for patient-specific products in orthopedic and maxillofacial surgery.
Deep Care
Ludwigsburg-based Deep Care makes Isa, an AI-powered desk device that coaches employees on posture, movement, breaks, hydration and stress throughout the working day. In a real-world study of 2,325 office workers across 50 companies, the company says participating businesses recorded 56% less sick leave.
On privacy, the company operates under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which it says it builds into its products by design. Isa has no camera or audio recording, its AI runs on the device rather than in the cloud, and employers never see individual results; employees can choose each month whether to add their numbers anonymously to company averages. According to its privacy policy, booking a device requires only an email, a start date and a delivery address, used solely for shipping.
In the EU, three in five workers report musculoskeletal complaints, and 61% of businesses cite prolonged sitting as a risk.
Collective X
Collective X Health gives wearables, health apps and sports brands a library of female-specific research to build their products on. More than 20 doctors and researchers, led by co-founder Dr. Stacy Sims, an exercise physiologist who led sex-differences research at Stanford, vet the studies by hand. Companies license it through an API.
The company builds its product from peer-reviewed research and female-specific data, and every insight it sells comes with its sources attached.
Collective X came out of stealth on October 13 with a $3.2 million pre-seed round co-led by Council Capital and Anthemis Female Innovators Lab Fund.
The U.S. had no law requiring federally funded clinical research to include women until the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, meaning much of the evidence today’s health apps and AI models learnt from was built mostly on men. The imbalance persists, however; the National Academies found that less than 9% of NIH funding over the past decade went explicitly to women’s health.
Konko AI
Konko AI builds AI agents that run the back office of medical clinics across Latin America, handling patient messages, triage, scheduling and follow-ups. Co-founder Jean Marc Goguikian watched his partner, Dr. Vallejo, give up nights and weekends to keep her clinic running, which inspired the company.
Konko’s privacy policy says it does not sell or rent personal information or use it to train AI models. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and the company displays SOC 2 certification. Patient conversations run through messaging apps such as WhatsApp, which the policy discloses.
In September, the startup raised $6 million led by Hi Ventures, with LifeX Ventures, SquareOne Capital, GroundUp Ventures and Phoenix Fund, to expand in Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica. The platform already manages more than two million patient interactions across 90 healthcare institutions and 60 specialties.
The Pan American Health Organization warns that 14 of the 39 countries in the Americas already lack enough doctors, nurses and midwives, and that the region could be short between 600,000 and two million health workers by 2030.
Allswell
Allswell is a queer-founded mental health company, launched in 2025, that pairs one-on-one virtual therapy with peer groups and trauma-focused programs built for LGBTQ+ patients. Its therapists are either LGBTQ+ themselves or experienced with the community, and it accepts Medicaid and commercial insurance, with Medicaid clients paying nothing.
The startup says it keeps records in a HIPAA-compliant system and that everything shared in therapy stays confidential, apart from the exceptions required by law.
Allswell raised a $7 million seed round on October 14 and plans to expand beyond Maryland, Virginia and D.C. and launch psychiatric medication management next year. In its most recent cohorts, 77% of patients showed improvement in anxiety and 71% in depression after 60 days.
A 2023 meta-analysis found LGBTQ people have more than twice the risk of PTSD of their heterosexual, cisgender peers, with transgender people facing the highest risk, and the Trevor Project’s latest national survey, released in May 2026 covering more than 16,000 LGBTQ+ young people in the U.S., found that 36% had seriously considered suicide in the past year, rising to 40% among transgender and nonbinary respondents.
If you or someone you know is struggling or having thoughts of suicide, help is available. Visit findahelpline.com to find free, confidential support in your country.
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
