Flo Health launches perimenopause tools as survey finds 66% of women feel more ready for puberty

Two-thirds of American women between the ages of 38 and 50 say they feel better prepared for puberty than for perimenopause. The statistics, from a nationally representative survey created by Flo Health and conducted by Wakefield Research, capture something that decades of public health messages have failed to address: most women approach hormonal changes that disrupt their lives with less reliable information than they had when they were young.

Flo Health, a period-tracking app that has grown into the world’s largest women’s health platform with 80 million active users, is trying to close that gap with a new perimenopause tools program it’s introducing this month to its top subscribers. The features, a symptom checker, a perimenopause severity measure, a menopause timeline tracker, and a guide to medically proven support options, represent the company’s most important product expansion since achieving unicorn status in 2024.

The knowledge gap

The scale of the problem Flo is targeting is undeniable. More than a billion women around the world will experience perimenopause or menopause, but a recent Flo study found that one in three American women age 35 and older don’t know if they’re going through menopause. It’s part of the ongoing gender gap in health data that femtech companies have been working to close. The confusion is compounded by an information landscape that has gone from quiet to noisy: doctors are increasingly warning patients to question the unproven advice that abounds on social media and health forums as the discussion of menopause enters the mainstream.

The consequences of that confusion are measurable, if self-reported. In Flo’s Wakefield Research survey, 52% of women in a relationship said menopause had affected their romantic relationship. 48 percent said it interfered with their ability to exercise. These are not summaries. They explain how many people navigate the medical reality with inadequate tools, and explain why Flo sees perimenopause not as an additive feature but as a market.

What is done with tools

The new suite consists of four products, all of which are available to Flo Premium users. The Perimenopause Symptom Checker is a self-test that maps user-reported symptoms against known menopause indicators. The Perimenopause Score, which Flo describes as the first scientifically validated digital assessment tool designed specifically for perimenopause, provides a measure of severity and tracks changes over time. The Menopause Timeline estimates where the user sits in the broader hormonal cycle. And Help Options offers medically verified comparisons of treatments, from medication to lifestyle changes, that are matched to specific symptoms.

Tools are built on content developed through Flo’s network of over 100 medical professionals. Anna Klepchukova, Flo’s chief medical officer, created the launch as a response to a knowledge crisis rather than a feature gap. The problem, he said, is not that women cannot access perimenopause content. It’s because they can’t separate the proven medical guidance from the conflicting stories that have accompanied the topic’s rise in public discourse.

The research behind it

Flo has been building up to this launch for over a year. Its scientific team published the study in the journal Nature Portfolio npj Women’s Health who found menopause symptoms often start earlier than previously thought, a finding that complicates the already accurate timelines most women get from their doctors. Separately, the collaboration with the Mayo Clinic produced what both organizations described as the first global digital survey of menopause awareness, drawing on data from more than 17,000 Flo users in 158 countries.

A Mayo Clinic study found that knowledge of perimenopause varies greatly by country, with the highest scores in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia and the lowest scores in Nigeria, France, and parts of Latin America. But all the findings were consistent: knowledge was low everywhere. The most commonly reported symptoms were not hot flashes that dominate the popular perception but fatigue, mental fatigue, and irritability, the mismatch between expectations and experiences that may contribute to delayed recognition.

A business case

Flo is not the first app targeted at perimenopause. Clue, a cycle tracker based in Berlin, launched a perimenopause mode in 2023. But Flo’s scale gives it a different kind of average. The app has been downloaded over 420 million times. It became the first European femtech unicorn in July 2024 after a Series C investment of $200 million from General Atlantic, and its total bookings were expected to exceed $200 million in the same year. Perimenopause represents a natural extension of its existing user base: millions of women who started tracking their cycles in their twenties are now entering the age range where those cycles become unpredictable.

The commercial logic is straightforward. Pemenopause features are only available to premium subscribers, meaning every woman who moves from free cycle tracking to paid menopause support increases Flo’s average revenue per user. The company’s bet is that the same trust it built by being the world’s most downloaded period tracker carries over to a stage of life where trust in information sources is scarcer and more important. That bet comes with a caveat: experts have called for stricter femtech data rules, and Flo herself settled with the FTC in 2021 for allegedly sharing sensitive health data with third parties, a history that makes the question of trust more than theoretical.

Whether that bet pays off depends on something harder to measure than downloads or revenue: whether women who have learned not to trust perimenopause advice will treat the app’s medical content differently than the social media posts and wellness advocates who have defined the conversation so far. Flo’s answer is a clinically validated, Mayo Clinic research, Nature publication, network of innovative medical professionals. It’s a stronger foundation than what its competitors offer. But 66% of women who feel more ready for puberty than perimenopause have not reached that stage due to a lack of apps. They got there because the medical system, the educational system, and the culture failed to tell them what was coming. The app, however well designed, is part of the structural problem. Flo’s clear argument is that a good clip, used at scale, can still change results. Eighty million monthly users is the benchmark against which that argument is tested.