Ida Tin

Who they are

Ida Tin is the co-founder of Clue who coined the term 'FemTech' and later co-founded Femtech Assembly, a think tank for women's health investment — now running the Hormone Challenge at SPRIND, Germany's federal breakthrough-innovation agency.

Person

Ida Tin studied Social Entrepreneurship at KaosPilots in Denmark — the unconventional BA-level business school known for graduating doers — graduating in 2004, and earlier studied art at schools in South Africa and London. Before Clue, she co-founded MotoMundo, a guided motorcycle touring company operating in Mongolia, Cuba, and Vietnam with her father, and published a book in Denmark in 2009, 'Directress' (Direktøs), about a motorcycle trip through the western United States. She founded Clue in 2012, built it into a menstrual health and fertility app with 11 million monthly active users, coined the term 'FemTech' in the process, and led the company to become the first all-digital FDA-approved birth control in 2021 — a regulatory milestone. She later stepped back from CEO to Chairwoman before moving to SPRIND, Germany's federal breakthrough-innovation agency, where she now leads the Hormone Challenge. Alongside this she co-founded Femtech Assembly, a think tank making the case that investment in women's health is a path to economic growth, and is writing a book about the FemTech industry. The through-line: she builds institutions — companies, think tanks, regulatory firsts — around a single thesis that women's health data has been structurally underinvested. Possibly — her current role at SPRIND dates to 2025 or 2026, placing her at an early stage of that mandate. She writes actively on LinkedIn about hormonal health, data privacy in women's health apps, and FemTech's investment gap; she has spoken at TechCrunch Disrupt, TEDx, Web Summit, EU-Startups Summit, and Slush, and was named one of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in 2016.

Company

SPRIND — the Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen — is Germany's federal agency for breakthrough innovation, founded in 2019 with a roughly €250 million annual budget and a 10-year government mandate. It operates with around 50 employees and is designed to fund high-risk, high-reward innovation that the private market won't touch. Ida Tin joined, Possibly — as recently as 2025 or 2026, to lead the Hormone Challenge — a programme focused on women's hormonal health as a target for breakthrough innovation. The agency's structure is explicitly modelled on giving programme leads significant autonomy to define and run their challenges.

Market

SPRIND competes for talent and mandate in the small global cohort of government-backed deep-innovation agencies — peers include DARPA in the US and ARIA in the UK. The Hormone Challenge sits at the intersection of women's health research, digital health regulation, and biotech — a space that has historically attracted less public and private funding than comparable areas of medicine, which is precisely the structural gap Ida Tin has spent her career documenting.

Network

No direct edges are available from the network probe. Based on her public record, Ida Tin's professional orbit spans the FemTech founder community, EU health-tech investors, and German innovation-policy circles. Her public commentary on Flo Health signals she engages critically with rival app operators and data-privacy stakeholders in the women's health space.

How they likely show up

Founded Clue in 2012 and ran it as CEO for roughly a decade before moving to Chairwoman → likely thinks in decade-long arcs; not a quarterly-results operator.
Coined 'FemTech' as a category label, then built a think tank (Femtech Assembly) to institutionalise the investment thesis → frames problems at the level of infrastructure and systems, not just products.
Active LinkedIn writer on FemTech, hormonal data, and data privacy — including public criticism of a competitor (Flo) by name → comfortable with public positions and not shy about naming the thing directly.
KaosPilots background (a school that uses real-world projects as curriculum) → likely learns by doing and is impatient with purely theoretical frameworks.
Co-founded MotoMundo (motorcycle tours) and wrote a travel book before founding Clue → high tolerance for ambiguity and unfamiliar contexts; treats novelty as a feature.
Moved from CEO of a scaled consumer app to leading a government-agency innovation challenge → willing to trade commercial scale for mandate scope; motivated by the problem more than the org type.

Conversation tips

→ Reference the Hormone Challenge specifically — she moved from a successful consumer company into a government agency to run it, which is a deliberate bet worth asking about.
→ Engage her on data privacy in women's health; she has publicly called out Flo by name on LinkedIn, so she's thought hard about where the industry gets it wrong.
→ She coined 'FemTech' — don't treat it as a given term. Asking how she arrived at it, or what it's failed to capture since, will get a more interesting answer than asking what FemTech is.
→ She's a writer (a published book, an in-progress book, active long-form posts) — she responds well to ideas with texture, not just bullet points.
→ Don't assume she's still running Clue day-to-day — she stepped back to Chairwoman and has since moved to SPRIND; lead with where she is now, not where she was.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on the Hormone Challenge at SPRIND — she left the Chairwoman seat at an 11-million-user app to run a federal government innovation programme, which is a specific and unusual move worth asking her to unpack.
Mention Femtech Assembly — she co-founded it as a think tank to make investment in women's health legible as an economic argument, not just a health argument. That framing is pointed and she'll have strong views on whether it's working.
Reference her 2009 book 'Directress' (Direktøs) about motorcycling the western US — it pre-dates Clue by three years and signals who she was before the FemTech identity; founders often light up when you know the pre-company chapter.

Discovery questions

The Hormone Challenge is housed inside a government agency with a 10-year mandate — how does that time horizon change how you design a challenge compared to building a venture-backed product?
You coined 'FemTech' as a category label in 2012 — more than a decade on, where has the term done its job and where has it limited the conversation?
Clue got FDA approval as a digital birth control in 2021 — what did that regulatory process teach you about where the bottlenecks actually are in women's health infrastructure, versus where people assume they are?

Avoid

Don't treat her primarily as a 'Clue founder' — she has explicitly moved on to a new institutional role at SPRIND and is building beyond that chapter; anchoring the whole conversation there signals you haven't tracked what she's doing now.

Make it yours