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Elina Berglund

CTO and Co-Founder

Natural Cycles

POSITION

CTO and Co-Founder

COMPANY

Natural Cycles

COUNTRY

Sweden

Website

Natural Cycles

SCENE

Technology

SOCIAL

LinkedIn

Twitter

What makes Elina Berglund a Global Shaker?

Elina Berglund is shaking up an entire industry with the world’s first approved birth control app.

Natural Cycles introduced their “digital contraceptive” to the European market in 2017 and has some 600,000 active users, according to the company. The Natural Cycles app tells women which days they can have unprotected sex by tracking their temperature.

Previously a particle physicist, Elina quit her plush job at CERN, where she was part of the team that discovered the Higgs-Boson particle, which led to the Nobel Prize for physics in 2013.

“Following this success, Elina was looking for an effective natural contraceptive and applied her skills from particle physics to create an algorithm that could accurately pinpoint when a woman is fertile,” she writes on her LinkedIn page, explaining the decision to set up Natural Cycles.

“Elina’s mission is to pioneer women’s health with research and passion – by empowering every woman with the knowledge she needs to be in charge of her health.”

Although Natural Cycles began to market the product in 2014 with approval from the Swedish Medicinal Products Agency, it ran into trouble the following year when the agency revoked approval, forcing them to remove any reference to contraception in marketing the app.

It was only in February 2017 that they finally received approval from the German inspection and certification organisation Tüv Süd, allowing them to market the product throughout Europe. It was the first time a technical device of this type had been approved for contraception anywhere in the world.

In a story in USA Today, Berglund said the Swedish Medical products Agency confirmed that the app is 93% effective with typical use — compared to between 85% – 98% effectiveness for condoms.

Last updated: August 9, 2019