For generations, women have been the ones who hold everything together — caring for families, supporting others and carrying countless unseen responsibilities of everyday life, while their own health and needs often come last.
Ana Lima, PhD, wants to help change that. With Lunia, she is building the digital infrastructure for women’s health. With a background in Physics, an MSc in Biophysics and Bionanosystems, and a PhD in Materials Engineering, Ana, as co-founder of Lunia, brings a scientific perspective to one of healthcare’s most personal challenges.
Yet, she believes entrepreneurship is not about having all the answers from the beginning.
We often imagine that successful founders started because they felt ready, but the reality is that most of us begin with uncertainty, doubts and many more questions than answers.
Our thanks to Ana for reminding us that meaningful innovation begins with listening, curiosity and purpose.
How can women’s continuous health intelligence help move healthcare from reacting to symptoms towards preventing problems earlier?
I believe the biggest opportunity in women’s health isn’t collecting more data. It’s creating continuity. Today, healthcare is often built around moments: a consultation, a symptom, a diagnosis. But a woman’s health is not a series of isolated moments. It evolves continuously through biological changes, life transitions, lifestyle and personal experiences.
The challenge is that each medical appointment only captures a snapshot. Important patterns can be missed because the context that connects those moments is often lost. Continuous health intelligence allows us to bring those pieces together.
By understanding symptoms, experiences and health changes over time, we can identify patterns earlier, provide better context and support more informed conversations between women and healthcare professionals.
The goal isn’t to replace clinical judgement or diagnose through AI. It’s to give women a deeper understanding of their own health and give healthcare professionals a more complete picture to support earlier and more personalised decisions.
Ultimately, prevention isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about recognising meaningful changes early enough to take action.
What advice would you give to young women who have ideas but may lack the confidence to pursue them?
Confidence is one of the biggest myths in entrepreneurship. We often imagine that successful founders started because they felt ready, but the reality is that most of us begin with uncertainty, doubts and many more questions than answers.
If I had waited until I felt completely confident, I probably would never have started… My advice is: don’t wait for confidence. Start with curiosity. Start with purpose. Start because you believe the problem is worth solving.
Talk to people. Listen more than you speak. Test your ideas. Be open to changing them, because they will evolve. Every conversation, every challenge and every setback teaches you something that no book can teach.
Confidence isn’t something you find before you begin. It’s something you build by taking action. And don’t underestimate the value of your own perspective. Innovation rarely comes from people who all think the same way.
It comes from those who see a problem differently because of their experiences.
What have you learned from listening to women that has changed the way you think about building Lunia?
I thought I was building a technology platform. What I learned from listening to women was that I was actually building trust. Every conversation reminded me that behind every symptom there is a person trying to understand what is happening to her body.
Many women shared experiences of feeling unheard, dismissed or having to become their own researchers, connecting information from different appointments, online searches and conversations. What impacted me the most wasn’t the complexity of their health challenges. It was how often they felt alone while navigating them. That changed the way we approached Lunia.
We stopped thinking about it as a tool to track symptoms and started thinking about it as a companion that helps women connect the dots in their own health journey.
Not to replace healthcare professionals, but to help women feel more informed and prepared when seeking care. Listening also taught me something very humbling: the more conversations we have, the more we realise how much there is still to learn.
That’s why we don’t want to build something simply for women. We want to build it with women.
At the end of the day, the most important lesson wasn’t about technology. It was understanding that, for many women, what they need most is not more information. It’s to feel heard and understood.
Are there any people, founders, or thinkers who have influenced the way you build Lunia?
I don’t think my inspiration comes from one single person. It’s really a combination of scientists, thinkers and, above all, the women we’ve listened to throughout this journey.
As a physicist, I’ve always admired scientists like Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin and Jennifer Doudna. They each challenged conventional thinking in their own way, but what inspires me most is their curiosity, their commitment to evidence and their determination to push knowledge forward despite uncertainty.
That’s a mindset I try to bring into building Lunia. I’ve also been influenced by people like Atul Gawande, whose work reminded me that most failures in healthcare aren’t failures of medical knowledge — they’re failures of the systems around it. That’s essentially the bet behind Lunia: the missing piece for most women isn’t more medical information, it’s a structure that actually holds onto their story over time.
But if I’m completely honest, the people who have shaped Lunia the most aren’t famous names. They’re the women who trusted us with their stories. Every conversation challenged one of our assumptions. Every interview made us rethink a feature, a decision or even our vision. They taught me that building for women is very different from building with women. Listening isn’t just part of the process, it’s the foundation of it.
If there’s one principle that guides me every day, it’s that innovation should never start with technology. It should start with understanding people. Technology is simply the tool that allows us to turn that understanding into meaningful impact.
What’s next for Lunia, and for you as a woman leading change in tech?
What’s next for Lunia is continuing to earn trust. We’re still learning, still listening and still improving. My ambition isn’t simply to build a successful product. It’s to build something women genuinely rely on throughout their health journey.
For me, I’ve always wanted to build something that matters. Lunia is simply the expression of that purpose. Since I was young, I’ve been driven by the idea of creating something with real impact.
Science gave me a way of understanding the world, and entrepreneurship gave me a way to change a small part of it.
I hope Lunia contributes to a future where women’s health is better understood, where care becomes more continuous and personalised, and where women feel more informed and empowered to make decisions about their health.
And if my journey shows another woman, especially someone coming from science or engineering, that she doesn’t have to choose between research, innovation and entrepreneurship, then that’s something I’ll be incredibly proud of.
