Prickly Pear Well being will show off girls’s mind well being at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 through NewsFlicks

Iman Clark, CEO of Prickly Pear Well being, says she had an epiphany that at last led her to TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.  

It used to be round 9 years in the past. She moved from Tunisia to the U.S. for grad faculty, then joined an organization that created gamified studies for folks with neurodegenerative prerequisites, like dementia. This used to be executed through giving them a pill or a pc and allowing them to play video games whilst medical doctors amassed knowledge on them, like their possibility of falling and total vary of movement.  

“I noticed that most of the people, 75-plus, have two to a few power prerequisites, and it doesn’t matter what we did, it’s all the time going to be arduous,” she instructed TechCrunch. “Then I went again to the analysis and noticed that like, 70% of the Alzheimer’s inhabitants are girls.”

She dug deeper and located that girls have been two times as prone to be recognized with despair and nervousness, and 3 to 4 occasions much more likely to be recognized with migraines. “That’s once I discovered we don’t seem to be truly fixing for ladies’s biology, and that’s costing us lives and bucks.”

So she created Prickly Pear Well being, which gives clinical toughen for ladies’s mind well being, a voice-first, AI-powered better half that is helping girls of their 30s to 50s navigate the hormonal adjustments that have an effect on mind well being. The product we could folks document fast reflections all the way through the day the use of their voice and Prickly Pear’s AI era analyzes their language and context to trace any cognitive adjustments.

Prickly Pear Well being will display of its tech at TechCrunch Disrupt, which runs October 27 to 29 in San Francisco.

It additionally pulls in sleep knowledge, middle price process, and different metrics from trackers like Apple Well being, Oura, and Garmin to assist be offering customized insights on how they may be able to take higher care in their well being.

Clark mentioned there’s a collective settlement that girls’s well being is an area ripe for innovation, and that girls wish to be founders, wish to be most sensible voices, and are uninterested in being within the again seats of their very own lives. 

Clark formally introduced a unfastened model of her product in Would possibly and is gearing as much as release the top rate providing in October, for Psychological Well being Consciousness Month and Menopause Consciousness Month. 

She began doing focal point teams at Arizona State College and located that girls of their past due 30s to early 50s have been reporting a large number of mind fog and psychological fatigue, but it surely ceaselessly took them till their 60s to understand it needed to do with hormonal fluctuations, menopause, and even an onset of one thing deeper. It used to be right here that Clark discovered she sought after to concentrate on this age vary. 

“They’re ceaselessly brushed aside or misdiagnosed when signs like mind fog, temper shifts, or abnormal cycles first seem,” she mentioned of girls of their 30s to 50s, including that those midlife years are important to mind well being, however conventional care is failing to glue the dots. 

“We’re addressing that hole. Serving to girls acknowledge and act on early alerts earlier than they escalate into extra critical well being demanding situations later,” she mentioned. 

Arizona may be the place the muse for the corporate’s identify got here from. She become enthusiastic about the cacti, how they stand in spite of the warmth and bring wholesome fruit. “That’s when Prickly Pear got here to existence as a result of that’s the fruit that grows within the cactus tree, and it used to be an inspiration of thriving in harsh prerequisites and comfortable resilience,” she mentioned. 

She considers competition in her similar box to be present menopause apps, which, she mentioned, are extra like symptom trackers. “We consider it’s essential to know signs, however we consider that the ones approaches are reactive approaches, whilst for us, we’re there so to locate issues.” 

She raised a $350,000 pre-seed spherical and mentioned it used to be “truly arduous,” particularly as a girl of colour. “We needed to be so excellent that you can not be unnoticed,” she mentioned. She sought to construct relationships with buyers earlier than beginning her pre-seed, which, she mentioned, truly helped when it got here time for the ask. “That’s a well-liked factor we are saying: ‘Ask for recommendation and also you get trade, ask for trade and also you get recommendation occasionally,’” she mentioned. 

Some recommendation she gained used to be to use for Startup Battlefield, with pals telling her to be loud and proud about being a part of the newest startups to pitch all through the contest. 

“Disrupt is without equal level for brand new concepts,” she mentioned. She’s excited to focus on girls’s mind well being, be told from different founders, and, in fact, “connect to buyers and companions who consider, like we do, that girls’s well being innovation isn’t area of interest, it’s the way forward for healthcare.” 

If you wish to be told from Prickly Pear firsthand, and spot dozens of extra pitches, treasured workshops, and make the connections that power trade effects, head right here to be told extra about this 12 months’s Disrupt, held October 27 to 29 in San Francisco.