Exclusive: Prima-Temp is acquiring Kindara in merger of two Boulder women’s health tech startups

BOULDER — Prima-Temp, a healthtech company pioneering chronobiological healthcare for women, has acquired Kindara, a fellow Boulder-based women’s healthtech company.

Kindara makes an app and Bluetooth-connected thermometer to help women track their fertility and create a community of other women looking to monitor their health and ovulation.

Prima-Temp makes the Priya, a data-tracking medical device inserted inside a woman to continuously monitor her core temperature. Core temperature is a marker for circadian rhythms, like what we use to track our sleep cycles. But circadian rhythms are also related to metabolism, obesity, hormones and fertility, Prima-Temp CEO Alene Campbell told BizWest. It’s all related to chronobiology, which is the science of recurring biological signals with time-dependent features.

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“Circadian rhythm is sort of a window to the soul,” Campbell said. “It can help determine when to give chemotherapy to a patient or when someone will have an infection. It shows up in a very particular pattern in a person. And you can determine it by very carefully tracking temperature.”

Priya, Campbell said, is a highly sophisticated medical device that tracks and manages fertility in real time by continuously monitoring core temperature. That data is sent to a user’s smartphone and the cloud, where it can be sent to their doctor. The result is a more effective ovulation tracker, that can actually give a more accurate and wider fertility window.  With most ovulation tracking devices, the chances of getting pregnant are about 8 percent, Campbell said, because it’s a window of a few hours. But Priya can widen the window to about two days of accurately predicting fertility, increasing the chances of getting pregnant to about 24 percent.

Priya is expected to be launched in Europe in the first half of 2019 — due in part to a major partnership with Gedeon Richter, a multinational pharmaceutical company focusing on women’s health — and in the U.S. in the second half of 2019.

Purchasing Kindara, however, made sense, Campbell said. Kindara is one of the most well-known fertility apps, after being launched eight years ago. It has more than 1.5 million downloads and 800,000 active users. The goal is to build on that community with Priya, thanks to the asset acquisition of Kindara.

The brand of Kindara, as well as its app and Wink thermometer will still continue, Campbell added. What is more, since both companies are based in Boulder, many team members were able to join Prima-Temp. Campbell declined to share the purchasing price of Kindara, but said that the deal was done in cash and stock, with stock being the larger portion. Kindara shareholders are now shareholders in Prima-Temp.

Looking ahead, Campbell said she is looking forward to next year’s launch of Priya, as well as continuing to foster the Kindara community.

“It’s all about the community and the app,” she said of the acquisition. “It’s a wonderful group of women, all self-describing as very interested in fertility. It’s very hard to find those people unless they tell you who they are. We have that wonderful community to build on, launch Priya with and have a huge benefit. These are active users, talking all the time and sharing important data. It’s an important community and we expect it to grow.”