Healthtech startup Ovira is helping women tackle a key problem – drug-free period pain relief

Female readers know how bad period pain can get. For the men, I’d say, imagine being kicked in the nuts every month for four days straight. Oof. Ouch, right? 

That’s what it feels like for your mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, or any friends with a vagina going through primary menstrual pain (dysmenorrhoea) or, even worse, secondary menstrual pain – due to conditions such as endometriosis, fibroids, PCOS, adenomyosis, or pelvic inflammatory disease.

Australian period care startup Ovira, has come to our rescue with a device that offers drug-free and instant period pain relief.

Founded by Alice Williams as a natural and safe pain management tool to help with her crippling endometriosis, Ovira has rapidly grown to help hundreds of thousands of women worldwide better manage their period pain. 

Sick of limited pain relief options available – mostly heavy pharmaceuticals – Williams researched other ways to treat her pain and came across electrotherapy, better known as TENS technology – a small battery-operated device that sends mild electrical currents to your tummy to help reduce pain. 

“TENS technology has been around since the 80s; that’s why I was so surprised as to why this hasn’t been applied to period pain at scale. We made sure that our device is the smallest on the market, so we can hide it underneath clothing, whether they’re wearing pants or dresses and so on, and we also made sure the battery life lasts all day. So you can clip it on at the start of the day, and off you go,” Williams said. 

Her vision for Ovira is to end the unnecessary suffering of women globally, and the device is just one way to achieve this goal. Menstrual pain is a major issue that the period care startup aims to address. However, it is only one of the many problems women experience during their menstrual cycles, and Ovira’s larger goal is to work on solving them all.

“What we’ve done with period pain so far is that we’ve saved women from experiencing 6.3M days worth of pain, which is huge. It’s actually hard to comprehend,” she said.  

Ovira reports that 98% of its users experience decreased pain levels within 30 minutes of using the device. In the two years since Ovira was founded in 2020, the team has grown from one to 10, alongside a Facebook group of more than 14,000 women and a social following of just over 6.5 million.

Williams found that the younger audience love the brand, and she believes it’s because they spoke authentically to them. 

“We spoke one to one, like a normal human, and we didn’t try to fib above them. We are very raw and real in our marketing,” she said.

“We don’t do the women running down the beach. So we’re happy to show real period blood, we’ll show women vomiting in the toilet, we’ll show exactly what it’s like when you’re experiencing period pain, and I think because they could relate to it so much, they’re our biggest promoters.”