After a personal struggle with her periods, Amy Thomson was compelled to create an accessible solution to help other women like her better manage their hormonal health. A busy schedule of international flights, work burnout, and shifting time zones proved to have a profound impact on Amy’s physical health and as a result her cycles stopped for two years.

“At the time I was running an agency and one of our biggest clients was Nike which allowed me to work with some incredible sports scientists and doctors. I started to realize that there was a core gap in the market around how we could use data to help women better see the patterns of their emotional health related to their hormonal health,” Amy says.

The Moody Month app helps women better understand their hormonal health.

After equipping herself with this valuable knowledge, Thomson founded Moody Month, an AI-driven app that tracks moods and hormones to help women better understand their bodies. With the help of her all-female engineering team, Thomson is committed to supporting thousands of women through hormonal complexity and is on a mission to improve female health globally.

The app uses AI technology to forecast information about what’s happening in a woman’s body each day, and learns how to optimize their wellbeing. Its models are built and trained from large proprietary data sets and existing research on how mental health is affected by hormones. These models can then deploy daily support based on a user’s cycle and mood predictions.

Moody Month uses AI to help users track their moods and provides wellness support.

An AI-powered solution for hormonal health advice

“The biggest asset in the business is the ability to have built models that are trained on hundreds of millions of data points, which then help other women better understand their own health experiences. So there's this great feedback loop of benefit, where the app is constantly self-regulating based on user inputs and the models are adapting and improving over time,” says Thomson.

Moody Month pattern matches using an ML model to provide baselines on everything from menstruation & pregnancy to perimenopause. These AI-generated insights are approved by a doctor so users only get served guidance relevant to their needs.

“There is a very core function for LLMs within the business which is essentially disseminating large quantities of research, often from multiple sources into new tangible insights and assets. It’s great to have AI synthesize all this content, but it’s better with a human in the loop for peer, academic, and doctor's review, ensuring all consumer-facing content is accurate,” says Thomson.

Since Moody Month was built on Google Cloud, Thomson was thrilled to participate in the Google Cloud Academy UK program. “It’s been incredible having access to an amazing network of talented AI founders and experts. The team at Google are extremely passionate about our business, advocating internally and giving us access to enterprise clients and potential business partnerships,” says Thomson.

A notable partnership in particular was with fellow Google Cloud Academy alumni Mettle, another mental health and wellbeing app targeting men.

“We are so grateful for opportunities to collaborate with Mettle after connecting on the program. We are working together to develop a workplace scheme where we provide enterprise clients both the male and female version of a wellbeing app. We are already starting to see the impact of mental health on employee productivity and subsequently on the bottom line, so being able to address it makes a huge difference,” Thomson said.

As a fledgling female-founded startup, Moody Month used BigQuery, a serverless, cost-effective, and multi cloud data warehouse. Having the ability to build out live dashboards featuring easily visualised analytics enabled the Moody Month team to share insights internally and externally with investors.

Reducing operational costs with Google Cloud

They also benefited greatly from Google Cloud credits which helped reduce infrastructure costs and enabled the business to meet real-time demand with automatic scaling features.

“So typically there are some financial challenges when it comes to being a female-founded business focusing on a specific female segment. Statistics indicate only 2% of VC funding is allocated to women-led startups and we’ve experienced plenty of fundraising obstacles so it’s critical our tech stack is lean to keep costs low,” Thomson shared.

Like many other tech startups, Moody Month has significant overheads but a limited operational budget to maintain monthly cloud costs, potentially putting their business at risk. Building a startup in ML and AI, means a lean stack is crucial and Thomson advises female founders to build their apps on cost-effective platforms like Google Cloud - where 90% of all AI unicorns are built.

“We’ve faced the end of our runway more than once, and our lean cost base—enabled by GCP—helped us ride out the storm. For female founders in particular, finding practical ways to keep server costs low can be the difference between surviving or shutting down when funding is tight,” she warned.

Identifying hormonal health challenges changes lives

Throughout the duration of the program, Moody Month had plenty of exciting updates in the pipeline. The app now supports pregnancy, loss and postpartum journeys, “taking Moody into all hormonal life stages of mental health,” Thomson says.

Thomson is immensely proud of the strides Moody Month has made and the app is already having an unexpected impact for users.

“Some of the most powerful and transformative stories we hear from users is how Moody Month saved their marriage or even changed their lives,” Thomson says proudly.

“I literally get handwritten letters from people saying our app saved their relationships from the brink because for the first time, they could finally articulate their changing emotions and better communicate with loved ones.”