Elina Vale is the CEO and co-founder of Essence Labs, a FemTech startup focused on menstrual well-being in the workplace. Since launching in 2023, she has led the company through a $600K seed round, entry into Berkeley SkyDeck Cohort 16, and a growing presence across the European and US startup ecosystems. Her work sits at the intersection of women’s health, AI, and employee benefits, and it draws directly from over a decade of experience building communities, programs, and companies.
Before Essence, Vale spent more than four years at Women in Tech, a global movement backed by partners including Intel, Dell Technologies, and Microsoft. She served first as Head of WiT Chapter, where she built a community of 10,000 members and 80 volunteers with more than 50,000 event participants. She then moved into the Global Program Director role, leading a mentoring program that connected 2,000 mentors and mentees across 93 countries. She also launched an online QA course that over 18,000 people completed.
From Programs to Products:
That operational background informs how Vale runs Essence today. The platform is not a standard period tracker. It combines a to-do list, habit tracker, period tracker, and cycle-based scheduling tool into one AI-powered app. The idea is that a woman’s 28-day hormonal cycle affects productivity, focus, energy, and mood in measurable ways, and that scheduling work, meetings, and recovery around those phases can improve performance.
Essence positions itself as an employee benefits tool, sold to companies rather than directly to consumers. Employers integrate it to support menstruating employees with personalized daily and weekly insights, fitness recommendations, and mental health tools. The company cites research showing that menstrual-related presenteeism and absenteeism cost employees around 23 productive days per year.
The Numbers Behind It:
Essence closed a $600K seed round in early 2024, with participation from Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, Davidovs VC, Growing Well Partners, and several angel investors. The round was led largely by female investors, which Vale has noted is both a reflection of the market and a practical reality of who understands the problem firsthand.
The company’s stated goal with the funding was to enhance the app, attract new customers, and continue researching the connection between productivity and the menstrual cycle. Essence also appeared in TechCrunch’s coverage of all-women founding teams and was featured in Forbes in the context of FemTech funding trends.
A Track Record in Community Building:
Vale’s earlier work at Women in Tech gives her profile a dimension that many founders at her stage do not have. She was a core organizer of “Women Taking Up Space,” described as the world’s first 24-hour virtual conference, which featured 200 speakers. She was also selected as a German Chancellor Fellow by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a program that identifies prospective leaders to design and execute projects of social significance.
Before that, she ran Brainfest, an edutainment company that expanded to 14 cities and served 30,000 clients before she exited by selling her shares. She also spent nearly a decade as a senior business analyst, including work on a hotel construction business plan with a $25 million budget. The pattern across all of it is execution at scale, not just vision.
What She Is Working On Now:
Vale spoke at the EU-Startups Summit in Malta in 2024, where her talk was titled “Turning Advisors into Angel Investors.” The topic reflects a fundraising approach she has spoken about openly: building relationships with advisors who understand the product and converting that trust into capital. Several of Essence’s investors, including menstrual health expert Danielle Keiser and Ksenia Kapoor, a US corporate benefits specialist, are also listed as company advisors.
Essence is available on both iOS and Android. The platform targets companies that want to reduce gender-related burnout and turnover while building a more inclusive benefits offering. For founders and operators watching the FemTech space, Vale is a clear example of someone who built the network, credibility, and operational experience before building the product.
