Ovasave Maps Women’s Health From Fertility to Midlife

In 2023 Torkia Mahloul received a piece of information that felt like a temporal earthquake. At 34, having built a formidable career in banking and tech, she was told her fertility was declining rapidly. If motherhood was a future she wanted to hold open, she should freeze her eggs. Soon.

“I was shocked,” Mahloul recalls, the memory still vivid. “I went through five rounds of egg freezing in two years. It was costly, isolating, and shrouded in complexity.” Through this journey her sharpest realisation was about systemic failure. “How had I reached my 30s without knowing this was something I could—or should—monitor? When I spoke to other women, I found I wasn’t alone. We were all navigating a black box.”

Her question, born of personal urgency, echoes in the hushed spaces of women’s health clinics and, as I’ve come to see in my medical training, in the very architecture of medicine itself. In lecture halls, we are taught the body as a universal map, yet the cartography is often distinctly male. We learn the symptoms of a heart attack as crushing chest pain, not the subtle nausea and jaw ache more common in women. We practise CPR on mannequins modelled on male physiognomy. The hormonal symphony that governs half the population—a lifelong composition of fertility, metabolic change, and transition—is too often a postgraduate elective.

This collective “black box” experience—where hormones, fertility, and long-term health are shrouded in stigma, guesswork, and reactive care—is what Mahloul and her co-founder, seasoned fertility expert Majd Abu Zant, set out to dismantle. In 2023, they launched OvaSave, the UAE’s first direct-to-consumer digital health platform dedicated to fertility and hormonal health. What began as a wake-up call has rapidly evolved into a Hub71-backed startup, later securing $1.2 million in pre-seed funding in 2025 and is now spearheading a revolution in how women’s health is understood, accessed, and managed in the UAE and Saudi Arabia with plans to expand across the MENA region.

"Women deserve better. Better education, better support, and better access to fertility care. OvaSave came from a place of pain, actually—of being really helpless at how to do this. I wanted to reinvent this journey," Mahloul tells StartUpScene.

The data, when you listen, is a chorus of unmet need. The World Health Organization frames infertility as a global experience, touching one in six people. In the UAE, the figures resonate with particular force; an Aster DM Healthcare study suggests one in five couples face fertility challenges, with cases in Dubai projected to reach 10,000 by 2030.

Yet these numbers speak only to the moment of recognised crisis. The deeper silence lies in the years, even decades, preceding it—a time when education and accessible monitoring could transform panic into planning.

OvaSave’s carefully calibrated ecosystem is a new trusted companion. Its heart is a graceful, intuitive app and website that transforms the solitary act of tracking into a dialogue. Women can log the subtle language of their bodies—cycles, symptoms of PCOS, the shifting sands of perimenopause. The platform listens, synthesising these entries into elegant trend analyses over weeks or months, rendering the invisible visible. "We are trying to give women all the education and tools so that they make their own decisions. We are not trying to enforce a Western narrative."

This self-knowledge is then met with gateway science. OvaSave delivers precise, at-home lab kits to your door. Their pioneering AMH (Anti-Müllerian Hormone) test requires just a finger prick. More expansive panels for fertility, hormones, and perimenopause follow, with technology ensuring sample stability for 30 days.

But data without interpretation is merely noise. Here, OvaSave’s masterstroke is its human scaffold. Every test unlocks a telehealth consultation with a dedicated care advocate , a guide to translate numbers into narrative and possibility. This bridge—between result and roadmap—is where anxiety begins to morph into agency. The platform then becomes a conduit to a curated network of specialists in fertility, gynaecology, nutrition, and mental health.

For those ready to act, OvaSave architects the journey. Curated packages bundle access to premium, pre-vetted clinics, treatments like egg freezing (including medication and storage), and IVF pathways. Tools like an egg-freezing calculator and live-birth success estimator ground hope in personalised probability, replacing folklore with foresight.

Recognising that a woman’s health is a continuum, OvaSave has built a dedicated “Midlife” suite for perimenopause and menopause, demystifying HRT, outlining alternatives, and providing specialist support. It is flanked by a line of scientifically-formulated supplements and a “Journal” of expert articles and community reflections, fostering both knowledge and kinship.

"We are building for the continuum. From first period to menopause and beyond. This isn’t just about having a baby; it’s about living a fuller, healthier life in every chapter."

OvaSave’s initial vision was direct-to-consumer, but its path to widespread impact revealed a more powerful lever: the workplace. “To democratise access, we had to integrate into the fabric of women’s daily lives,” Mahloul explains. The startup now designs corporate fertility benefit packages, allowing employers to embed OvaSave’s suite within employee health insurance. "We made it always about bringing different stories of women in this region, giving them the platform in their voice"

This B2B strategy, bolstered by a landmark partnership with global broker Mercer Marsh, is an access engine. By making proactive, preventative care a covered benefit, it dismantles the primary financial barrier that silences so many conversations before they begin.

The technology beneath is built for this scale—modular, allowing seamless integration of new clinic and lab partners across borders. The roadmap hums with the promise of deeper AI integration, evolving from a tracking tool to a predictive health companion offering bespoke lifestyle insights drawn from a user’s unique biological narrative.

Fresh from a $1.2 million pre-seed funding round led by PlusVC, Annex Investments, and 25 Madison, OvaSave’s gaze is fixed on meaningful expansion. The cornerstone is Saudi Arabia, with a launch in summer 2024 acting as the overture to a three-year MENA strategy. "We are only one platform so we can be big, but we are rooted here. We wanted to have the app and the website fully translated because we were seeing that our services were used by Arab women, and wanted to take this model and adapt it across the region."

Perhaps OvaSave’s most resonant achievement is narrative. "Now, women are on social media, discussing their choices, celebrating using their eggs freezing, and discussing things that were deemed taboo in public space," Mahloul explains. Its emblem, a vibrant purple “fertility bus” that toured UAE business districts offering free AMH tests, became a mobile monument to changing times. On its first day, over 300 women arrived, a queue that exhausted supplies and spoke volumes about a latent hunger for knowledge.

The road was no easy one and had taught her that: “that there is no playbook. There is no roadmap. You learn as you go, and you learn from your mistakes. Entrepreneurship is having a house that's on fire all the time and trying to put it out." For her, the journey from patient to CEO mirrors this collective awakening. “The foundational realisation was that my ignorance was not personal failure, but a systemic gap,” she reflects. “If I could stand in that gap, then perhaps we could build a bridge across it.”

OvaSave is that bridge. It is a startup engineered on empathetic response. It wields the precision of technology with the warmth of human support, creating a space where women’s health is a continuous, authored story. In a world that has too often told women to wait, to wonder, and to worry in silence, OvaSave is offering the chance to truly know, and therefore to truly choose. They are building a new timepiece for women’s health, one where every woman can finally read her own clock.

"Success would look like... having a different conversation in five years from now than what we had back then."