A focus on metabolic health — how the body produces, uses, and stores energy — is not merely a trend. Although 80 per cent of all women will be affected by a chronic illness at some point in their lives, the medical system continues to treat symptoms rather than addressing underlying metabolic causes early on.
Women are systematically underrepresented in clinical studies; hormonal fluctuations across the entire lifecycle – from the menstrual cycle through pregnancy to menopause – are barely accounted for in existing healthcare models.
And for most women, personalised prevention simply does not exist.
Austrian startup Hello Inside aims to change that. The company is positioning CGM (continuous glucose monitoring)-based metabolic tracking as a tool for women’s health, addressing areas such as PMS, menopause, energy levels, cravings, and symptom awareness.
It delivers this through personalised, sex- and gender-sensitive recommendations. Its programme is now available free of charge to members of BARMER, one of Germany’s largest statutory health insurers, which covers more than 9 million people.
I spoke to co-founders Mario Aichlseder, CEO, and Jürgen Furian, COO, to learn all about it.
The challenge of reach vs impact
For Aichlseder, that gap between reach and impact is personal. Aichlseder was a professional athlete in his youth, competing as a rock climber at the European and World Championships. He was an early employee at Runtastic, where, as VP Growth, he helped scale the organisation to 140 million registered users, and then sold the company to Adidas in 2015 for €220 million.
He stayed on for another four years through the corporate integration, getting to know corporate life. And during that time, he revealed, one thing became very clear:
“We had a fantastic product and fantastic reach, but reach does not necessarily mean impact. In other words, we helped healthy people stay healthy in a fun way, but it translated into a 1 per cent day-30 retention rate. “
At that point, he was working very closely with the Sports Performance Team at adidas to explore the next frontier in hardware beyond smart wearables and scales. They were looking into biomarkers, hormone monitoring, blood sampling, and glucose. And that’s when, according to Aichlseder, things shifted.
Experiencing an instant feedback loop
Two of Aichlseder’s three aunts live with diabetes, and his mother also died early from a chronic disease. That´s why preventative health became such an important topic in his life. He borrowed a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) from one of his aunts and put it to use. He recalled:
“My brain went in a completely different direction, because it was the first time I got real-time insight into how my food, movement, stress, and sleep were immediately visible and gave me an instant feedback loop.”
Aichlseder admits, “We tried building this before, back at Adidas and Runtastic, with a group of health experts. We had all the resources. But it is really hard to figure out human metabolism. There are so many complex patterns and interdependencies. We worked with static decision trees, protocols, diets, exercise regimens — trying to somehow create structure — but we really failed.”
So he decided to join forces with Jürgen Furian, founder of Pioneers and Vinzenz Weber, founder of blockhaus medienagentur and CTO of Diagnosia, to solve it.
Cracking the code with data intelligence
Most metabolic or wearable platforms stop at data collection and visualisation: glucose curves, sleep scores, activity metrics. Hello Inside takes it a step further by building a system that interprets those signals in context and translates them into decisions.
Aichlseder believes Hello Inside has cracked the code. Most companies use generative AI on large datasets. But in healthcare, recommendations must be auditable and traceable. So the company built its tech using a "Controlled-by-Design" principle: every recommendation is transparent, monitored, and aligned with established medical guidelines.
Aichlseder explained:
“We rank them according to current scientific standards and then pass those into the model. From there, we again reprioritise and apply quality assurance standards to the recommendations and insights.”
This is necessary because much of the public health model's training data is of poor quality.
A 2025 report by Stanford-affiliated researchers reports an approximately 60 per cent failure rate across 13 LLMs on women's health questions.
Worse, these models often delivered incorrect answers with high confidence.
The company has built what is likely the most comprehensive metabolic health dataset for women in Europe, including 66,000 symptom logs from 1,743 women, tracked continuously with glucose monitors over a 90-day period. The approach is holistic, combining glucose data with inputs on movement and sleep, and integrating with wearables such as Oura, Garmin, and others.
Women come for weight loss, but report exhaustion
An internal analysis by Hello Inside based on user-reported observational data suggests that engaged users of Hello Inside reported improvements in weight and several symptoms over 90 days.
One of the most interesting insights from Hello Inside’s data is that the number one symptom women report isn't what anyone in the industry assumes.
“Over the last six years, we kept hearing the same thing from women: 'I’ve been to multiple doctors, my lab results are normal, but I’m exhausted, I can’t lose weight, and no one can tell me why.”
At first, it was just feedback. But when we analysed the data, we saw that the number-one symptom — by far — is a lack of energy. What’s interesting is that when users sign up, they rarely choose “increase energy.” They choose “lose weight.”
So there’s a disconnect. People come for weight loss, but the underlying issue is exhaustion.”
Hello Inside also observed unexpected correlations, such as improvements in skin health linked to glucose stability. And importantly, even as it scaled the data by doubling and quadrupling, the results remained consistent.
Cycle syncing enters the evidence base
Further, a recent IRB-approved clinical study led by FLO Living in collaboration with Mira, Hello Inside, and Citruslabs found that a “cycle syncing” approach that aligns nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle habits with the phases of the menstrual cycle was associated with significant reductions in PMS symptoms.
In the three-month, single-group trial of 60 women aged 22 to 42, 92 per cent of participants reported a reduction in both the number and intensity of PMS symptoms within 60 days, with improvements emerging as early as the first month. And the company has achieved stickiness that few app developers could even dream of.
According to Furian, “Our hypothesis was: if we can capture attention, we can change behaviour. With the CGMs, we see up to 19 app opens per day. Without them, around three per day.”
That kind of frequency — closer to social media than healthcare —i s what enables behaviour change.
Making the shift from D2C to statutory health
Commercially, Hello Inside started with a D2C angle, which is no easy endeavour, but Aichlseder asserts, “thankfully we had enough operating experience, and from my eight-plus years in the space I knew how to keep a cool head, keep the focus, and keep momentum at a sustainable pace — without over-raising or going overboard on the investor side.”
This enabled the company to be very diligent about building the foundation and then finding proof in the D2C space. With the data, the company realised it needed to shift into a B2B2C business model. And it started with statutory health insurance.
According to Aichlseder, the company went after the people who could see the potential — rather than trying to convince those who just weren’t receptive. “
The D2C proof was beneficial because it removed the risk factor for statutory insurers around whether end users would actually like the product.
Most companies trying to enter insurance build only for the payer and completely ignore the consumer. If someone asked me what the biggest challenge in this business is, it’s that we are trying to do the impossible: build for the payer and the consumer at the same time. That’s the real stretch.
Second, outcomes matter. You have to show and prove that whatever you offer has measurable health outcomes, and that it helps the statutory insurer understand, measure, and adapt.”
Further, while Germany and Austria both say they prioritise prevention, in practice, incentives remain relatively modest, fragmented, and often behaviour-based rather than outcomes-driven. That creates an interesting gap for companies like Hello Inside.
Currently in Germany, many incentivised health insurance programs, such as gym attendance and health checkups, focus on attendance rather than outcomes as a measure of success.
However, a suite of free, doctor-prescribed, health-condition-specific apps, such as those from HelloBetter, has paved the way for inclusion as a competitive advantage for startups targeting health insurers. BARMER has now launched a ZPP-certified metabolic prevention program and a 21-day blood sugar challenge on Hello Inside’s platform, closing a critical gap in women's healthcare.
This represents one of the first large-scale integrations of AI-powered metabolic prevention into statutory health insurance in Germany.
Building the next layer of metabolic insight
From here, Hello Inside wants to create better selection and higher-resolution content and courses for specific areas — whether that’s energy, pregnancy, menopause, or gestational diabetes.
As its intelligence layer is already built to scale, Aichlseder predicts that its biomarker tracking will expand soon:
“Lactate is something he sees coming fairly soon, but the one he’s most excited about, and which is probably one and a half to two years out, is cortisol.”
Furian asserts:
“Metabolic health has gone from unknown to central. In 10 years, we’ll look back and realise how little we understood.”
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