Lioness

Anna Lee, cofounder of Lioness

Lioness is a sexual wellness company that built the first and only biofeedback vibrator that provides data on arousal and orgasm from one’s own body, by measuring involuntary pelvic floor muscle movements, one of the best indicators of arousal and orgasms. This allows users to discover what works best sexually and literally see (visually) how numerous conditions like diet, mood, sleep, and medications affect their sexuality. The company also has the largest dataset of female physiology during arousal and orgasm and the largest real-world (in the bedroom, not in the lab) data on sexual response and orgasm.

“I grew up in an immigrant Korean household where we never talked about sex. I had so many questions about female pleasure and natural functions that were shamed and often rebuffed—even by medical professionals due to both the stigma and lack of research around female sexuality. I realized I had the power to make a difference—engineering a solution to change the stigmatization, taboo, and lack of resources around female sexual health. So I started Lioness seven years ago with my amazing cofounders, Liz and James,” shares Anna Lee, cofounder of Lioness. “During Covid, we launched a medical and academic research platform to give researchers a way to incorporate real-world sexual function data into any research project (sex, health, or social-related) for the first time ever, while also giving users the option to explicitly opt-in to participate in research they care about. We have also launched an arousal hotspot identification using an algorithm based on over 100,000 anonymized user sessions.”