When Sophie Haccou was asked in university what was bad about public toilets in the Netherlands, she could think of one thing: menstruation. She started doing a deep dive with interviews, focused on the menstrual cup specifically.
Along the way, she learned about period poverty, not being able to afford to buy both food and menstrual products. With CupHub, she is on a mission to tackle both. And not just in the Netherlands.
In episode 165 of Women Disrupting Tech, Sophie shares how she moved from fixing public toilets to developing Casey, a portable menstrual cup rinser that women can use anywhere there’s a toilet and clean water. Here’s what you’ll learn by listening.
- How Casey makes menstrual cups more practical and hygienic.
- Why affordability is just one aspect of addressing period poverty, and what the other parts of the puzzle are.
- What the role of community and education is in breaking taboos around menstruation.
Plus, you’ll learn why CupHub is crowdfunding to build and scale their menstrual health solutions.
In the end, our conversation is about creating agency for women, the ability to go and do whatever they want when they’re having their period.
Start listening by pressing play below. Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Towards the end of our conversation, we talk about Sophie’s fundraising experiences so far. For hardware startups, like CupHub, the early part of this journey is extra difficult: they often lack early traction needed to get investors on board that can help them build prototypes so they can start pilots. Here are three takeaways from our conversation that can benefit other founders as well.
Crowdfunding to stay out of the valley of death
Sophie mentions one of the squeezes that startups can end up in when they don’t get investments: the upfront cost of hardware is significant. So if you don’t get investments, you get stuck. Crowdfunding can be a way to stay out of what is known as the valley of death. The proceeds can be used for prototyping and getting pilots to build the proof points that are needed to convince VCs at a later stage.
Crowdfunding as community building
There are more advantages to crowdfunding than bridging the gap between ideas and early traction. For early-stage startups, crowdfunding as a first step can be valuable because it creates a network of ambassadors. It also allows investors with smaller contributions to join, feel a sense of ownership and become vocal supporters of the brand. And crowdfunding is a way to market a company, a way to get publicity.
Filtering advice is a founder’s job
Sophie received a lot of advice from investors early on. All well-intended, but also overwhelming. Her lesson was to not implement all the advice you receive. While talking to people is a good way to learn from other people’s successes and failures, the founder must remain the one “steering the wheel” and check the advice against their own read of the business.
These lessons combined can help founders stay in control, choose the funding and the community that can support them best, while choosing what advice to act on.
Know a founder building in FemTech who could benefit from these insights? Use the share buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 04:50 | Introduction to Sophie Haccou and CupHub |
| 08:47 | Development of Casey, the portable menstrual cup rinser |
| 12:51 | Designing user-friendly and sustainable menstrual products |
| 16:51 | Business model: crowdfunding and social impact partnerships |
| 18:50 | Material safety and standards for menstrual cups |
| 20:42 | Future prospects: diagnostics and FemTech innovations |
| 22:41 | Global expansion and impact in developing countries |
| 24:49 | The role of community in breaking taboos |
| 26:51 | Crowdfunding strategy and investor engagement |
| 28:50 | Partnerships with food banks and NGOs |
| 30:58 | Access to clean water and sterilization in different regions |
| 32:50 | The importance of education in schools about menstruation |
| 34:56 | The social and health impact of menstrual products |
| 36:57 | The future of FemTech and diagnostics |
| 38:43 | Advice for female founders and entrepreneurs |
| 40:49 | Building a community and sharing experiences |
| 42:43 | Expanding internationally and future goals |
| 44:52 | Funding strategies and business sustainability |
| 46:43 | The role of men in menstrual health awareness |
| 48:52 | Closing thoughts and how to support CupHub |
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
One of the humorous parts of the episode is when Sophie mentions her co-founder Aart being on stage at the Philips Innovation Awards and getting a question around the materials used in the product and if they’re fit for use inside the vagina. Sophie recalls him dryly mentioning that ‘we put many things inside it on a sort of daily basis.’ (referring to sex). Here are three more magic moments to enjoy.
Her co-founder was sent out of the menstruation class in high school
When we talk about the taboo that surrounds menstruation, Sophie mentions that her co-founder Aart was once sent out of a biology class in high school, because menstruation was a topic that was ‘only for girls’. As a co-founder, he is now an expert when it comes to how period products work and the materials used in them. It’s a 180-degree turn that not many men will make in their lives.
Supporting her mother-in-law in biology class
Sophie’s mother-in-law is a biology teacher. And until Sophie and Aart started building Casey, she knew about menstruation cups but could not explain how they work and how to clean them. Eventually, Sophie joined her to answer the questions from pupils. It’s invaluable knowledge that gives the pupils an option to really choose the menstrual product that is right for them.
Casey as a cocktail shaker
When I ask Sophie to describe how Casey works, she comes up with the cocktail shaker analogy. It makes a seemingly complex medical-grade hygiene product easy to understand and to operate. Simply shake it like a cocktail shaker.
These moments show three magic traits that any founder should have: being curious, being able to make a complex product easy to understand, and sharing knowledge.
🗣 What was your magic moment from the episode? Was it the turnaround her co-founder made, the guest lesson about menstruation, or the analogy of a cocktail shaker? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
When we discuss expansion plans, Sophie says that she is currently in talks with a foundation in Kenya that builds schools and has established relationships with local communities, about testing CupHub's cup and rinser, Casey, in that context. It leads her to say this:
"It's the dream to tackle period poverty, not just in the Netherlands but hopefully in the whole world.”
— Sophie Haccou
The Kenya conversation is still early - a foundation contact, not a signed pilot - but it shows the ambition isn't abstract. It's already attached to a specific place and a specific set of people willing to test it.
Know a founder who could use an inspiring quote like this for their own journey? Use the buttons to share it with them.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
Over the past few weeks, we’ve had quite a few episodes about women’s health and specific products in that space. When we compare this episode with the recent ones, three major themes and trends emerge:
Agency as a driver for women’s health products
CupHub's design is focused on giving "the choice back to women" and providing the autonomy to manage their periods on their own terms. In earlier episodes, we heard from founders who build tools that reduce clinical or doctor dependency, giving users the agency and education to manage their conditions independently. We saw this in episode 162, about the valve that Leonie van de Kamer is building with Certain, and in episode 164 about the adaptable pessary from Mirjam Weemhoff and Bart van Diepenbeek. These medical devices do pretty much the same in terms of agency. And in episode 153, the central idea behind Cyclisity is to educate women so they can take control of their own fertility.
Breaking the taboo through community and education
A core philosophy in this episode is that "a taboo is created when you don't know anything about something". Sophie argues that taboo subjects, whether they involve menstruation, sexual misconduct, or personal health, can only be dismantled through active education, knowledge-sharing, and (digital) spaces where users can openly discuss their lived experiences. Besides episodes 162 and 164, this topic comes back as early as episode 66 with Mamamoon (now 3mbrace) founder Kasia Pokrop. She uses education on her platform to guide women through the 3 Ms of women’s health (Menstruation, Motherhood, Menopause).
The funding gap between hardware and software
Sophie highlights a major structural barrier for hardware startups: the upfront development and manufacturing costs (such as physical molds for CupHub's Casey rinsing device) are incredibly high. She also highlights that the investors she spoke to remain heavily biased toward software and AI. This forces physical health tech and MedTech founders to rely on alternative pathways like bootstrapping and crowdfunding to build community ambassadors first. We heard something similar from Leonie van de Kamer (episode 162) and Karen Berg (in episode 161). Leonie van de Kamer talks about the friction in getting funding to build a physical medical device that does not exist yet. Karen noted that FemTech settles for building easy wellness products because they're fundable instead of looking at more complex solutions that address the core of the problem.
What connects these three trends is that the products giving women the most control are also the hardest to talk about and the hardest to fund; taboo keeps them out of the conversation, and the higher cost of building something real, not just an app, keeps them out of the investment case.
🗣️ How do you look at these trends? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
What does it actually take for AI to make healthcare more human? In episode 166, I speak with Dr. Hannah Allen, Chief Medical Officer at Heidi, about what happens when clinicians get back the time and headspace that administration has taken away from them.
In this short preview, Hannah makes a simple point: the best use of AI is to give clinicians more space for exactly that, the human side of medicine.
Curious how Heidi is creating more space for that human side? Leave your email address below to find new episodes in your inbox every Thursday.
What I Want to Leave You With
A statistic in Sophie’s story that shocked me was that 1 in 8 women in the Netherlands needs to choose between food and menstrual products. You’d think that has nothing to do with taboo, until you realize how poverty impacts women in their health and their wallet. It’s a sort of self-reinforcing system of a lack of education, a lack of money that results in a lack of safe options, health damage, loss of income, and so on. This is why the true magic is in CupHub’s collaboration with the foodbank (Voedselbank) because it addresses period poverty at its core.
But there is no taboo without a lack of education, and canceling a taboo therefore requires sharing knowledge. Well, especially for men, this episode is full of knowledge about a woman’s personal hygiene and the mental load that comes with menstruation. That’s important, because I doubt that Aart was the only boy who was ever told that menstruation is a woman’s affair.
But even for women, considering Sophie’s words that you’re lucky as a woman to be taught about menstruation at school, there is a lot to learn in this episode, like how long you can have a tampon in.
I want to close with a learning that may be strange, but also a good example of my own biases: Thanks to Sophie’s story about the problems with public toilets, I started to notice that the toilets at my coffee shop have a sink inside the toilet. I always wondered why, but as it turns out, it is not a coincidence. The place is run by women. They understand how important it is for their business that women are able to go for coffee even when they menstruate.
PS At the time of writing the blog, the crowdfunding has already reached 100% of its target amount. But since there is a stretch goal, that should not keep you from donating.
Listen to the full conversation with Sophie Haccou on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Sophie Haccou
Sophie Haccou is co-founder of CupHub, the Dutch startup building Casey, a portable rinsing device for menstrual cups.
She studied industrial design engineering at TU Delft, focusing on strategic product design, what the market wants and needs, while active in pushing back on sexual misconduct during her studies. It was her bachelor's end project, tasked with improving the public toilet, that led her to menstruation as the answer and into a deep dive of interviews focused specifically on the menstrual cup.
She met co-founder Aart in the Build Your Startup elective at TU Delft, where the two of them decided to turn the idea into a real company. Sophie handles the market and strategic side of CupHub, while Aart focuses on the technical, materials, and production side.
You can connect with Sophie Haccou on LinkedIn.
About CupHub
CupHub is a Dutch startup building Casey, a portable rinsing device that makes menstrual cups practical to use anywhere, not just at home. Casey solves the problem of nowhere to rinse a cup once you're out the door, since almost no public toilet stall has a sink inside it.
The company also takes on the affordability side of periods. Even in the Netherlands, one in eight menstruators has to choose between food and period products. Through a partnership with the Voedselbank (food bank), CupHub works to close that gap alongside the practicality problem Casey solves.
CupHub has been built by co-founders Sophie Haccou and Aart while bootstrapped, working other jobs to fund the company's early development. The team is now raising through crowdfunding rather than VCs, with a goal of €100,000 and a stretch goal of €200,000 to go full-time and scale production.
You can support CupHub's crowdfunding campaign on CrowdAboutNow, or follow along on LinkedIn and Instagram, or visit CupHub.net.
Listen to Episode 165 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 - 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
- 🎟️ You can buy your ticket here.
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