Meet Nesma Amin, founder of the first Egyptian-speaking app for women’s reproductive health

When Nesma Amin (LinkedIn) set out to create Aziza, a women’s health app built entirely around colloquial Egyptian Arabic, she turned to the women closest to her for inspiration. She asked her mother to poll friends and relatives about the words they use to refer to periods, given the social discomfort and taboo around saying the word outright. The responses ranged from “the pyramids” to “El Beta’a” (the thing). Aziza was among the suggestions, and everything clicked for Amin when she knew she had found the right name.

Amin and co-founder Ali Alaa (LinkedIn) wanted a woman’s name that carried emotional weight. They initially considered Latifa, meaning gentle, before settling on Aziza, which translates to dear or precious and is a familiar name in many Egyptian families. Amin says the responses have been mixed: some women named Aziza were pleased to see their name on a women’s health app, while others still felt embarrassed by the association.

So, who is Aziza?

Aziza is an Egyptian Arabic app built to improve women’s menstrual health, pairing an easy-to-use period tracker with clear, jargonfree health information. Users log symptoms each day, and the app sends reminders ahead of their period and fertile days. Its health articles sit alongside the tracker in the same dialect, and Amin says its users range from women preparing for marriage to new mothers dealing with postpartum hormonal shifts.

The founders had originally planned for women aged 18 and older. “After launching, we noticed a huge wave of organic sign-ups from young girls aged 12 and 13 who had just started their periods,” Amin tells EnterpriseAM. Girls that age often don’t know who to ask, and many worry that their naturally irregular cycles mean something is wrong. Aziza changed its onboarding so younger users get no stressful alerts about a late period and are told that irregular cycles are normal at their age. The app’s blog now runs content flagged for ages 12 and up, among them a piece on getting your period at school.

More than 90% of Aziza’s users are on Android, so the team tests the app on older, cheaper phones. Budget handsets still caught them off guard. “We didn’t fully see the actual user experience until users started sending us screenshots of bugs or display issues,” Amin says. “We would look at them and say, ‘Why does it look like that? It doesn’t look like that on my Android phone.’” Display and responsiveness vary from one phone to the next, and Amin admits the app still doesn’t run perfectly on all of them.

Bumps in the road

Patchy data was the next problem. Since launch, Aziza has added offline access so women can check their cycles and read some health information without a connection. “A woman might have internet, but she doesn’t have internet access 24 hours a day. She might only be able to turn on her mobile data for just 30 minutes a day,” Amin says. “I want those 30 minutes of connectivity to be enough for her to get everything she needs for the day.”

Shared phones forced another fix. Sisters, or a mother and daughter, often use Aziza on the same device with separate accounts, and the app can’t merge their data for privacy reasons. The team made sign-in and password recovery simpler for users who, as Amin puts it, forget their passwords every day.

The woman behind the app

Amin started out as an engineer. She studied digital media engineering and technology at the German University in Cairo, earned a computer science and software engineering degree, then steered away from a career writing backend code. While most of her classmates went into corporate and multinational jobs, she joined a software agency founded by alumni of her university as a project manager on web and mobile builds and stayed in product management from there.

Women’s health came next. At a healthcare social enterprise, Amin ran product for its digital health tools and built its tech team in-house. She also managed women-friendly health services in Manshiyat Naser, an underserved Cairo neighborhood, where the project trained primary healthcare workers and local clinic and hospital staff to improve reproductive and sexual healthcare for women.

A head of product role at a fertility diagnostics startup then took her to Germany. The company’s tool used predictive algorithms to spot hormonal and fertility conditions in women who had been trying to conceive for over six months. Amin arrived right after a funding round and oversaw the product as the company moved from selling to German consumers to selling to US businesses. She came away convinced that women’s health products have to start with the menstrual cycle.

By then she knew she wanted to build for Egypt’s mass market. Local startups mostly served the 5-6% of Egyptians who are affluent and comfortable with English-first apps, she says, leaving more than 90% of the population without localized digital products. “I didn’t want any Egyptian woman, regardless of her background or region, to feel like a product wasn’t designed specifically for her.”

In May 2023, she pitched the idea to Alaa, a software developer. A first version was ready by late August. After testing with friends and family, Aziza went live on the App Store and Google Play in November 2023, and Amin says no Egyptian app had been dedicated to period tracking and women’s health before it. Sign-ups came in with no marketing spend while both founders kept their full-time jobs; Amin then left hers four months after launch to run Aziza as CEO.

Making money moves

So far, Aziza is bootstrapped. It’s been running on self-funding and revenue, topped up with prize money from startup competitions, and has raised no outside equity. Amin wanted an impact business that earns its keep and can scale and decided early against running it as a non-governmental organization (NGO). In 2025, content partnerships with United Nations agencies and other organizations paying for women’s health awareness brought in enough to sustain operations. Aziza also takes a revenue share from healthcare providers such as HealthTag that offer in-person services to its users.

Paid extras for the app are also under study. Amin’s example is a woman who spends EGP 50 on a clinic visit plus transport, who might instead pay EGP 20-30 for a digital triage or consultation in the app. Basic tracking will stay at no cost, and Amin says nothing already in the app will ever sit behind a paywall.

Aziza also gets offline help from 75 medical students across the country. They volunteer as ambassadors and fold menstrual health workshops into the medical convoys and field training their degrees already involve. Aziza provides the training and materials and pays for the sessions, which run at NGOs and community centers. Amin says the network spans more than 80% of Egypt’s governorates and gives the company a way to get first-hand experience at what’s happening on the ground.

What’s next for Aziza?

The founders plan to open a formal funding round in 2027, once they have pinned down their revenue streams. Investors agree the market is there, Amin says, but the model is where conversations get hard. The question she always hears from venture capital investors (VCs) is how Aziza will balance social impact with fast revenue growth. “VCs look for rapid 7x-10x revenue scaling. Those numbers are aggressive for any startup, let alone a female-led startup working in women’s health within a highly stigmatized market.” Female founders in femtech face documented fundraising gaps, she adds, a pattern she traces to how investors read risk and how women present their numbers. She accepts that an app with no charge to users is an unusual VC pitch and is banking on impact investors and strategic backers to fund the round.

Amin wants to take Aziza from 170k active users today to 1 mn in Egypt by early 2028. Her product plans center on artificial intelligence built natively in Arabic. “Global health datasets are heavily Westernized,” she says, arguing that Aziza’s local data can give women in Egypt and the region more relevant guidance.