Flo Health Hit a $1B Valuation and $200M in Revenue: How Dmitry Gurski Beat a Better-Funded Rival

August 31, 2026

TL;DR: Flo Health is a women's health app — a period tracker wrapped in medical content, chatbots, pregnancy and perimenopause modes — with roughly 75 million monthly active users, about $200 million in top-line revenue, and roughly 35% share of the period tracker market. It was founded in 2015 by Dmitry Gurski (CEO), his brother Yuri Gurski, Andrew Kovzel and Max Scrobov, and is headquartered in London. In 2024 Flo raised more than $200 million from General Atlantic, becoming the first purely digital consumer women's health app to reach unicorn status. The competitor everyone expected to win — Glow, founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin with $30M from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, three years earlier — is, by Gurski's account, roughly a hundred times smaller today. Gurski told the whole story on The Product Market Fit Show.

What does Flo Health do?

Flo is a period tracking app. That description undersells the strategy behind it.

Gurski's founding insight was that a period tracker is a spectacular acquisition and retention product and a terrible business on its own — the same shape as Gmail.

"Period Tracker is a very unique, good product because most of women use period trackers and they use them for a very long time and retention is high and acquisition is simple. But then it's just like a tiny product which can't bring enough engagement and value to be maintainable." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

So Flo did what Google did with Gmail: surround the free, high-retention core with enough adjacent value that the whole thing becomes monetizable. Medical articles, symptom patterns, chatbots, and — critically — modes. Pregnancy mode, trying-to-conceive mode, and now perimenopause mode.

Key stat: roughly 20% of American pregnant women use Flo's pregnancy mode, and only about 2% of them are acquired directly. The rest switch over from other modes inside the app.

"Our idea was to create, like, a kind of, like, to surround period tracker by different features… And it was a really crucial idea because of that Flo became monetizable." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

Every mode extends the lifespan of the same user. Perimenopause mode, he says, is a bet on adding another ten years of usage per customer.

Key stat: Flo says it added 17–18 million monthly active users in a single year — more than all but one standalone competitor's entire user base.

Who founded Flo Health?

Flo Health was founded in 2015 by Dmitry Gurski, Yuri Gurski, Andrew Kovzel and Max Scrobov. Dmitry Gurski is CEO.

His path there is unlike almost any other founder on the show. He grew up on a small family farm in post-Soviet Belarus, where households grew their own food because the shops were empty.

"When you're like growing potato, you just, you can't fake your job the same way as you may fake your job in the corporation. Because if you fake your job, then you will be hungry." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

At 15 he and his brother were picking and selling mushrooms in the forest. That paid for a computer. The computer led to writing articles about computers, which led to a publishing house asking a 20-year-old to write a book. He wrote an 1,100-page book on ActionScript over a year, working nights.

"Sometimes opportunities are much bigger if you're kind of naive and stupid enough to assume that you can't do that." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

They went on to publish roughly 2,000 educational books, and separately built mobile apps. Across a decade Gurski was involved in about ten companies with five exits, including sales to Facebook, Google and Farfetch.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. In 2015 Flo nearly died — a crisis in their other businesses drained their reserves. What saved it was his brother's angel investment in MSQRD, sold to Facebook in 2016.

"Without the exit of MSQRD, I'm not even sure that Flo would survive 2016 even with traction." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

How much has Flo Health raised?

More than $300 million in total, as Gurski shared on the show.
More than $200 million from General Atlantic (2024) — verified as of August 2026 — taking Flo past a $1 billion valuation and making it the first purely digital consumer women's health app to become a unicorn.
The first round closed in 2016. In that deck, Gurski's five-year dream was 3–4 million monthly actives and a $20 million valuation. Reality was, in his words, "dozens of times bigger by any measurement."

Key stat: Gurski estimates he collected roughly 300 rejections from at least 200 firms, including the best-known names — some of them saying no at multiple stages.

"It's always unpleasant to get hundreds of no's." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

He is direct about why the segment was hard to fund: most partners at the firms he pitched were men who didn't understand the category, passed it to one of the few female investors on the team, who then had to carry it into an all-male investment committee with no comparable success story to point at. Flo, he argues, is now that benchmark.

For more on raising against the odds, see Bland AI's 180 rejections and BoldVoice's consumer bet when VCs wanted B2B.

How Flo beat Glow: simplicity, accuracy, and a wider audience

In 2015 the App Store already had hundreds of period trackers — five of the top ten health and fitness apps were period trackers. Gurski calls the incumbents "pink calendars."

Glow, the best-funded entrant, had a three-year head start and Max Levchin's name on it. Gurski's read on why it lost:

"A big mistake of Glow, of Max Levchin, was to focus too much on a narrow segment of trying to conceive, rather than to have a focus on a wide audience. And also, I think the product was not simple enough." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

Flo's own simplicity was an accident. They launched two apps — a sophisticated one with many symptoms and buttons, meant to be the main product, and a stripped-down calendar meant to be a traffic generator. The simple one took off. A year later they killed the sophisticated version.

The second edge was accuracy. Competitors predicted the next period with fixed 28-day logic. Flo was the first period tracker to use machine learning, in 2015–16.

"Simplicity is the most significant, but second point is accuracy of predictions." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

To this day, Gurski protects one specific piece of real estate: the top of the first screen, where 90% of user time is spent. Everything else may get crowded; that does not.

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The retention curve is the only PMF signal that matters

Gurski's definition of product market fit for consumer products is unusually concrete — and it explicitly ignores the number most people quote.

"It really doesn't matter. Is it 10%, 15%, 50% after one month? What's really significant is the shape of the curve." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

A curve falling to zero means no fit. A curve that flattens — even at 3% or 5% — means some cohort keeps coming back, and that cohort is worth studying. In Flo's case the signal was unmistakable: 40–50% retention several months after install, with 1–2% monthly churn afterwards.

"I still have never seen so good retention curve, so nice shape among health and fitness products. It was something much more similar to social networks, Netflix." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

The explanation is the part most founders skip: retention is a property of the use case, not the product.

"Retention is a user case. And to build a big business is necessary to build this business based on naturally repeating cases." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

Gym apps have terrible usage retention because going is a choice you can defer forever. A period is not. His analogy: gym versus school.

Key stat: about 60% of Flo's traffic is still organic, most of it word of mouth — which he calls the truest sign of real product market fit.

Deleting features that A/B tested well

One of the more counterintuitive practices at Flo: periodically removing features that once proved themselves.

"All these features initially showed like in A/B test, like a good improvement of revenue or conversions… But then when we just deleted them, metrics improved, including like this metrics we initially used as justification for these features." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

His explanation is that a feature added to a simple app faces little internal competition. Twenty features later, the same feature is cannibalising attention from better ones. Almost no company does this cleanup.

"For product person, believe me, like to kill old feature is almost as to bring your old dog to a vet." — Dmitry Gurski, Flo Health

The discipline required is separating the vocal minority from the base. Flo removed basal temperature tracking — used by roughly 0.1% of users — and the support inbox and reviews exploded. At tens of millions of users, 0.1% is still a crowd. They held the line because the data was unambiguous.

Flo runs about 200 simultaneous experiments and employs roughly 15 user experience researchers.

Key lessons from Dmitry Gurski's playbook

1. Pick a big, crowded market over an empty niche. Gurski's rule: if a product doesn't exist, that usually means nobody needs it. Flo entered a market with hundreds of competitors and won on execution. 2. Judge the shape of the retention curve, not its level. A plateau at 3% is a signal. A steep slide to zero at any starting number is not. 3. Build on naturally repeating use cases. No amount of gamification moves a 1% use case to 50%. Choose the behaviour that recurs on its own. 4. Surround the free, sticky core. A period tracker alone can't be monetized. A period tracker plus content, modes and tools can. 5. Delete features on purpose. Complexity compounds silently, and the metric that justified a feature a year ago will often improve when you remove it. 6. Kill zombies fast. Gurski's sharpest warning is about products that limp along at a few million a year forever: "sometimes it's better to fail faster, to be free to try something new." 7. Success is a function of attempts. He has seen founders fail on the first try; he says he has never seen one fail across five.

FAQ: Flo Health

Q: What is Flo Health? A: Flo Health is a women's health app centred on period and cycle tracking, extended with medical content, symptom insights, and dedicated modes for trying to conceive, pregnancy and perimenopause.

Q: Who is the CEO of Flo Health? A: Dmitry Gurski, who co-founded the company in 2015 with Yuri Gurski, Andrew Kovzel and Max Scrobov. Gurski grew up in Belarus and built roughly ten companies with five exits before Flo.

Q: How much funding has Flo Health raised? A: More than $300 million in total, as Gurski shared on the show — including over $200 million from General Atlantic in 2024, which took Flo past a $1 billion valuation.

Q: How many users does Flo Health have? A: Roughly 75 million monthly active users, with Flo adding 17–18 million monthly actives in a single recent year.

Q: Is Flo Health a unicorn? A: Yes. Following the General Atlantic investment in 2024, Flo became the first purely digital consumer women's health app to reach a valuation above $1 billion.

Q: How does Flo Health make money? A: Primarily through subscriptions. Gurski notes that the App Store subscription model — which only became broadly available around 2017–2019 — was the single change that made revenue at this scale possible.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

Dmitry Gurski, Co-Founder & CEO of Flo Health — went from a Belarusian family farm to building the first billion-dollar digital women's health app, with 75M monthly users and $200M in revenue.