Innovation UBC’s HATCH Venture Builder program provides established, UBC research-based venture teams with the resources and expertise to scale their business. Ventures undergo leadership training, up to 18 months of educational programming building off skills learned in our Venture Founder program, gain access to spaces, and receive the advisory services of dedicated Entrepreneurs in Residence (EiRs) who support company development, sales and marketing, recruiting and fundraising.
Currently in the HATCH program is eSense, whose mission is to empower all women to take control of their sexual well-being by delivering accessible, evidence-based digital support. In this Q&A, read all about co-founder Lori Brotto’s experiences as both a scientist and entrepreneur, the women’s health issue eSense is solving, and eSense’s exciting next steps as the team continues their commercial pilot in partnership with several clinics.
Tell us about yourself. Your background, your UBC connection, and what drew you to entrepreneurship.
I'm a clinician-scientist at UBC, where my work sits at the intersection of sexual health, women's health, and mental health. For most of my career, I've moved between the research lab, the clinic, and the classroom — designing and testing mindfulness-based and cognitive behavioral interventions for women's sexual health, training the next generation of researchers and clinicians, and trying to make sure the science we generate actually reaches the people who need it.
That last part is really what drew me to entrepreneurship. I spent years building and validating interventions that worked — genuinely changed people's lives — but that were locked inside a clinical trial or a handful of specialty clinics. Watching good science stall at the point of translation was frustrating in a specific way: not because the evidence was lacking, but because the delivery mechanism was. Founding eSense was my answer to that problem — a way to take clinically validated tools out of the lab and put them directly into people's hands, at scale, in a form that's accessible, private, and evidence-based.
UBC has been the foundation for all of it — the research infrastructure, the clinical population, the mentorship community, and now, through programs like HATCH, the entrepreneurial scaffolding to take that science further than I could have on my own.
What is your venture, and why does it matter?
eSense is a digital health platform that translates clinically validated cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness-based interventions for women's sexual health into a scalable, accessible tool. It is intended to mimic what would happen if a woman saw a qualified sex therapist for her distressing sexual concerns; however, the sad reality is that the majority of women suffer in silence.
It matters because sexual health concerns — particularly low desire — are common, under-treated, and often surrounded by shame or silence. Women frequently don't have access to a specialist, don't know where to start, or don't feel comfortable raising the issue at all. The interventions we've built on are backed by years of clinical trial evidence, but until now they've only been available to the small number of people who could get into a research study or a specialized clinic. eSense is built for anyone who wants an evidence-based, private, self-directed way to work on this part of their health — without waiting for a referral or overcoming the barrier of an uncomfortable conversation.
What recent venture milestones are you excited about?
This has been a season of real momentum. I recently completed the Connection Silicon Valley program, which gave me direct exposure to fundraising, FemTech, and digital health investor networks in a concentrated and highly strategic way — that experience sharpened both my pitch and my thinking about eSense's revenue model. I'm currently in the middle of our pre-seed round, with active conversations underway across several investor groups, and I'm energized by the caliber and engagement of the people at the table.
On the product side, we have been building out our go-to-market thinking across multiple channels — direct-to-consumer, B2B2C, payer partnerships, and licensing — which has forced me to get much more precise about who we serve first and how.
Most exciting is that we recently launched a commercial pilot where we have partnered with several clinics who serve women, and the clinicians in those centres have been so excited to offer their patients something that they know works and that they trust. Our hope is to complete the commercial pilot by the Fall.
What has been the biggest challenge you've had to overcome in building your venture? And, how did you get through it?
The learning curve for me was real! As a scientist and clinician, learning entrepreneurship involved a lot of deep learning. There has also been a slow identity shift from researcher to entrepreneur — learning to make decisions with incomplete information and move at startup speed after a career built on the deliberate pace of rigorous science. One of the skills we hone well in science is doing research in a highly controlled way where we can control independent and dependent variables. In commercialization, it is so much messier.
How has the HATCH program supported your journey?
I would say that my training with HATCH has been invaluable — both hearing the range of experiences and advice from the entrepreneurs in residence, and also sharing stories with my academic colleagues on the same pathway. I would highly recommend this to my UBC colleagues who are moving into entrepreneurship.
What's next for your venture? What are you working toward in the next 12 months?
Over the next year, our focus is on closing our pre-seed round and using that capital to move eSense from a validated concept to a product in the hands of real users at scale. That means finalizing our go-to-market strategy across our priority channels, deepening and growing partnerships with clinics and physicians who want to refer their patients to eSense, growing relationships with potential investors, creating a broader brand and awareness, and building out the team to support that growth. I am so excited about the pathway ahead!
Longer-term, my goal hasn't changed since the earliest days of the research this is built on: make evidence-based sexual health support as normal and accessible as any other part of women's healthcare — no shame, no waiting list, no gatekeeping.
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