Liz Klinger and Anna Lee founded Lioness, a data-driven sexual wellness company, back in 2013, to carve out space in the sex tech industry and in consumers' lives. Their first product, the Lioness Smart Vibrator, is the "first and only vibrator to improve orgasms through biofeedback and data," developed from over half a decade of research and development with sex researchers, doctors, and their in-house ex-Google X and ex-Amazon engineering team. Since its inception, the Lioness Smart Vibrator has won multiple Best of awards at CES. It even earned Lee a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list last year.
We spoke to Lee and Klinger about Lioness’ technology and the future of sex tech.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Business of Business: Walk me through Lioness' origin story and your founders journey.
Liz Klinger: I came from a more conservative family. I grew up in the Midwest and we didn't really talk about sex. In a way, that made me more curious about the topic. So I ended up exploring sex and sexuality and pleasure primarily first through the arts...I ran across an opportunity to sell sex toys, primarily to women through Passion Parties. As I was hosting and doing more of these parties, I was finding that there were a couple people at each of these [parties] who would take me aside and start asking me all these questions that they'd had in the back of their heads related to sex and pleasure and relationships...I saw a need there. Eventually, I went looking into how do I start my own [business] to improve sex lives in some way.
Anna Lee: I ended up meeting Liz and James [Wang, Lioness’ third founder], and we started this thing from an underground lab at UC Berkeley. No windows, just sitting at a desk, cutting things at three in the morning and then, being able to build a product. As Liz was saying, we've realized the big thing is that there's just such a lack of information about sexual behavior, sexual pleasure, all of that, especially for people with vaginas. We realized even before you can build a vibrator that's supposed to be the best vibrator in the world, nobody even knows what that is because there's not enough information on pleasure itself. So, we're trying to solve that problem of giving people enough information about their own bodies.
Tell me about your flagship product, the Lioness.
Klinger: The Lioness vibrator looks like a typical vibrator at first glance, but it's actually designed with a whole suite of different types of sensors. What Lioness as a product is able to do is automatically track what your body is doing during a session. So, you're able to see the different pelvic floor contractions and movements over the course of a session, and you can identify if there's an orgasm there. With the app, you're able to see that, and the user is able to put in different notes or tags about the experience. They might track if they're particularly stressed, or if they had a lot of coffee or no coffee at all, or alcohol is another common one that people track. You can start seeing these different things and experiences, and over time see what is a good session for you, or a baseline session for yourself, and how those sessions can change from a number of different factors.
Let's dig into those features of precision sensors, biofeedback, AI, and pleasure data.
Lee: There truly is no vibrator currently out in the market that does biofeedback data tracking in the way we do. There's going to be a lot of vibrators that are called "smart vibrators" because "smart" in the tech world usually aligns with Bluetooth-enabled, so something that's remote controlled...But I would say in terms of biofeedback data and being able to give graphs and charts of what we're trying to do, there's currently nothing on the market that exists in what we're doing.
"We've gone against every single odd — being in Silicon Valley, doing consumer hardware, working in sex tech, building this business as women founders and first-time founders. At this point, if somebody doesn't recognize the work that we're doing, that's not who that we want in our team."
So, the Lioness 2.0 is launching this month?
Klinger: Yes...There's a feature called Live View that's really interesting for a lot of our users where — this is an optional thing — they can actually see from their app what's going on in real time with their sessions...Then there's a hotspot algorithm that uses AI to give people a heat map of their session. So to better navigate and see where they may have been more or less aroused or may have had an orgasm. It's basically a way to help people read through their data better. It's something that we built based on about 50,000 different sessions since the inception of Lioness.
Jumping into the sex tech industry at large: where and why is the sex tech industry poised to grow right now?
Lee: I always tell this to people, especially investors: The money doesn't lie. There's such a big opportunity in sex tech, people that want to purchase, and it's been around for years for a reason. The really amazing thing that we're seeing is different companies building for different people. Before, it was very much just a vibrator with a button and a motor, and it was like, if this doesn't work for you, something's wrong with you. It was a one-size-fits-all case. Now, with sex tech flourishing, we're starting to see all these people come with different products that are gender neutral, that aim for the LGBTQ+ community, or just all different types of people and different bodies. I think that's been really amazing to see how that's shifting.
How has the pandemic impacted the sex tech industry?
Klinger: On one hand, when all the lockdowns started happening, the assumption was that everyone's buying sex toys and spending time at home...We saw some of that too with some of our purchasing data, like people being more experimental and explorative, and buying Lionesses because of that. But there's another side of it too, especially as the pandemic wore on, and usage of the Lioness plummeted in the holidays. It was around the time when lockdowns and COVID cases were getting to their peak, a lot of people were not very sexually active during that time. We did an accompanying survey through the research platform...If you want a fun data point, in November, 2020 there was a 37.78% decline in masturbation frequency when compared to frequency in November 2019.
How have you handled taboos or stigma around sex tech while pushing your business forward?
Lee: We've gone against every single odd — being in Silicon Valley, doing consumer hardware, working in sex tech, building this business as women founders and first-time founders — we've gone above and beyond. At this point, if somebody doesn't recognize the work that we're doing, that's not who that we want in our team.
