Medical devices & diagnostics · Fertility diagnostics
Zergo
A Waterloo nanotechnology team built a cannabis breathalyzer, then pointed the same electrochemical sensor at fertility hormones in urine. Y Combinator lists the company as inactive. Its two peer reviewed papers were published after it stopped selling anything.
A sensor that changed jobs
On March 16, 2018, judges at the University of Waterloo Nanotechnology Engineering Capstone Design Symposium gave first place to Group 16, an impedimetric sensor for detecting THC. Five fourth year students stood behind it: Thomas Dunlop, Chris Taylor, Noah Debrincat, Karolyn Mackowiak and Ben Milligan.
Three years later, two of those five were selling something very different. The sensor had barely changed. The molecule had.
By early 2021 the company called itself Zergo, and its home page opened on a line that could have come from any consumer health startup: “Current fertility technology was invented at the same time as the floppy disk drive.” It sold a reusable analyzer, single use cartridges and a phone app that read hormone levels out of urine. Underneath it was a weed breathalyzer.
The problem with a red line
Home ovulation kits look for luteinizing hormone, which the pituitary releases in quantity just before an egg is released. The FDA describes these kits plainly as qualitative: they tell you whether your LH is elevated, not whether you will conceive, and they detect the surge reliably about nine times out of ten when used correctly.
Zergo’s argument was that a fixed threshold is a blunt instrument for a hormone whose baseline moves from person to person. In a June 2021 founder interview the company put it in its own words: “Qualitative ovulation tests are 100% ineffective for 180 million women across the world.” That figure is company-stated, and no independent source for it was found.
The proposed alternative was numeric. The website said the best hormone tests can tell 10 from 15 milli international units per millilitre, and that Zergo could tell 15.1 from 15.2.
Two engineers, one capstone, one pivot
Debrincat and Dunlop met in a nanotechnology engineering class at Waterloo in 2013, according to the company’s own about page. The capstone became a company. It won $25,000 and space in the Velocity Garage at the Velocity Fund Finals in the winter of 2018, plus $10,000 in the Esch Entrepreneurship Capstone Design Awards.
The product then was the SannTek 315, a breath test for delta-9 THC aimed at police and workplace safety. Y Combinator took the company into its Summer 2019 batch. At Demo Day, Debrincat gave the pitch in a sentence: “The reason why there is no breathalyzer for cannabis today is because the concentration of cannabis in your breath compared to alcohol is 20 million times smaller, so detecting that is technically hard to do.” The device was meant to show whether someone had consumed cannabis in the previous three to four hours, at $800 to $1,000.
The founders did not oversell the evidence. In his Launch HN post that August, Debrincat wrote: “We haven’t had enough resources to run any formal trials yet to publish data, but that is changing this year.” He named the contract research organization they had hired, Curebase. Asked whether a reading would track impairment, he answered: “Confident that it will indicate, not necessarily confident that it will correlate (if that makes sense).”
A University of Waterloo notice reported that the company “has just completed a successful round of seed financing that will inject $2.6 million into the company” and would start field tests in 2020. Then the team turned the sensor around.
What was left behind, and what was published
The fertility product never reached a launch that any public record confirms. A sponsored post on a Canadian fertility site in June 2021 said the system was “Launching next summer” and pointed readers to a waitlist. Nothing followed. The US patent application covering the fertility cartridge, filed February 3, 2021 and assigned to SannTek Labs Inc. by Dunlop and hardware lead Brad McCloy that June, was later abandoned for failure to respond to an office action.
The science came out anyway. In December 2022 and again in July 2024 the journal Talanta published two papers on electrochemical urine biosensors from a group in which most authors listed SannTek Labs Inc., Waterloo alongside John T. W. Yeow’s lab at the University of Waterloo. The 2024 paper is about exactly the product Zergo had been selling.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| LH biosensor paper | Talanta 279:126567, dated Nov 1, 2024, online Jul 14, 2024. Authors Yuksel, Dunlop, Luo, McCloy, Mills, Kayaharman and Yeow; most list SannTek Labs Inc., Waterloo. Detection limits of 1.02 and 1.53 mIU/ml by two statistical methods across a 0 to 40 mIU/ml range, and no cross reactivity with hCG. | Public record |
| hCG biosensor paper | Talanta 254:124156, issue dated Mar 1, 2023, online Dec 2, 2022. Same lab and company affiliation. Limit of detection 2.17 mIU/ml, with specificity against LH. | Public record |
| Resolution claim | The site said rival tests separate 10 from 15 mIU/mL while Zergo separates 15.1 from 15.2. The papers report limits of detection between 1.02 and 2.17 mIU/ml, a different measure, and report no figure supporting a 0.1 mIU/mL discrimination. | Claim exceeds the record |
| Imprecision claim | An 8% imprecision figure against a stated 7.5% laboratory standard appears only in a post labelled Sponsored Post, myMindBodyBaby, Jun 23, 2021. No published data behind it was found. | Sponsor-stated |
| Clinicians and customers | The site said fertility doctors across North America trusted Zergo. No named doctor, clinic or customer appears in any source found. | Company-stated |
| FDA status | No 510(k), no PMA and no device registration listing under Zergo or SannTek Labs in openFDA searches on Sep 24, 2026. A quantitative at-home hormone test is a regulated in vitro diagnostic in the United States, so nothing here was cleared for sale there. | Nothing on file |
| Registered trials | No studies on ClinicalTrials.gov under either name, including the cannabis study the founders said they had hired a CRO to run. | Not found |
| Patents | Four filings. Two cartridge applications of Feb 3, 2021, one being US 17/166,895, assigned to SannTek Labs Inc. on Jun 7, 2021 and later abandoned. Two breath sample filings with an Oct 19, 2018 priority date, listed inactive. | Public record |
| Operating status | Y Combinator lists Zergo as Inactive and zergo.com no longer serves the company site. One data service says the company wound up in July 2021, which sits awkwardly beside a June 2021 patent assignment and a 2024 paper carrying the company name. | Sources disagree |
Read plainly: the sensor chemistry is real and it is in the literature, with numbers anyone can check. The consumer product on top of it is not. There was no FDA authorization, no registered trial, no named clinic and no launch. What survived is two Talanta papers and an abandoned patent, an unusual shape for a startup record, because the evidence arrived after the company that paid for it had gone quiet.
What to watch
- Whether the LH agitation method is picked up by another device maker. The 2024 paper is public and the patent is abandoned.
- Further work from the Yeow group at the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology using the same sensor design.
- Any US regulatory filing that would let a quantitative at-home hormone monitor of this type be sold. None exists under either company name.
- Corrections at the data services, several of which still carry revenue and headcount figures for a company Y Combinator marks inactive.
In their words
“There are already people knocking on our door: Is your product ready?”
Noah Debrincat, co-founder and CEO, Communitech News, 2018 · Independent
“The reason why there is no breathalyzer for cannabis today is because the concentration of cannabis in your breath compared to alcohol is 20 million times smaller, so detecting that is technically hard to do”
Noah Debrincat, Demo Day, reported by the University of Waterloo, 2019 · Independent
“We haven’t had enough resources to run any formal trials yet to publish data, but that is changing this year.”
Noah Debrincat, Launch HN post, Hacker News, August 2019 · Founder post
“Confident that it will indicate, not necessarily confident that it will correlate (if that makes sense).”
Noah Debrincat, on whether a reading tracks impairment, Hacker News, August 2019 · Founder post
“THC presence does not automatically imply impairment”
Cristina Buccola, cannabis industry attorney, to Observer, 2019 · Independent
“Current fertility technology was invented at the same time as the floppy disk drive.”
Zergo about page, archived 2021 · Company-stated
“The best hormone tests today can differentiate between 10 mIU/mL and 15 mIU/mL, but ours can differentiate between 15.1 mIU/mL and 15.2 mIU/mL.”
Zergo about page, archived 2021 · Beyond the published data
“If you need to pivot your company, tell your investors BEFORE you’re 100% decided that you should do it.”
Noah Debrincat to Frederick Daso, Founder to Founder, June 2021 · Interview
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordQuantitative detection of pre-ovulatory luteinizing hormone surges in urine
- Public recordA precise and rapid early pregnancy test, electrochemical point-of-care biosensor
- Public recordUS application 17/166,895, cartridge system for analyte measurement
- Public recordopenFDA 510(k), PMA and registration searches, Zergo and SannTek Labs
- Public recordOvulation (Urine Test), home use tests
- Public recordZergo company page, status Inactive, Summer 2019
- IndependentNE Capstone Design Symposium award winners
- IndependentSannTek preparing cannabis detector for field tests
- IndependentCannabis startup pitches investors in Silicon Valley
- IndependentThe Velocity startup making a cannabis breathalyzer
- IndependentY Combinator bets on a startup building a weed breathalyzer for cops
- IndependentA new weed breathalyzer for police arrests is being developed
- InterviewStartup Spotlight #132: Zergo
- Founder postLaunch HN: SannTek (YC S19), breathalyzer for cannabis
- CompanyZergo home and about pages
- SponsoredReducing TTC sex fatigue, sponsored post
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
