Anna is the technical co-founder of Lioness, the sexual wellness company that built the world’s first and only smart vibrator that improves orgasms. Because she grew up in an immigrant, Korean family where talking about sex was taboo, she is a big advocate in Lioness’s mission to destigmatize women’s sexuality through knowledge of their own bodies. Before Lioness, Anna was a mechanical engineer at Amazon, launching the Kindle Voyage and Amazon Dash Button. She has been featured on the Engineering Insight podcast and spoken at top universities like UC Berkeley and Chalmers University, SXSW, and CYFY India and Morocco.
What inspired you all to create this company?
We started Lioness inspired from our own upbringings of growing up in conservative families where we never talked about sex. The lack of conversations around sex, especially as women, made us feel alone in feeling ashamed of our own body. When we started having conversations with other women, we quickly discovered that we were by far not the only women who had questions about their sexual health left wondering, “am I normal?” Unfortunately, the question far too common among all women because when we look at the history of research in women’s health, and even further into women’s sexual health, there’s still an incredible lack of research- often held back by societal taboo. Most of the female physiological sex research that we, as a society, lean on to this day are from the 1980’s from a sample size of 15 women. We founded Lioness, the world’s smartest vibrator, as a step toward helping women, and ourselves, discover their own answers. Not only does the Lioness use advanced biometric sensors to show data on their own sexual pleasure and orgasms, we also partner with sex researchers and doctors to advance the knowledge and research beyond the imaginable.
What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
Lioness is a Silicon Valley, women-led company with strong female engineering, design, and executive leadership, which surprisingly in this industry, is an uncommon feat. Our product is women-centric at its core, from our choices to use the same materials as those used in medical devices to tailoring the Lioness smart vibrator’s ergonomics to how women actually hold vibrators. Most importantly, there are no other vibrators or products in the consumer market that have the technical capability of our exclusively patented integration of smart, biometric sensors along with our statistical data methods to provide insights on sexual arousal to improve orgasms.