Lessons in love: the STI results app that won’t make you blush

A few days before London Pride this year, a pop-up store in London’s Soho, painted in black and adorned with purple balloons, lures customers with a bar code promising free ice cream.

Inside, some tech folk, a handful of healthcare professionals, and a tattooed man wearing bondage gear make small talk over enticing canapés.

This eclectic crowd is gathered for the launch of Zults, the brainchild of two southwest London mothers — architect Georgia Di Mattos and sonographer Bianca Dunne. The two met five years ago while they were both on maternity leave.

Zults is an app aimed at making discussing sexual health less awkward while navigating the minefield of modern dating networks.

The app uses dual encryption and enables users to securely upload their latest sexually transmitted infection (STI) test results onto a digital card.

The card can be stored in Apple or Google wallets, respectively, and shared with anyone, even those who don’t have the app, through various methods such as links, user search, QR codes, and Bluetooth.

It’s not quite rocket science, but creating a user-friendly UI that captures nuances of modern dating and can persuade healthcare companies to collaborate has been a labour of love for its founders.

For the first version of Zults, the duo collaborated with medical device software developers at Zendra Health and the online testing service Sexual Health London.

Infectious language

Mattos and Dunne first came up with the idea for the digital card at the beginning of 2020. But, initial launch plans were put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“People urged us to pivot and become a testing app for Covid, but we stuck to our guns,” Dunne recalls.

However, she adds that the Covid-19 years may have paved the way for society to start discussing infections in normal, everyday terms.

“Words like ‘transmission’, ‘track and trace’, and ‘infection’ have become daily parlance for people. Covid normalised this language, and that certainly helped us at the time,” she says.

However, while language around infection may be more commonplace — so too are the infections.

Five years on from the pandemic, STIs are at a record high, according to statistics published by the UK Health Security Agency.

The agency reveals that 401,800 STIs were reported in England in 2023 — a 5% rise from the previous year. In particular, a spike in infections among 18–25-year-olds may have been exacerbated by misinformation on ChatGPT / TikTok.

A decreased fear of HIV since the introduction of free PrEP, an anti-HIV drug, on the NHS, as well as improved HIV treatment, has also been attributed to a surge in other STIs among gay and bisexual men.

These stats should hammer home the importance of safer sex and discussing sexual health. Still, many people are reluctant to share sensitive medical information over dating apps or apps that reveal their personal contact details, such as WhatsApp or email.

Card carrying

There is an alternative: a digital ‘Zults’ card in which users can update their STI results every three months will help normalise conversations around sexual health, reasons Dunne, making it less awkward and more straightforward.

“People tend to test reactively,” explains Dunne, “but we want to promote a culture of people testing proactively. Where people are more inclined to communicate that to someone else and have the confidence to ask about testing status. Zults allows people to have that conversation.”

Dunne’s co-founder Mattos adds that the Zults backend is not a harvester for data: When users sign up, the company asks for an email and password — and there is no data holding of names, gender, or sexual preferences.

Zults is a platform; it does not provide physical kits or testing, meaning that if this B2B2C venture wants to scale, it needs to sign up more third-party healthcare providers from around the UK to promote this new, free service to different user communities.

Many of these providers came along to the pop-up in Soho last month to find out more about how Zults could support their work.

Mattos and Dunne would also like to see dating app firms join the fray, although the pair note that many appear nervous about mentioning the word testing on their sites.

“They’d prefer to pretend things like STIs don’t exist,” adds Dunne.

According to Mattos, the UK launch of this bootstrapped venture is a proof-of-concept which they do not expect to generate revenue from.

Once they successfully onboard more providers and build up a community of users, the plan is to commercialise and scale the platform for the US and European markets.

User perspectives

The jury is still out on whether Zults will succeed. TechInformed spoke with a single woman in her thirties, who preferred to remain anonymous, and pointed out that SHL already provides users with a PDF or a link to their test results as part of their free testing service.

A spokesperson from Zults responded that while users of SHL’s kits can share or show prospective partners their results, “the issue is that it’s quite clinical and clunky, and there’s a worry that people can easily doctor PDFs.”

We also spoke with a gay man who is actively involved in campaigning for improved sexual health for queer men. He suggested that the most useful aspect was not the digital card, but rather the ability to request another person’s results from within the app.

“From the perspective of the work I do with my charity, I think the issue is normalising conversations about getting tested and sharing results. The growing concern is that certain communities aren’t getting tested frequently enough and perhaps even feel uncomfortable talking about their results. Anything that encourages more conversation in that area is going to be useful.”

He added that the main groups of concern are heterosexual people, ethnic minorities, and people aged under 25.

“The Gen Z group is at particular risk right now. Finding new ways of getting them involved is essential. If they’re more likely to engage with an app than a PDF — which is obviously more likely — then it will probably make a difference.”

He added that nowadays, many people meet on apps such as Grindr, Tinder, and Hinge. They may only want to engage in something casual: “They don’t want to share their number, but they also want to have some kind of assurance that they’re engaging in informed and consensual intercourse.”

Starting in the heart of Soho, a couple of days before Pride appears to be a smart move, he thought. “I think the gay community would flock to something like this, and you know how it goes; we make everything cool, and the rest follow.”

But a real mark of success, he said, would be if that crossover happens, and straight people start adopting it. “I think it will be straight women first, which will, in turn, encourage straight men to do it,” he said.

So, if the phrase “I’m not sleeping with you until you share your Zults” creeps into modern dating parlance the same way that “swiping left or right” has, this app may indeed prove a game-changer.