Her daughter asked her the same questions about her body that Nina had been asking herself at that age. That was the moment. Not a pitch deck, not a market gap on a slide. A conversation at home, where a child wanted to know what was happening to her, and her mother realized that if her own daughter was asking these same questions, there were more people out there asking too.
Nina is the founder of ZAE: Hormonal Intelligence OS, a Nashville-based platform. Her background is fashion design, fine arts, and software architecture, and ZAE is the fourth company she has founded. ZAE launched on the App Store and Google Play in May 2026, after two years of conceptualization and eight months of solo development, born from her own frustration with a wellness industry that was not giving her, as a woman, the tools she actually needed.
The plain version of what ZAE does: it knows what day it is for your body, not just what day it is on the calendar. It adjusts nutrition, movement, recovery, and a cross-domain scanner that checks food, beauty, household, and clothing products against the user's current biology. There is a free tier and a paid subscription that opens up the full platform, deeper biomarker integrations, the unlimited scanner, and the AI assistant.
Caring is the rarest skill, and it is the one thing that turns technology into something that actually helps a human being. If you care enough about a problem to lose sleep over it, you are already qualified to solve it.
A smart outsider looks at the wearables industry and assumes the big companies have already solved this. Nina will tell you they have not. The industry measures heart rate and sleep with precision, then hands every user the same generic advice. A woman in her follicular phase does not need what a woman in her luteal phase needs. A pregnant body does not need what a postpartum body needs. And men have their own circadian rhythm that most consumer wellness apps overlook. ZAE serves them, too. Data without biological context, in her read, is just noise. ZAE was built to be the context layer the industry skipped.
Even the interface reshapes itself around the user's phase; every suggestion, every recommendation and the colors change to reflect the user's energy throughout the day. But the hard part is the engine underneath: a system that has to be safe enough for a pregnant woman, smart enough for a perimenopausal woman, and accurate enough for a man on a circadian rhythm, all in the same codebase, governed by the same logic. Most wellness companies build for one user. ZAE's foundation was built for five. Three patent-pending claims protect the architecture. The scanner runs across four product domains through a single engine; the kind of coverage no other consumer scanner currently offers.
The constraint right now is time. Nina is still solo on the product side, which means every hour she spends on something that is not building, improving, or talking to users is an hour the product does not move forward. Administrative overhead, repetitive coordination, the inbox. None of it is hard. All of it is just slow.
The weeks have a rhythm she protects. Gym at 4am with a self-growth book in her ears, then meditation. Building starts around 6am: writing code, reviewing the engine, deciding what ships next, fixing whatever broke, planning marketing. The other half of the week is the part she says she is still learning to navigate. Growing her network. Talking to mentors. Showing up at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, where she went through the Spring 2026 TakeOff accelerator. Doing interviews like this one.
Do not ask whether you fit. Build the thing, and the fit will reveal itself.
Applying to TakeOff is the decision she will single out as better than expected. She almost did not apply. She had been heads-down building for so long that joining a cohort felt like a distraction from the work. It was the opposite. It broke the isolation, forced her to articulate what she had built to total strangers, and got the product to market faster. The decision she would undo is the time she spent doubting herself, trying to follow playbooks that did not fit how she actually thinks. The moment she trusted her instincts and built the way she wanted to build, things got faster and clearer.
Nina grew up in Latin America. She started her first business at 21, an apparel import and distribution operation, and after graduating as a fashion designer, she launched her own denim brand, Denim Route 54, and secured a distribution contract with Beco, one of Venezuela's most recognized department store chains. The plan was to scale Latin America-wide. Life had other plans. As she puts it, "Life has a way of redirecting us." She moved to the United States, where the fine art chapter eventually opened, and where, several years later, ZAE began. The biggest influence on how she operates is her mother, a self-taught creator who can paint a canvas or build a dress with no formal training in either. She just decided, at some point, that she was capable, and then she was. Nina watched that for years before she understood what she was watching. The lesson she absorbed: you do not ask permission to be good at something. You start, and you keep going, and one day you look up and you are. That is what carried her from fashion design into fine art, and from fine art into building a hormonal intelligence platform with no traditional engineering background. None of those transitions felt brave at the time. They felt obvious. Every chapter of her life taught the next one what it needed to know.
The worst stretch cost her sleep, a social life, time for herself, time for the people she loves. Building something hard and alone, with no team, required overcoming her own doubts daily. She does not romanticize it. She also does not regret it. Anything worth having will be hard, in her framing, and the stretch that almost broke her is the one she now calls her biggest blessing.
What is next is people. The infrastructure is built, the engine is live, the scanner is working across all four domains. Every new user who scans a product they have been using for years and finally sees what is in it, who finally understands what their body has been trying to tell them, is the actual goal. The technology was the means. The connection is the mission.
