Coroflo After the EIC Accelerator: Breastfeeding Monitor at Last

Coroflo Limited, a Dublin company incorporated in April 2017, makes Coro, a silicone nipple shield with a flow sensor inside that reports to a smartphone app how much breast milk a baby has taken during a feed. It won a grant in the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 cut-off of 3 April 2019, where the European Commission's list of selected companies names Coroflo Limited as the only beneficiary of the TheCoroRevolution project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,506,828 towards a total cost of €2,158,862, for a project that ran from 1 December 2019 to 31 August 2023. Coro went on sale in Irish shops on 13 July 2026, according to Techbuzz Ireland, and in the UK in September 2026 through John Lewis, according to Startups Magazine.

That launch came eight years after the first one the company announced. In October 2017 Coroflo told Fora it planned to sell Coro through two Irish pharmacy chains in the second half of 2018. In February 2024 it told The Irish Times the monitor would be in stores in the second half of 2024, a date FemTech Insider also reported. The product reached shops in July 2026.

On Sale, Late

Coroflo is trading. The Irish company register lists it as "Normal", with its last annual return made up to 30 September 2025 and financial statements for the year to 31 December 2024 filed on 25 November 2025, according to SoloCheck and OpenCorporates. Both list a Form B5 return of allotments filed in August 2025, which records new shares issued; the size of that issue and its buyers are not public. SoloCheck names Valeworth Limited as the largest corporate shareholder. The figures in the filed accounts sit behind paywalls at SoloCheck and North Data and could not be checked for this article.

The product is now in retail. Tony Kealys, an Irish baby goods chain, lists the medium-size Coro at €299, and John Lewis lists it at £279. Techbuzz Ireland names McCauley Pharmacy as a second Irish stockist. The company's website says only the medium size is available and that small and large sizes will follow. No sales figures have been published.

Before the launch, Coro collected design and trade-show prizes. It won a Red Dot Product Design award in 2025, with Dolmen Design and Innovation of Dublin credited as design partner. At CES in Las Vegas in January 2026 it won awards including CNET's Best of CES for parent tech and Gadgety's Best of ShowStoppers, according to Coroflo's launch announcement as carried by Techbuzz Ireland; Techlicious reviewed the device from the show on 14 January 2026. Its reviewer called it "genuinely compelling" for mothers with low milk production, premature babies or latch problems, and warned that constant measurement could add anxiety for parents whose breastfeeding is going well.

How Coro Measures Milk

The clinical way to find out how much milk a breastfed baby takes is test weighing: the baby is weighed on a precise scale before and after a feed. Coroflo's final report to the EU describes Coro as an alternative to that method. Its patent, US10928228B2, granted in February 2021 with a priority date of 13 July 2016 and Jamie Travers and Helen Barry as inventors, describes strain gauges mounted on a flexible member that spans the milk channel inside the shield, so that milk passing through bends the member slightly and the gauges register the flow. The same family includes European, British, Chinese and Japanese filings. The app shows volume per breast, feed duration, flow rate and milk temperature.

The company's report sorts earlier attempts into three groups: offline indirect methods, connected devices that estimate intake without measuring the milk itself, and real-time direct measurement. It claims Coro is the only "proven accurate" device in the last group. That claim rests on Coroflo's own description; no independent comparison of Coro with other intake monitors was found.

What the EU Paid For

The project's objective on CORDIS was to fund "the product's industrialisation, pre-commercialisation and clinical validation to build crucial scientific credibility." The grant agreement was signed on 5 November 2019. The project lasted 45 months and filed three reporting periods, the last covering March 2022 to August 2023.

The final report says Coro moved from concept to a functional prototype and then to a production-ready design. It obtained the CE mark after tests for food-contact safety, electromagnetic compatibility and radio emissions, and Coroflo joined the Bluetooth SIG. A manufacturing partner was contracted, tooling was made and first production samples were inspected, though the report adds that "further improvements of some production steps are still required." The sensor was tested against test weighing in a clinical trial with breastfeeding mothers run with RCSI (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland). Results from 2021 tests were presented as a poster at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2022 meeting; results from 2023 were "under review and being prepared for publication".

1. Industrialise the deviceDeliveredProduction-ready by August 2023 per the final report; on sale from July 2026.
2. CE markDeliveredFood contact, EMC and radio tests, per CORDIS; retailers cite CE standards.
3. Clinical validationPartlyRCSI trial completed; one conference poster in 2022.
4. Peer-reviewed accuracy paperNot found"Under review" in 2023; a PubMed search finds nothing.
5. Market launchLateNot within the project; came almost three years after it closed.

The accuracy evidence is the weakest part of the record. In October 2024 the breastfeeding site Boobingit reported, citing Coroflo, that in vivo testing was due to finish in August 2024 and that independent research groups would run their own studies; it cited no published results. The company website offers a downloadable "Accuracy Statement" and announces a research collaboration with the Lundquist Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, also mentioned by Startups Magazine; no study from that collaboration was found.

The Money Since the Award

Coroflo raised €650,000 by October 2017, including €250,000 from Enterprise Ireland's High Potential Start-Up programme, according to Fora. In February 2024 it raised €2.8 million from investors including Brian Caulfield of Scale Ireland and Shemas Eivers of the Boole Syndicate, bringing total equity to €4.2 million, according to The Irish Times and FemTech Insider. Two months later, at the opening of its new headquarters at DCU Alpha, Enterprise Ireland and The Irish Times described the round as €3 million and the total raised as €6 million. Neither explains the difference. The same reports say the company had doubled its workforce in six months and planned six more hires, and that former Tánaiste Mary Harney had joined the board. Engineers Ireland carried the same figures.

Coroflo does not appear in the EIC Fund's investment portfolio pages that could be retrieved, and its 2019 award was grant only, so no EIC equity was attached to it. CORDIS lists no other EU project for the company. Revenue, losses and headcount from the filed accounts are not public without a paid report.

Why It Matters to Europe

Coroflo's EU report cites data that only 13% of infants in Europe are exclusively breastfed, against a WHO recommendation of exclusive breastfeeding to six months, and names concern about milk supply as a main reason mothers stop. A reliable home measurement could help mothers and clinicians separate real low supply from unfounded worry, which is the public-health case the grant was built on. The report also argues that breast milk avoids the water and packaging footprint of formula. Coro is an Irish-designed consumer health device whose sensor IP, the CORDIS report says, is protected in Europe, the US, China and Japan; where it is manufactured is not stated in the sources reviewed.

The Verdict

This article is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout. Coroflo was not asked for comment.