Dublin’s Coroflo makes history with four awards at CES 2026

As Irish breastfeeding monitor start-up Coroflo breaks records at the world’s leading consumer electronics show CES, we speak to co-founder Rosanne Longmore.

As we chatted to Rosanne Longmore yesterday evening in San Francisco, the Dublin start-up she co-founded, Coroflo, had just raised its awards haul at CES to four, with the announcement that they had been chosen as a Techlicious Editor’s Choice awardee, one of just 30 from a field of more than 4,000.

It is the first time in history that a product has scooped four of the awards at one show, the CES organisers told Longmore. Coroflo had already won the CNET Best of CES 2026 – Parent Tech award, the Best of ShowStoppers – Gadgety award, and the Tech Podcasts Network Best of CES award, for its breastfeeding monitor, Coro. CES is the largest consumer electronics show in the world, so the start-up is hoping the recognition will kick-start its next big fundraising round.

Coroflo’s flagship product – Coro – is a standard silicone nipple shield containing a patented microflow metre that allows mothers to keep track of exactly how much breastmilk their baby is consuming. Information is collected by Coro while the baby is breastfeeding, and this real-time data is sent to a smartphone app created by Coroflo.

An Enterprise Ireland high-potential start-up, Coroflo’s backers include Brian Caulfield of Scale Ireland, Shemas Eivers of the Boole Syndicate and several private investors who had backed the company’s seed round.

Founded back in 2017 by Longmore, Jamie Travers and Helen Barry, it’s been a long and sometimes tough road for this start-up, which has a product with such complex manufacturing that it needs new regulatory approval every time Coroflo changes even the smallest component.

“When you’re developing a complex hardware product like ours, every time something had to be changed, all of the regulatory testing has to be re-completed,” says Longmore. “It’s a very long road to market when you’re creating something that is going into a baby’s mouth at the end of the day.”

It is just one of the big challenges that faced the start-up, says Longmore.

“First was could anyone in the world get the tech to work? The shield, and the flow metre within a standard silicone shield was always the known solution. The silicone nipple shield being as thin as a contact lens and already available on the market, fitting the technology into something that was highly accessible and highly tolerable was difficult. It took us six years to get the flow metre to a level of accuracy that was considered world first.

“And then the second thing was the manufacturing at scale,” she says. “Coro was an extremely complex product to manufacture, as you can imagine – getting all those tiny components into a fully flexible nipple shield, the precision engineering, the material science, and obviously the regulatory rigour around that is kind of sacrosanct.”

Now its product, Coro, is in final testing with women around this island, and is about to launch in pharmacies in Ireland in March, in the UK in May and the US in September.

And all this without any venture capital investment, it should be said. Funding from the European Innovation Council through its Horizon 2020 programme and a group of loyal private investors and angels have supported Coroflo along that nine-year journey, as well as Enterprise Ireland, whose praises Longmore sings when we speak.

Bridging the gap

“Without our private investors, without Enterprise Ireland and the European Commission, we’d never have gotten this far,” says Longmore who adds that all the venture capitalists they met wanted to wait until they had a product on the shelves.

“So without supports like that, for companies like ours that are solving real-world problems that can’t get to market straight away, Enterprise Ireland and the EU are really bridging a gap there. And I don’t think they get the credit for it.”

In a world where we are creating a lot of tech for tech’s sake, and where AI products of every shape or size are somewhat sucking the oxygen out of the investor market, Longmore is clearly extremely proud of the real-world problem Coroflo is tackling, and of the recognition it has received in the US.

“One of the main reasons women stop breastfeeding is they don’t know the volume, they don’t know if their baby’s getting enough milk,” she says. “If we can give them this peace of mind and this data, will it help them breastfeed for longer, and what does that look like for global health population outcomes?

“And we’re very clear in our messaging, this product is not for every mother. If a mother is breastfeeding naturally and her baby’s gaining weight, she does not need Coro,” says Longmore. “You never want to introduce a barrier where it’s not required. But for a woman who’s about to stop breastfeeding because she’s so uncertain, that’s where we come in as a secondary as a tool in her toolkit. And that’s why we stayed so aligned to the medical professionals. Doctors nurses, lactation consultants all love that.”

Longmore points to to cultural difference in the US, where women go back to work so quickly after childbirth. “It’s a different use case,” says Longmore. “They love Coro. They can kind of maximise the breast milk their baby’s getting in the morning and evening, and know exactly how much they need to pump.”

And Longmore is delighted with the reception in the US “when they see that we’re trying to make an impact in health and make lives easier for mothers – with extremely accurate data”.

“No guesswork.”

She says it is rare that the judges at CES see something truly novel, so they were very taken with this nuanced and sophisticated health tech, and she and her team were thrilled with the reception they received. It was the first time Longmore had brought her relatively new marketing team to a large event in the US – the whole Coroflo team back in Dublin numbers 12 these days – so winning four awards was quite the boost.

“The judges very, very rarely see anything truly novel, I would say. So it was amazing to get the four top awards, and there was five of us here in the US. The team was amazing.

“Up until 18 months ago, it was just the engineering team and me, I was the only non-scientist or engineer,” says Longmore who says she’s particularly delighted for the engineers back at home. “I’m out every day at the coalface listening to the positivity every day with Coro, whereas for them getting the awards is really exciting. Many of them are young, coming to us straight from their PhDs, wanting to work on something exciting. So the recognition in awards season is great.”

It has been a long road but as Coroflo prepares to bring their product to market, the awards could not be more timely. “We’re there now. It’s just taken longer than we hoped. But we never pivoted, we knew breastmilk volume has been the Holy Grail in medical science for women. No one in the world has achieved that until us, and we got there,” says Longmore.

It should be added that Ireland’s Peri, co-founded by Heidi Davis and Donal O’Gorman, also scooped a major award at CES 2026, winning the CNET Best in Wellness award. Already last year Peri, a wearable perimenopausal health tracker, had been named as a CES Innovation Awards honouree – given to consumer technology products with “outstanding design and engineering”.

That means of the 22 awardees from a field of 4,100, two Irish women co-founded start-ups won possibly the most prestigious of all the CES 2026 awards, the CNET award. Quite the showing.

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