It´s time for Femtech innovation and investment to rise

Half of the global population faces similar issues in their lives, but for many reasons(1), these challenges have been often neglected by business innovation (just remember the controversial case of Health Apple’s app, which could track “all of your metrics that you’re most interested in”, but only if ‘you’ were a man). To balance this matter, Femtech has been slowly but surely growing, bringing to women(2) solutions for some of their most private, intimate, and obvious needs.

Femtech stands for technologies, products, and services developed for women concerning healthcare and wellness. The term was coined by Ida Tin, a Danish entrepreneur who founded Clue, in 2012, one of the first fertility and cycle apps. She was having a hard time explaining to investors where her new business fitted in, which ended up leading her to come up with a term that creates a new and stronger category of innovative solutions targeting women’s challenges and needs. From period tracking, birth control, and fertility support, Femtech is going way further, to embrace menopause, sex wellness, pregnancy and post-pregnancy, pelvic health, to name a few other topics.

Some examples of successful startups working in this field:

• Callaly (London, UK): the multiple-award-winning Tampliner, a next-gen tampon designed by the company was recognized as one of the best inventions of 2020 by the Times. It has recently received the approval of the FDA and will start selling in the US this Summer. Today it has been distributed all over Europe.
• Elvie (London, UK): the company started with an award-winning Kegel exercise device and soon grew its offer to a silent breast milk pump, also praised by the critics. Elvie has received more than $52M of investments, one of the largest fundraisings in Femtech to date.
• Emjoy (Barcelona, Spain): a sexual wellbeing audio app for women, that saw paying users to double during the pandemic, and is investing more and more in practices of body exploration and erotic stories to boost women´s pleasure. Emjoy is no more than one year old, yet has raised more than $3.5M in funding.
• Nua (Mumbai, India): supported by a strong community of users and backed by a $4M funding, the company offers, by monthly subscription, customizable packs of sanitary pads according to the personal menstruation flow.

Despite these examples of success, the reality is that most solutions for this large segment remain underdeveloped, considering women´s purchasing power. Only in health, it’s estimated that women expend $500 billion annually, but only 4% of the R&D in this sector is targeted to their health issues. In 2019, the global market of products for female health has achieved around $800 million and estimates foresee a $3 billion market by the end of 2030. With news like the right of free period-products in Scotland, the market can expect more positive actions around the world supporting female goods.

Last year, venture capital (VC) investments in Femtech reached $592 million, with (only) 6 exits. As stated by TechCrunch: “The largest exits in recent years include Progyny’s $130M IPO and Procter & Gamble’s acquisition of This is L. for $100M. Progyny’s stock has roughly doubled in the eight months since it went public.” This amount is still a tiny fraction of the global VC funding, which reached around $300 billion in 2019.

These numbers are changing with the help of new accelerators and programs dedicated to the category that see the great opportunity lying here. In London, Femtech Lab offers a 12-week femtechers-only accelerator program, and in Paris, Station F has created a subscription-based community of Femtech founders, for information exchange and peer support, with a development program integrated. Large corporations have been a great help as well, like AXA, the insurance company, which created one of the first female-focused startup accelerators in collaboration with 50inTech, and in 2020 has selected 10 companies to an 8-months program to support them through the creation and fundraising phases. It is worthy to mention the Cartier Women´s Initiative Award, which since 2006 has been encouraging women entrepreneurs.

If you are still not convinced, here you have the last piece of investment advice: the majority of Femtech companies are female-founded companies, which are known for delivering twice as much per dollar as men-owned ones!

(1) This discussion is out of the scope of this article. We wouldn’t even know where to start…

(2) The words women and female in this article include all hues of the gender spectrum or any person that feels identified with the solutions the Femtech category offers.

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