Hello and welcome to FutureFemHealth Pro - our deeper analysis on the women’s health market.

As always, free subscribers receive a preview of this week’s analysis. Upgrade below to read the full article.

A mammogram is designed to look for breast cancer. But could the same image also tell a woman something about her risk of developing ovarian cancer?

That’s the premise behind ProvanAI, a new US startup developing AI technology to predict a woman’s five-year ovarian cancer risk from a mammogram.

The company, which has recently raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding, comes from Washington University School of Medicine professors Joy Jiang and Graham Colditz. Their previous startup, Prognosia, developed AI to predict five-year breast cancer risk from mammograms before being acquired last year by South Korea-based Lunit.

Now they’re asking what else the image could tell us.

Their hypothesis is that breast tissue reflects years of exposure to factors including reproductive history, hormones, obesity and lifestyle, many of which also influence ovarian cancer risk. ProvanAI is collecting external data to validate its technology and plans to pursue FDA clearance, so this remains a technology in development rather than an ovarian cancer screening test available today.

But what particularly caught my attention was how Jiang and Colditz described the bigger opportunity. They want to move thinking about mammography beyond breasts that need imaging towards what Colditz called a “whole woman visit.”

And they’re not alone.

In this piece, we’ll explore why companies are looking for new health information in clinical tests and samples that already exist - and why AI could make it easier to reach patients, build distribution and even find a route to reimbursement.

Read more

US period care brand Viv has raised $2 million in its first priced funding round to support its nationwide retail expansion and launch a new patented tampon technology.

The financing brings the Gen Z-founded company’s total funding to $3.3 million and will support the rollout of 11 products across all 526 Whole Foods Market stores in the US. It will also fund the launch of Cottonlock, a new tampon design developed to prevent cotton fibres being left behind in the body after removal.

The round was backed by Launchpad Venture Group, SSB Next Chapter Holdings, Westchester Angels and Creator Venture Fund, alongside a group of consumer-sector executives and founders, including Bombas co-founder Andrew Heath and Youth to the People co-founder Joe Cloyes.

“Discovering the difference between a tampon with a protective veil and without was eye-opening, and we knew we had to act fast to bring a new product with this technology to market,” said co-founder and CEO Katie Diasti.

Building differentiation in period care

Cottonlock uses a patented protective veil around the tampon designed to prevent fibres remaining in the vagina following insertion and removal.

Viv says the technology is intended to address an issue that can persist with organic cotton tampons. The company cites research in which 30% of surveyed gynaecologists reported detecting traces of fibres in tampon users, while 83% believed repeated exposure could potentially disrupt the vaginal microbiome.

The tampons are made from GOTS-certified organic cotton and are chlorine-free, with no viscose or synthetic veil. The applicator is also made without BPA or phthalates.

The launch comes amid growing scrutiny of the materials used in menstrual products. For Viv, Cottonlock represents an attempt to move the organic tampon proposition beyond ingredients alone, using proprietary technology to differentiate its products.

The new funding will combine that product launch with a significant retail push, adding Cottonlock tampons alongside plant-based pads and liners to Viv’s nationwide Whole Foods range.

There’s clearly a backlog of funding announcements held over from the quieter summer months, because this week’s issue is jam-packed with capital flowing into women’s health - from a major consumer health round in India to inhaled IVF drugs and a mainstream bank launching its own dedicated women’s health fund.

🌟 In this week’s briefing:

• 🏆 Mainstream Norwegian bank DNB launches a dedicated women’s health fund

• 🩸 A €15m bet on spotting pregnancy complications in the first trimester

• 💨 Could IVF injections become inhalers?

• 🧬 CAR-T’s autoimmune push hits a safety setback

Share your news: anna@futurefemhealth.com

💰 Capital flows

📌 NORWAY: DNB launches dedicated women’s health fund. Women’s health is moving further into mainstream investment, with Norwegian banking giant DNB launching a fund dedicated to the market. Portfolio manager Anesa Mulabecirovic Sahnoun will lead the fund and says she wants to demonstrate that money can be made from women’s health and that improving women’s health benefits society more broadly. (Continue reading: Dagens Næringsliv)

📌 INDIA: Nua brings in around $14m in fresh capital as part of $50m Series C transaction. What started as a period care brand has grown into a broader women’s wellness business spanning maternity, skincare and intimate care, alongside digital products including a period tracker - and now reaches more than three million women and girls each month. The deal combines around $14m of fresh capital with a much larger secondary component providing partial exits for earlier investors, taking the total transaction to $50m. Peak XV Partners and Filter Capital led the round. (Continue reading: AfriWallStreet)

📌 SPAIN: iPremom raises €15m seed for earlier detection of pregnancy complications. What if the risk of conditions such as preeclampsia could be identified in the first trimester, giving clinicians more time to intervene? That’s the premise behind iPremom’s MaiRa platform, which uses a blood test to look for early molecular signals of pregnancy complications. Its €15m seed will support clinical validation and commercial rollout, led by Amadeus Capital Partners. (Continue reading: EU-Startups)

📌 AUSTRALIA: GonGlobal secures A$1.2m to explore an alternative to IVF injections - inhaled medicines. So much IVF innovation focuses on diagnostics, embryo selection and clinic efficiency, but this idea will strike a chord with anyone who has actually gone through the experience. GonGlobal’s OVULAIR aims to deliver fertility medicines through a nebuliser instead of repeated injections, using inhalation technology licensed from RMIT University. The company has secured A$1.2m from RMIT, Innovation Victoria and a private investor to advance the technology. (Continue reading: RMIT)

📌 JAPAN: SiccaNova raises ¥1.25bn (c.US$8.1m) Series A for a potential Sjögren’s treatment. Another example of women’s health investment that doesn’t necessarily carry the label: more than 90% of people with Sjögren’s syndrome are women, according to investor MPower Partners, whose WPower Fund backed the round specifically for its potential to address women’s unmet health needs. SiccaNova is developing an oral small-molecule treatment for severe dry mouth associated with the autoimmune condition, with the funding supporting development towards the clinic. (Continue reading: PR Times)

📌 ITALY: Tensive secures up to €20m for breast reconstruction technology. Breast cancer innovation doesn’t end with treatment. Tensive is developing REGENERA, a bioresorbable scaffold designed to support breast reconstruction following lumpectomy, and has secured a convertible venture-debt facility of up to €20m from the European Investment Bank. The funding will support clinical development, CE marking, manufacturing and eventual commercialisation. (Continue reading: Tensive)

📌 DENMARK: Mensis secures DKK 760,000 to develop continuous hormone monitoring biosensor. Another contender in the race to move hormone testing beyond occasional blood-test snapshots. Danish startup Mensis is developing a wearable biosensor designed to collect hormonal data continuously and has secured DKK 760,000 (around US$120,000) from Innovation Fund Denmark’s Innofounder programme, giving its co-founders funding to work full-time on the technology for the next year. (Continue reading: Mensis)

📌 CANADA/US: The Fertility Partners sells US clinic to IVI RMA to double down on Canada. Fertility clinic consolidation continues, but this deal sees one major network narrowing its geographic focus while another expands. Canada’s largest fertility clinic group TFP has sold Illume Fertility, which operates across Connecticut and New York, to global reproductive medicine group IVI RMA. TFP says the sale will allow it to focus its capital and growth plans on building its Canadian network, while Illume becomes part of IVI RMA’s expanding US footprint. (Continue reading: The Fertility Partners)

🌟 Industry moves and strategic shifts

📌 US: MiSalud takes employer women’s health benefits to an often-overlooked workforce. The employer women’s health boom has often focused on professional workforces with comprehensive insurance. MiSalud Health is taking a different route with a bilingual programme for frontline and Spanish-speaking workers spanning reproductive health through to menopause. Crucially, part-time and seasonal employees can access it regardless of insurance status - widening the employer women’s health model to workers often missed by more premium digital health providers. (Continue reading: MiSalud Health)

📌 GLOBAL: Safety concerns hit two major CAR-T programmes targeting autoimmune disease. The idea of using CAR-T to effectively “reset” the immune system has become one of the more closely watched new approaches to severe autoimmune disease. So simultaneous setbacks at two major programmes is significant. Novartis has paused some trials following three patient deaths from severe immune reactions, while Bristol Myers Squibb has separately halted enrolment in autoimmune studies while it reviews inflammatory events. The affected programmes span lupus, lupus nephritis, systemic sclerosis, myositis, Sjögren’s disease and multiple sclerosis - several diseases that disproportionately affect women. (Continue reading: BioPharma Dive)

📌 ISRAEL/EUROPE: Pulsenmore completes European registration for at-home IVF ultrasound. Another part of fertility treatment could be moving out of the clinic and into the home. Pulsenmore can now market its FC ultrasound system in Europe, allowing women undergoing IVF or fertility preservation to perform their own scans at home to monitor follicle development and endometrial thickness, with images shared with their care team. It marks the company’s first expansion beyond prenatal care into fertility. (Continue reading: Pulsenmore)

📌 EUROPE: Women’s health organisations join forces for a new Europe-wide innovation forum. Europe’s women’s health ecosystem remains fragmented across countries, but efforts to connect it are becoming more formal. The first Women’s Health Europe Forum will take place in Paris this November, led by Femtech France alongside organisations from Portugal, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and more. Startups, researchers, institutions and industry will come together, with corporate-backed innovation challenges from Garmin Health and PiLeJe running alongside the event. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

🩸 Research and women’s health news

📌 AUSTRALIA/US/ITALY: Cancer cell therapy technology is being explored for endometriosis. A new research collaboration will test whether a type of cell therapy being developed to target cancer cells could also have potential in endometriosis. Cartherics and the Zucker Institute will explore the approach across several diseases including triple-negative breast cancer and endometriosis - an early example of advanced therapeutic technology crossing over into a disease still badly in need of new treatment options. (Continue reading: Cartherics)

📌 US: One in three young women has never been screened for cervical cancer. Despite decades of progress in cervical cancer prevention, a new JAMA Network study points to a worrying shift in screening: one in three young women has never been screened, with the proportion reporting no previous screening rising substantially between 2005 and 2023. This is the type of stat that reminds us that developing better tests is only part of the challenge - getting women to use them is another. (Continue reading: Inside Precision Medicine)

📄 Policy watch: risks and opportunities

📌 AUSTRALIA: Work begins on the country’s first national perimenopause and menopause clinical guidelines. Backed by A$2.9m over three years, the “living” guidance will be led by the Australian Living Evidence Collaboration at Monash University and updated as evidence evolves. The move could improve consistency in clinical practice and prescribing, while building on Australia’s Medicare-supported menopause assessments and subsidised treatments to embed menopause care more firmly within mainstream health infrastructure. (Continue reading: Australian Government)

📌 GLOBAL: Menstruation and menopause get their first international workplace standard. Workplace support for menstrual and menopausal health is moving beyond individual employer policies and national guidance. New ISO 45010 gives organisations an international framework for developing policies and practices around both - creating common infrastructure that employers, consultants and benefits providers can now build against. (Continue reading: ISO)

📆 Save the date

📌 Women’s Health Horizons London Autumn Summit: London, September 22. Join more than 400 leaders at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to explore how ambition in women’s health can be turned into meaningful, system-wide progress. 🎟️ Secure your ticket

📌 10 Years of FemTech: A Fireside Chat with Ida Tin: virtual, September 17. Ten years after Ida Tin coined the term FemTech, she will join FemTech Focus founder Dr Brittany Barreto to discuss where the category began, how it has evolved and what its next decade should look like. Includes a live audience Q&A too! 🎟️ Register here.

That’s all for this week! If you’ve missed any previous briefings catch them all at futurefemhealth.com and do make sure to follow us on LinkedIn and you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn.

Anna

A new European forum bringing together startups, researchers, institutions and industry players working across women’s health will launch in Paris this November.

The inaugural Women’s Health Europe Forum will take place on 27 November 2026, with 200 attendees expected in person and more than 200 joining online. More than 50 one-to-one meetings are also planned to connect organisations and support partnerships across the European ecosystem.

Led by Femtech France, the Forum is being organised in partnership with other European collectives working in women’s health innovation, including FemTech Portugal, FemTech Spain, FemTech Germany, FemTech NL, Tech4Fem and also the global collective FemTech Across Borders. Its ambition is to strengthen links between national ecosystems and increase the sector’s weight in European economic and political discussions.

Delphine Moulu, Managing Director of Femtech France, said: “Innovation in women’s health is emerging as one of the most dynamic sectors of digital health in Europe, driven by startups that invent concrete solutions for millions of women every day.

“France has built one of the richest Femtech ecosystems in Europe, and it is this expertise that we want to put to work for a broader movement. With the Women’s Health Europe Forum, we want to give this sector the place it deserves in the European economic and political debate, and create a space where national ecosystems can finally exchange, strengthen one another, and carry collective weight across the continent.”

Corporate support for innovation challenges

The first edition of the forum is being supported by Besins Healthcare, BNP Paribas, Garmin Health, Organon and PiLeJe, with two innovation challenges running alongside the Forum.

The Perimenopause & Menopause Challenge, run with PiLeJe, is seeking solutions to help healthcare professionals better identify and monitor vulnerabilities associated with perimenopause and menopause. The Women’s Health Wearables Challenge, with Garmin Health, is inviting startups, researchers and companies to develop women’s health solutions using data from Garmin’s connected ecosystem. Applications close on 18 October, with winners announced at the Forum.

The launch comes amid wider efforts to build more formal infrastructure around women’s health innovation in Europe. Last year, FemTech France partnered with the Paris Region to establish Femtech Île-de-France, which launched with an initial €5 million and a goal of raising at least €35 million more to invest in startups across endometriosis, fertility, menopause and women’s cardiovascular health.

Founded in 2022, Femtech France now represents more than 110 startups and says it is increasingly working with counterpart organisations across Europe.

Pre-registration for the Forum is now open, with ticket sales and the first speaker announcements expected in the coming weeks.

If the volume of news landing in my inbox is anything to go by, the summer slowdown is officially over. This week brings fresh capital, clinical milestones and potentially significant changes in how women are diagnosed and treated.

🌟 In this week’s briefing:

• 🫀 New heart attack definition could improve diagnosis for women

• 💰 Up to $35m for preeclampsia and eclampsia discovery

• 💊 FDA approves first targeted oral treatment for dermatomyositis

• 📊 What 2,000 pitch decks tell us about women’s health investing

Share your news: anna@futurefemhealth.com

This week’s issue is powered by Women’s Health Horizons:

Join the global women’s health ecosystem this autumn in London and Washington, D.C., bringing together the people shaping the future of women’s health.

Explore the summits →

💰 Capital flows

📌 US: Profound gets $35m funding from Gates Foundation for preeclampsia. An initial $20m, with up to a further $15m tied to milestones, will fund the search for new biomarkers and drug targets for two of pregnancy’s most serious complications - preeclampsia and eclampsia. ProFound was created by Flagship Pioneering, the venture-creation firm behind companies including Moderna. (Continue reading: BioXconomy)

📌 US: Materna Medical completes oversubscribed Series B3 ahead of Ellora launch. Preventing birth injury as it happens is beginning to attract fresh capital. Materna announced a $5m first close in June and has now completed its round as it prepares for the anticipated launch of Ellora, its device designed to reduce pelvic floor muscle injury during vaginal delivery. Portfolia and Dalton Investments joined returning investor. (Continue reading: Materna Medical via LinkedIn)

📌 UK: PeriPear secures £1.2 million for wearable designed to reduce perineal tearing. Up to 90% of first-time mothers experience some degree of tearing during vaginal birth, yet relatively little innovation has focused on preventing it. PeriPear is developing a wearable that applies gentle pressure and warmth to the perineum, with the aim of reducing tearing and episiotomy. Its combination of pre-seed equity and grant funding will support product development, clinical trials and regulatory work. The equity round was led by HERmesa and included backing from more than 50 female investors and women-led funds. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📌 SWITZERLAND: KOVE Medical raises CHF1.6 million (c. $1.97m USD) to reduce pregnancy complications following fetal surgery. Women undergoing fetal surgery face an increased risk of their waters breaking early and giving birth prematurely. This can happen because instruments must pass through the uterine wall and amniotic sac, leaving an opening through which amniotic fluid can leak. University of Zurich spinout KOVE Medical is developing an implant designed to close and stabilise that opening after surgery, with this angel funding taking the technology towards first-in-human studies. (Continue reading: VentureLab)

📌 US: ProvanAI raises $1.2m to predict ovarian cancer risk from mammograms. This WashU Medicine spinout is developing AI that analyses mammogram images to estimate a woman’s five-year risk of ovarian cancer, potentially turning an existing breast screening touchpoint into a broader source of women’s health data. The pre-seed was backed by BioGenerator and Missouri Technology Corporation, with funding supporting external validation and the path towards FDA clearance. (Continue reading: St Louis)

📌 US: Capital F closes $17 million debut fund targeting the “female economy”. This new pool of capital is explicitly looking for opportunities in markets where women drive demand. Founded by former retail executives Dawn Dobras and Margaret Coblentz, Capital F will invest at pre-seed and seed across women’s health, digital commerce and AI, writing cheques of between $250,000 and $1m. It has already backed 13 companies, including familiar names such as Hey Jane and period-tracking app Stardust, while women account for almost 80% of its LPs. (Continue reading: Tech Crunch)

🌟 Industry moves and strategic shifts

📌 GLOBAL: Flo Health hires IPO-experienced CMO as it enters its next phase of growth. Women’s health unicorn Flo has appointed Rina Hahn, who helped scale remittance business Remitly through its IPO, as Chief Marketing Officer. Flo’s CEO told FutureFemHealth that Hahn’s combination of “proven scale experience plus category sensitivity” was a “big part” of the rationale for her appointment, while adding that it is “not announcing any specific IPO or public listing plans at this time”. The hire adds another executive with public-market experience to Flo’s leadership team as the company prepares for further international expansion. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📌 US: Amara Therapeutics completes recruitment of nearly 600 women into major overactive bladder trial. Behavioral therapies are recommended early for overactive bladder, but many women struggle to access specialist support or follow a programme consistently. Amara’s US trial will test whether RiSolve - an eight-week app-based treatment combining bladder training, pelvic floor exercises and cognitive behavioral therapy - can improve symptoms and quality of life compared with standard behavioral education. Following 596 women for up to 12 months, it should offer meaningful evidence on whether digital treatment can make this care more accessible without compromising its effectiveness. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📌 US: Phira emerges from stealth with earring wearable designed to track hormone patterns. The race to continuously track women’s hormones has another contender - and another take on what “continuous hormone monitoring” actually means. Rather than measuring hormones directly, Phira uses thermoregulatory signals from behind the ear to infer patterns associated with estrogen, LH and progesterone. Founded by UC Berkeley-trained wearable sensing researcher Dr Alisha Menon, its work has received support from the National Science Foundation and research programmes at Rice and Baylor. A larger study is now underway ahead of a planned 2027 launch. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

🩸 Research and women’s health news

📌 GLOBAL: New heart attack definition could improve diagnosis for women. One of the biggest changes to heart attack diagnosis in decades could have a major impact on women. This new guidance agreed by four of the world’s leading cardiovascular organisations gives greater recognition to less familiar forms of heart attack that disproportionately affect women. It also recommends sex-specific thresholds for troponin, the blood test widely used to diagnose a heart attack, after the previous universal threshold was found to miss some women. (Continue reading: The Guardian)

📌 US: FDA approves first oral treatment specifically indicated for dermatomyositis. Around 70% of people with dermatomyositis are women, and this rare autoimmune disease causes the immune system to attack the muscles and skin, leading to progressive muscle weakness and painful rashes. Lisraya (brepocitinib), developed by Priovant and Roivant, is the first targeted oral treatment approved specifically for the condition. Trial results showed improvements in muscle and skin symptoms, alongside reduced reliance on corticosteroids. (Continue reading: MedPage Today)

💡 Perspectives

📌 GLOBAL: What 2,000 pitch decks tell us about women’s health investing. After five years reviewing more than 2,000 healthtech opportunities, Cross-Border Impact Ventures is seeing the women’s health pipeline broaden and mature. In this interview with FutureFemHealth, Managing Partner Annie Thériault shares what is changing in the companies coming through, where the funding gaps remain and why the next phase of the market could bring more consolidation and exits. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📌 GLOBAL: What has Women’s Health Horizons learned from bringing together more than 2,500 people across the sector? A year after we first spoke to founder Jason Clark, we caught up again about what WHH has learned from its global events, why fragmentation remains a challenge for women’s health and its plans to connect the sector beyond individual summits. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📄 Policy watch: risks and opportunities

📌 UK: Government begins search for England’s next Women’s Health Ambassador. The Department of Health and Social Care is recruiting a successor to Professor Dame Lesley Regan, who became England’s first Women’s Health Ambassador in 2022. The role was created to provide national leadership on women’s health, raise its profile across the health system and help drive delivery of the Women’s Health Strategy. It will be worth watching not only who takes over, but what mandate and priorities the next ambassador is given as the government determines the next phase of its women’s health agenda. (Continue reading: Gov.UK)

📆 Save the date

📌 Women’s Health Horizons London Autumn Summit: London, September 22. Join more than 400 leaders at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to explore how ambition in women’s health can be turned into meaningful, system-wide progress. 🎟️ Secure your ticket

📌 10 Years of FemTech: A Fireside Chat with Ida Tin: virtual, September 17. Ten years after Ida Tin coined the term FemTech, she will join FemTech Focus founder Dr Brittany Barreto to discuss where the category began, how it has evolved and what its next decade should look like. Includes a live audience Q&A too! 🎟️ Register here.

That’s all for this week! If you’ve missed any previous briefings catch them all at futurefemhealth.com and do make sure to follow us on LinkedIn and you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn.

Anna

A US startup with backing from the National Science Foundation and research programmes at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine has emerged from stealth with an earring-based wearable designed to track changing hormone patterns.

Phira was founded by Dr Alisha Menon, a wearable sensing researcher with a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley who previously worked on sensing technologies at Apple and CTRL-labs, later acquired by Meta.

Its small device sits behind the ear and continuously collects physiological data. Rather than directly measuring hormone concentrations in blood, urine or interstitial fluid, Phira uses thermoregulatory signals to identify patterns associated with estrogen, luteinising hormone (LH) and progesterone across the menstrual cycle.

For Dr Alisha, the idea grew partly out of frustration with existing cycle trackers.

“My cycle never behaved the way my trackers said it should. I needed to know what was actually happening inside my body, not just what averages said to expect,” she said.

“The way women understand our health has always been limited by snapshots and assumptions, leaving a gap between what our bodies are doing and the decisions we make every day.”

How does Phira work?

Phira’s approach builds on research linking reproductive hormones with thermoregulation. The company says the posterior ear gives it access to physiological signals more closely coupled to core body temperature than those collected at extremities such as the wrist or finger.

It has now released results on its website from an IRB-approved pilot study involving 12 women across 31 menstrual cycles. Participants wore the device continuously, with the study using daily urine-based hormone testing alongside a clinically validated sleep wearable and ovulation-confirmation app for comparison.

Phira says thermal biomarkers detected behind the ear showed patterns consistent with established estrogen, LH and progesterone dynamics across the cycle. The hormone-tracking results have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed paper.

Separately, a foundational study characterising the physiological signals collected by the earring-back wearable was peer-reviewed and presented at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference in July.

A larger study is now underway to test the approach across a broader population, including women with PCOS and women in perimenopause.

Measurement or inference?

The launch comes amid a wider discussion over what should count as continuous hormone monitoring - and, in particular, the difference between directly measuring hormones and inferring their movements from other physiological signals.

That distinction came into focus earlier this year around Clair Health, which raised $11.6 million for its wearable technology. Clair also uses physiological signals and machine learning rather than directly sampling hormones, and describes its approach as “continuous hormonal inference”. The company has argued that the important question is not whether a technology directly measures a hormone, but how well its inference is validated and whether the resulting information is useful.

As we explored in our FutureFemHealth Pro analysis, companies in this emerging market are taking markedly different routes, from direct biochemical sensing in biofluids to technologies attempting to derive information about hormone dynamics from other physiological signals.

Phira falls into the latter group. Its bet is that the combination of continuous sensing, the posterior-ear location and sufficiently high-resolution physiological data can provide a useful window into hormone dynamics without directly measuring the hormones themselves.

The company plans to launch commercially in 2027 and has opened a waitlist for early access.

You might also like to read:

Flo Health has hired a Chief Marketing Officer with IPO experience as the women’s health unicorn enters its next phase of growth - adding to a leadership team with experience of scaling and operating public companies.

Flo told FutureFemHealth that the “proven scale experience plus category sensitivity” Rina Hahn brings from previous company Remitly was a “big part” of the rationale for her appointment, while saying it was “not announcing any specific IPO or public listing plans at this time.”

Rina joins as Flo broadens its product offering across more stages of women’s health, including perimenopause, and plans a number of expansion initiatives for the second half of 2026 and beyond.

She will be based in Flo’s London office and lead marketing disciplines including brand, social, influencer, paid media, user acquisition and communications, with a particular focus on reaching the 40+ demographic.

Rina spent several years at digital financial services company Remitly, joining as Director of Digital Marketing before becoming Vice President of Growth and later CMO. During her time there, she helped build and lead a 150-person global marketing organisation as the business scaled through its 2021 Nasdaq IPO.

Flo drew a direct comparison between the two businesses in announcing the hire, noting that Remitly was of a similar size and scale to Flo when Hahn joined. Remitly has since grown to more than $2 billion in annual revenue.

Asked whether Hahn’s experience scaling Remitly through its IPO was specifically relevant to the appointment, Flo pointed to the combination of skills that experience demonstrates.

“Building and scaling a Global marketing organization, as well as leading a company through an IPO, requires a rare combination of skills. It takes operational rigor, brand building, thoughtful leadership, and careful handling of sensitive subject matter,” Flo’s CEO Dmitry Gurski shared, via email.

“These are qualities we have been looking for in the right CMO hire - a role we took a lot of time and diligence to find. They are also exactly the muscles Flo needs as we expand our product experience across more stages of women’s health, and grow our Global footprint.”

“That combination - proven scale experience plus category sensitivity - was a big part of why we brought Rina on board.”

Building for Flo’s next phase

The appointment comes two years after Flo raised more than $200 million from General Atlantic in a deal that valued the business above $1 billion, making it the first European femtech unicorn.

Flo now reports 80 million monthly active users worldwide. Its latest growth push includes extending the app beyond its roots in period and cycle tracking across a wider span of women’s health, with perimenopause becoming a particular area of focus.

CEO Dmitry Gurski described Hahn in the appointment announcement as “precisely the person we need for this role and our next phase”, pointing to both her quantitative approach and experience building a trusted brand in a sensitive category.

Hahn is also not the only senior addition in recent years with experience of large and public companies. Former Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg joined Flo’s board in January 2025, having also previously served on the boards of public companies including Uber and Universal Music Group.

Asked whether building out a leadership team with public-company experience signals how Flo is thinking about a future listing, the company said it had no plans to announce.

“We’re not announcing any specific IPO or public listing plans at this time. Rina’s appointment reflects the continued evolution of Flo’s leadership team as we scale the business and expand our impact in women’s health,” Dmitry Gurski said.

“Our focus remains on executing our growth strategy, continuing to innovate for our users, and strengthening Flo’s position as a global leader in women’s health.”

Hello and welcome to FutureFemHealth Pro - our deeper analysis on the women’s health market.

As always, free subscribers receive a preview of this week’s analysis. Upgrade below to read the full article.

Earlier today, we published news that UK-based Peripear has announced £1.2 million in equity and grant funding for its wearable designed to reduce perineal tearing during vaginal birth.

Just days earlier, US-based Materna Medical completed its oversubscribed final close of its Series B3, following a $5 million first close this summer. It is preparing to commercialise Ellora, a device designed to reduce pelvic floor muscle injury during vaginal delivery.

Now, two rounds don’t make an investment trend. But, they do put fresh capital in less than a year behind the same idea: rather than only treating the pelvic floor problems that can follow childbirth, can we prevent more of the injury as it happens?

The market need is shocking - and substantial. Up to 90% of first-time mothers experience a tear during a vaginal birth and it is slightly less common for anyone who has had a vaginal birth before.

While most tears are minor, more serious injuries can contribute to incontinence, pain, sexual dysfunction and prolapse long after the delivery room.

And the evidence is getting stronger. The newly published CHAPTER study, covering more than 2.2 million women, found childbirth-related perineal trauma was associated with higher risks of anxiety, depression, urinary incontinence, pain, sexual dysfunction and prolapse. For some outcomes, the increased risk persisted beyond five years after birth.

So can this much unmet need translate into an investable market?

In this week’s FutureFemHealth Pro analysis:

• Why evidence for prevention hasn’t yet translated into routine care

• The companies trying to turn that gap into a market

• What the economics and reimbursement challenge looks like

• Whether this could become a broader opportunity in maternity care

Read more

Oxford-based birthtech startup Peripear has raised £1.2m across an oversubscribed pre-seed round and grant funding from Innovate UK, as it prepares to take its birth injury prevention device into first-in-human trials in Singapore.

Peripear is developing a wearable device designed to help prevent tearing during vaginal birth. The device applies a warm compress to the perineum - the area between the vaginal opening and anus - during the pushing stage of labour, automating an intervention that currently has to be delivered manually by a midwife or clinician.

Peripear was co-founded by former NHS midwife Nina van Schaick, who spent 14 years working in maternity care, and healthtech founder Eviatar Natan. The idea grew out of Nina’s experience of seeing the impact of perineal injuries in clinical practice.

“Peripear is the answer to years of professional frustration for me as a midwife on the frontlines of birth,” she said.

“We have had compelling clinical evidence for use of warm compresses on the perineum during second stage of labour reducing tearing, pain and episiotomy rates, but are still expecting midwives and clinicians to improvise to apply this in practice.”

The oversubscribed pre-seed round was led by HERmesa, with participation from Zinc, SyndicateRoom Access - a data-driven super angel fund, AtVenture, Sie Ventures, Mint, InvestinWomen and Femtech Lab in partnership with Joanne Invests - marking the first investment from the latter’s new syndicate. More than 90% of its existing investors also backed the round, alongside angel investors Andrea Sinclair and Lavender Ventures’ Gail Armstrong.

“Peripear is building something that truly must exist. Founders with conviction, a product that addresses a real and meaningful need, and consistent, disciplined progress that compounds over time,” said Gail Armstrong.

A common birth injury

Up to nine in 10 first-time mothers who give birth vaginally experience a tear, graze or episiotomy, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. It is slightly less common for anyone who has had a vaginal birth before. Most tears are minor, but around 6% of first-time mothers experience a deeper third- or fourth-degree tear involving the anal sphincter.

While many women recover well, more serious perineal injuries can have longer-term consequences including persistent pain, urinary or bowel problems and pain during sex. Peripear’s focus is on prevention - making an existing evidence-based intervention easier to deliver consistently at the point when injury occurs.

While warm compresses are already recommended as one way of reducing the severity of tearing, they currently rely on a midwife or clinician manually holding a warm pad or gauze against the perineum as the baby is born. In busy maternity settings, delivery can depend on staffing, timing and whether a clinician has the time and hands available. Peripear is designed to automate that process.

“Clinicians do not have anything to offer currently beyond the reassurance that they will do their best with their experience, or use an episiotomy [a controlled cutting technique] to prevent a severe tear,” explained Nina.

“That’s cold comfort if it’s your perineum they are talking about or your episiotomy scar that interrupts pleasure for you for the rest of your life!”

Singapore and US first on route to market

With the fresh funding, Peripear is targeting its first human trial in Singapore in the second half of 2027, working with the National University Health System. It plans to pursue Singapore and the US ahead of wider NHS adoption, where Nina says the route from testing a new device to getting it into routine use can take longer.

“We didn’t choose international first because we don’t believe in the NHS, quite the opposite,” she said.

“But the honest answer is that speed to patients has driven our sequencing, not preference.”

Peripear is now pursuing funding for large scale UK trials to support adoption in the NHS working with Warwick Clinical Trials Unit and other NHS partners. The startup is also continuing R&D work with UK manufacturers while building the foundations for clinical pilots in Singapore and the US.

Irish women’s health company Amara Therapeutics has completed recruitment of 596 women into a US randomized controlled trial of its digital treatment for overactive bladder.

The APPROVE trial is testing RiSolve, Amara’s prescription app-based treatment, against standard behavioral education in women with overactive bladder (OAB). RiSolve delivers an eight-week treatment programme through a smartphone app, with clinicians able to follow patients’ progress through an online portal. The study is sponsored by MedStar Health Research Institute and has recruited participants across multiple US sites.

The scale makes it a substantial clinical test for a women’s health digital therapeutic. Rather than looking simply at whether women use or engage with the technology, researchers will assess whether RiSolve meaningfully improves symptoms and quality of life.

“The scale and rigor of APPROVE are particularly important to us,” said Brendan Staunton, CEO and co-founder of Amara Therapeutics.

“We want RiSolve to be supported by high-quality clinical evidence and to demonstrate not simply whether women use a digital treatment, but whether it meaningfully improves their symptoms and quality of life.”

Principal investigator Alexis Dieter, MD, said rigorous research was important in assessing approaches that could make behavioral treatment more accessible to women with OAB.

“Overactive bladder can have a profound impact on quality of life,” she said.

Designed for adherance

OAB causes urinary urgency and frequency, waking during the night to urinate and, for some women, urgency urinary incontinence. Behavioral therapies such as bladder training and pelvic floor exercises are recommended early in treatment, but accessing and sticking to them can be difficult.

Through the app, RiSolve combines bladder training, urge suppression and pelvic floor training with cognitive behavioral therapy, bladder health education and other interventions. Patients can log symptoms and bladder data as they work through the programme, while healthcare providers can follow their progress through a web-based dashboard.

Women in the APPROVE trial were randomized to either RiSolve or standard behavioral education. Its main measure is whether symptoms improve after eight weeks, with researchers also looking at quality of life, urinary frequency, nocturia, incontinence, treatment satisfaction, adherence and safety.

Participants will then be followed at six and 12 months to see whether any improvements last and whether they go on to use other OAB treatments.

With recruitment now complete, Amara said the focus will move to completing the eight-week primary endpoint follow-up and analysing the results.

You might also like to read:

Cross-Border Impact Ventures has spent the past five years looking at more than 2,000 healthtech investment opportunities.

What it is seeing now looks quite different from what was landing in its inbox when it raised its first fund, which had its first close back in 2021.

The Toronto-based impact VC firm announced earlier this month that it has secured a $58 million first close for its second Women’s and Children’s Health Technology Fund, towards a target of $125 million.

Returning institutional investors include KfW, on behalf of Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Skoll Foundation, Ceniarth and Equality Fund, while CBIV says a number of existing investors have increased their commitments.

But the five years between its first and second funds also provide an interesting window into how the women’s health investment market is developing - both in the companies coming through and the capital available to support them.

When managing partner Annie Thériault first began developing the idea for CBIV in 2018, women’s health was only just beginning to be talked about as an investment opportunity.

“There were fewer allocators or funds focused on as not as much in women’s health,” she tells FutureFemHealth.

“There were a lot of efforts around climate, but healthcare was sort of funded by that diverse founder initiative because a lot of women, a lot of diverse people, are creating companies that address these gaps.”

CBIV eventually closed its first $90.3 million fund in 20231, targeting companies that were commercially ready or approaching commercialisation.

At the time, that meant much of the investable pipeline sat in diagnostics, medical devices, software and healthcare delivery.

Five years later, the pipeline has become considerably deeper within these sectors and across new types of technologies as well.

From femtech to deep tech

“A lot of that pipeline that was early in the first fund is now ready for investment,” says Annie.

“What we’re seeing is a lot more deeper technology opportunities for Fund II.”

Drug discovery is one obvious difference.

“In Fund I we weren’t seeing drug discovery platforms focused on gender as one of the criteria, or racial equity, and really focused on healthcare areas that are disproportionately relevant to women and children, whereas now we’re seeing a lot more of that.”

That is taking CBIV into areas that might not once have appeared in a conventional definition of femtech.

Annie points to autoimmune disease, central nervous system disorders, mental health and cardiovascular disease as areas where the firm is now seeing more companies considering sex and gender differences within the science itself.

And the pitch decks look different too.

“If I look at the pitch decks I was receiving five, six years ago, often you would still see the image of the man holding his chest,” she says of cardiovascular companies.

“We know that women don’t suffer heart disease in the same way, and now we’re seeing more and more pitch decks that will show areas of cardiovascular health that are still relevant to men... but when you start digging deeper into the technology, there’s been more effort to ensure that the problem that’s addressed often is disproportionately the type of heart disease that women suffer from, and the clinical studies were developed with women’s needs in mind as well.”

Microbiome is another area where CBIV is seeing more activity, spanning the vaginal and gut microbiomes and their potential applications in areas including fertility.

“We’re seeing a lot more teams come to market with strong clinical backgrounds and interest to use these types of science to address the healthcare of women and children,” says Annie.

It is a picture of a women’s health market extending well beyond the categories that defined much of the first femtech wave.

The companies may be maturing faster than the capital

The funding environment, however, presents a more complicated picture. Annie says it is easier today to make the investment case for women’s health than it was when she started building CBIV.

“Six, seven years ago when I started to work on this, I had to really work hard to pull data together to prove our point,” she says.

“You had to do all your original research by yourself to find this data to show, ‘Hey, this disease is prevalent and women should want a better treatment.’”

Research from organisations including the World Economic Forum, McKinsey and Women’s Health Access Matters, alongside a growing body of market data, has changed those conversations.

“There’s a lot more rich data showing that you can make a lot of money in this sector,” says Annie.

CBIV is also seeing evidence in M&A.

“We continually see M&A transactions that are relevant to the types of things that we do at high multiples of invested capital.”

Yet capital has not necessarily followed at the same pace.

“There are still very few funds out there like Cross-Border that are deeply ingrained in the sector,” she says.

Traditional institutional investors can remain difficult to bring into specialist women’s health funds.

“Some of the more traditional institutions are still kind of younger in the process.”

There are signs of movement. Annie points to wealth managers and investment advisers beginning to pay closer attention to the category, helped in part by the transfer of wealth to women and younger generations.

“We see groups like UBS or Morgan Stanley holding sessions about women’s health to their women asset owners,” she says.

“These are some of the more credible managers of wealth in the world, some of the larger ones, and they’re showing up more and more.”

The funding gap doesn’t stop at Series A

Much has been written about the difficulty women’s health companies face moving from seed funding into a Series A.

Annie thinks the problem is broader.

“I think the drop-off is a little bit longer than seed to Series A,” she says.

Seed-stage companies can often find investors, even if they don’t always raise the amount of capital they would ideally want.

The lack of investors able and willing to lead larger healthcare rounds becomes more apparent as companies progress.

“If I had a dollar for every email I get from a great founder with something interesting saying, ‘I’ve got all these followers ready to jump in, but I don’t have a lead’…”

CBIV can underwrite deals across medical devices, diagnostics, AI and machine learning and other deeper technologies, but its funds can only make a limited number of investments.

“We’re one of the few firms that can underwrite deals in women’s health across the spectrum,” says Annie. “Yet many, many companies have a hard time finding an investor that’s able to do this.”

The problem can continue into Series B and beyond.

“One of the factors that we’re seeing from A to B is the B investors seem to be moving the bar a little - to want more progress before they step in than they did even five, six years ago.”

What Annie does emphasise here though, is that this isn’t necessarily unique to women’s health. Venture investors across healthcare have become more demanding about the milestones companies reach before their next round. It’s simply more painful in women’s health because there are fewer doors one can knock on.

But in a sector that still receives a small proportion of overall venture funding, Annie’s point is that the consequences can be more pronounced.

What actually makes something a women’s health investment?

As the pipeline expands into cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease and other conditions affecting both sexes, defining what counts as women’s health becomes more complicated.

CBIV for example, looks beyond whether a product is exclusively designed for women, and we discuss cardiovascular disease as an example.

“At CBIV we look at specifically what they’re working on and is there a difference in prevalence for women and men,” says Annie.

“If it’s more prevalent for women, that would be a checkbox. Or maybe it’s more deadly for women. Sometimes it’s the same prevalence, or maybe women have the disease less, but they have more severe outcomes because the current technology wasn’t developed for women.”

The firm’s diligence then goes into the product itself and the evidence supporting it.

“Was this tested on a sufficient enough number of women that we feel confident that the tech works equally for men and women?”

Annie recalls investing in Cardiosense, which has developed a non-invasive cardiac monitoring technology worn on the chest.

“One of the questions we asked the founders is - do the breasts have an impact on your device?” she says.

“I bet you anything that any of our male industry colleagues wouldn’t have thought to ask whether the boobs mattered.”

And in autoimmune disease, for example, women account for a substantial proportion of patients, yet Annie points out that historically even preclinical research could favour male animals because female hormonal cycles introduced additional variables.

If those differences aren’t considered in preclinical research and clinical trials, the question becomes a fairly fundamental one.

“Does it actually work on females? Does it work on menopausal females? Does it work at all points of the cycle?”

For CBIV, prevalence and disease severity therefore sit alongside clinical trial and product design when determining whether an opportunity belongs within its investment thesis.

Who buys the next generation of women’s health companies?

There has also been movement at the other end of the funding cycle.

CBIV has already had one significant exit from Fund I. AI-powered fetal ultrasound company Sonio was acquired by Samsung Medison in 2024, just four years after it was founded.

Annie thinks the next stage of the market could involve more consolidation before companies reach acquirers of Samsung’s scale.

“It’s still the truth that it’s hard to scale up single-device companies,” she says. “They belong better in a larger portfolio.”

A Medtronic-sized company already has the sales infrastructure, regulatory expertise and customer relationships needed to take a technology into many more markets.

But there remain relatively few sizeable acquirers specifically focused on women’s or children’s health.

“I do think we need to see a few smaller, medium-sized acquisition platforms come to market to create entities that are large enough to be more attractive to some of the main suspects.”

That could mean existing women’s health platforms beginning to acquire smaller companies, or device businesses combining to create companies with sufficient scale to become acquirers themselves.

“The time appears to be now,” says Annie.

Five years on

Fund I ultimately backed 11 companies across maternal and fetal health, neonatal care, cardiovascular disease, oncology, respiratory health, reproductive health and gut health.

CBIV estimates those companies have now reached more than 379,000 women and children across 32 countries.

Sonio is perhaps the neatest demonstration of what CBIV set out to prove. During CBIV’s investment, the company expanded beyond Europe into the US and had a presence in countries including Brazil, Nigeria and India. Under Samsung’s ownership, its AI technology is now being integrated into the company’s ultrasound systems.

“We were making a great investment in a great deep-tech company addressing big challenges for women and children and able to achieve a very strong return for investors in a short period of time,” says Annie.

At the same time, the technology has the potential to reach considerably more patients through its new owner.

“We want to see Samsung be hugely successful with these new machines because we know the health impact of this software on people, especially when you have predicted staffing shortages over the coming years.”

Five years after CBIV closed its first fund, the investment case for women’s health no longer needs quite as much explaining.

The companies coming through its pipeline are tackling a wider range of conditions with deeper science behind them. Large healthcare companies are providing evidence that women’s health assets can deliver valuable exits. Institutional investors that once paid little attention to the category are beginning to appear in the room.

The question for the next five years is whether enough capital follows these companies as they grow.

Almost a year ago, FutureFemHealth sat down with Women’s Health Horizons (WHH) ahead of its inaugural Boston summit. At the time, Founder and CEO Jason Clark described an ambitious plan to build a global platform focused on moving women’s health beyond repeatedly discussing the same problems and towards action.

A lot has happened since.

WHH has now convened more than 2,500 delegates through events in Boston, Copenhagen, London, New York and Berlin. Its global Advisory Board has grown to more than 50 members, and the organisation is preparing for its busiest period yet, with summits in San Francisco on September 1, London on September 22 and Washington, D.C. on October 7.

It is also expanding beyond events with the launch of WHH PRO, a year-round professional platform bringing together industry intelligence, investors, companies, opportunities and expertise across women’s health.

FutureFemHealth caught up with Jason Clark to discuss what WHH has learned from thousands of conversations across the ecosystem, why he believes fragmentation is becoming one of the sector’s biggest challenges, and what needs to happen next.

Anna: When we spoke last year, WHH was about to hold its first major summit in Boston. What has happened since?

Jason Clark: It has been an extraordinary year.

When we last spoke, a lot of what we were talking about was still an ambition. We believed there was an opportunity to build a genuinely global platform for women’s health, but ultimately we had to go out and prove that people wanted it.

Since then, we have hosted events in Boston, Copenhagen, London, New York, and Berlin and welcomed more than 2,500 delegates. Our Advisory Board has grown to more than 50 people globally, and we’ve had thousands of conversations with founders, investors, clinicians, researchers, policymakers, advocates, healthcare leaders and industry.

We’re now heading into our biggest period yet: San Francisco at UCSF Mission Bay on September 1, London at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) on September 22, and Washington, D.C. on October 7.

I’m incredibly proud of the growth, but the most valuable thing we’ve gained isn’t the number of events or delegates. It’s what we’ve learned from all of those people.

Anna: What has surprised you most?

Jason: How much exists — and how difficult it can still be to find.

When I first entered women’s health, I thought one of the biggest challenges was simply getting more people interested in the sector. I don’t think that’s the whole problem anymore.

There is extraordinary innovation happening. There are specialist investors. There are clinicians with decades of expertise. There are researchers doing remarkable work. Pharma is paying attention. Employers are becoming increasingly engaged. Governments are developing strategies. There is more capital, talent and entrepreneurial energy entering women’s health.

But the market remains incredibly fragmented.

A founder might be looking for an investor with a very specific thesis. An investor might be trying to understand which companies are emerging in a particular category. A researcher might need commercialisation expertise. A startup might need a regulatory specialist. A corporate innovation team might want to understand what is happening in an emerging area of women’s health.

Often, the right person exists. They just haven’t been introduced yet.

After thousands of conversations, that has become one of the clearest opportunities we see. The ingredients for progress increasingly exist; the infrastructure connecting them often does not.

Anna: So has your view of what WHH needs to become changed?

Jason: Absolutely.

We started with a very simple belief that progress comes from connection. I still believe that completely. But we’ve realised that connection needs infrastructure around it.

An event can create an extraordinary moment. You can have a founder meet an investor, a researcher meet an industry partner or a healthcare leader discover a company they didn’t know existed. But then everyone gets on a plane the next morning. The ecosystem doesn’t stop between conferences.

So our thinking has evolved from simply asking, how do we convene this ecosystem? to asking, how do we make the ecosystem easier to navigate every day of the year?

The way I describe our approach now is: listen, convene, learn, build.

And that’s really where WHH PRO has come from.

Anna: Tell us about WHH PRO. Why launch a professional platform now?

Jason: Because the community effectively told us to build it.

WHH PRO wasn’t conceived in isolation. It is the result of thousands of conversations across our events, advisory network and wider community.

We kept encountering the same fragmentation. So we’ve created a year-round professional platform bringing together the people, companies, capital, intelligence and opportunities shaping women’s health.

Members can access curated industry intelligence, investor and company directories, startup discovery, jobs and professional opportunities, projects, advisors and services, events and community features.

It’s intended for the whole professional ecosystem: founders, investors, operators, clinicians, researchers, advisors, service providers and corporate innovation teams.

Our events create high-trust relationships in person. PRO is about creating the infrastructure around those relationships for the other 364 days of the year.

And we’ve priced full membership at €99 per year because accessibility is important to us.

Anna: You’ve also recently reduced ticket prices for WHH events. Why make that decision when the cost of running events is increasing?

Jason: It’s probably one of the decisions I’m proudest of.

Everything involved in producing events seems to be getting more expensive — venues, catering, travel and production. We decided to move our prices in the opposite direction.

If we genuinely believe women’s health progresses by bringing different parts of the ecosystem together, then we cannot build rooms that are accessible only to people working for organisations with large conference budgets.

We need the early-stage founder in the same room as the pharmaceutical executive. We need researchers meeting investors, clinicians meeting technology companies, advocates meeting policymakers and early-career professionals having access to people who have spent decades building this industry.

Being independent gives us the flexibility to make decisions like that. Of course, we need to build a sustainable organisation, but we’re also thinking about the long-term value of the ecosystem we’re creating.

There is something contradictory about trying to address inequity while making participation unnecessarily inaccessible. Access shouldn’t be an afterthought in an ecosystem trying to solve inequity.

Anna: You’re about to host three major summits within a relatively short period. Why San Francisco, London and Washington?

Jason: Because they represent three very different pieces of the same puzzle.

One of the biggest things we’ve learned globally is that women’s health cannot be treated as a single homogeneous market. Different healthcare systems have different barriers. Different markets have different capital environments, regulatory structures and strengths.

So rather than taking exactly the same conference around the world, we’re increasingly asking what question matters in that particular market.

For San Francisco, London and Washington, those questions form a natural progression: How do we build and scale innovation? How do we integrate it into healthcare systems? And how do we create the policy environment that allows it to reach people?

Anna: Let’s start with San Francisco. What’s the question you’re exploring there?

Jason: Our San Francisco Summit at UCSF Mission Bay on September 1 is built around one question:

How do we scale women’s health innovation without scaling inequality?

We’re entering an incredible period technologically. AI, genomics, precision medicine, reproductive medicine, longevity and digital health could fundamentally change women’s healthcare.

San Francisco is one of the best places in the world to have that conversation.

We are expecting more than 400 leaders and 50+ speakers, with people from organisations including UCSF, Google, Kaiser Permanente, Organon, Silicon Valley Bank, American Heart Association Ventures and Portfolia participating.

But I don’t want us simply celebrating innovation. We need to ask the difficult second-order questions.

Can we personalise healthcare without making it unaffordable? Who funds these technologies? How are they clinically validated? How do health systems adopt them? And who ultimately gets access?

We’ve spent years establishing that gaps in women’s health exist. Now we need to think very seriously about what happens when solutions arrive.

Anna: And then London takes a different approach?

Jason: Yes. London asks:

How do we turn women’s health ambition into system-wide progress?

We’re hosting the summit at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists on September 22, bringing together more than 400 leaders and 50+ speakers.

The UK has enormous momentum around women’s health, but the interesting question now is how that ambition translates into healthcare delivery.

We’re looking at access to OBGYN care, delayed diagnosis, commercialisation, investment, intimate data and AI, England’s Women’s Health Strategy, employer health, prevention, pharmaceutical innovation and international models such as the Nordic Women’s Health Charter.

We have people including Dame Lesley Regan, RCOG President Dr Alison Wright, Halle Tecco, Carolyn Harris MP, Priya Oberoi, Dorothy Chou and Dr Angela Spatharou involved, alongside leaders from clinical practice, the NHS, pharma, investment, advocacy and technology.

That mix is intentional.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that the next era of women’s health will not be delivered by startups, government, pharma, clinicians, investors or advocates independently. Progress happens at the intersections between them.

Anna: Washington, D.C. then brings policy into that picture?

Jason: Exactly.

The premise for Washington is very straightforward: we don’t advance women’s health without government, policy and advocacy.

You can develop an extraordinary product, drug, diagnostic or medical device, but scientific innovation alone doesn’t guarantee impact.

Someone has to approve it. Someone has to reimburse it. Health systems have to adopt it. Clinicians need to understand it. And patients have to be able to access it.

So Washington on October 7 is focused on those mechanisms.

We’re looking at reimbursement and market access, FDA approval through to adoption, research inclusion, medical education, employer coverage, state innovation, federal policy and the international consequences of U.S. funding decisions.

We’re bringing together leaders from organisations including the Society for Women’s Health Research (SWHR), March of Dimes, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Medical Association, Organon, Hologic, Northwell Health and NYU Langone Health.

There’s a line that has increasingly shaped how I think about this: a breakthrough that cannot be reimbursed, adopted, taught or accessed is not yet a breakthrough for patients.

Anna: Your Advisory Board has also grown considerably. What role does it play now?

Jason: We now have more than 50 advisors around the world, and that global perspective has become incredibly important.

But I’m less interested in saying, “We have 50 advisors,” than explaining why they exist.

We don’t believe WHH should sit in a room and decide what the women’s health ecosystem needs. We need to listen.

Healthcare systems differ. Markets differ. Patient experiences differ. The challenges facing a founder in London can be completely different from those facing a clinician in California or an advocate in Washington.

Our advisors challenge our assumptions, identify issues we’re overlooking, contribute expertise and help shape our programmes and strategy.

And increasingly, that philosophy extends beyond the Advisory Board. More than 2,500 people have now attended our events, and we’ve spoken with thousands more.

I want WHH to be something that is built with the ecosystem, not simply for it.

Anna: Last year you told FutureFemHealth that WHH was tired of conferences where people discussed the same problems and then reconvened months later to discuss them again. Do you still feel that way?

Jason: Completely. But I would articulate the problem slightly differently today.

I don’t think the answer is that we need fewer conversations. We need better infrastructure around what happens after those conversations.

A conversation should be able to become an investment. An introduction should be able to become a partnership. Research should be able to find a commercial pathway. Expertise should be discoverable by the company that needs it. A promising company should be able to find the right health system, employer or strategic partner.

That is why we are thinking beyond individual events. Events remain incredibly important to us because nothing replaces high-trust human relationships, but around them we are building a global advisory network, WHH PRO, industry intelligence, company and investor discovery, professional opportunities and talent.

Our ambition is not to build another conference company. We want to help build the connective infrastructure of the global women’s health ecosystem.

Anna: Finally, are you optimistic about where women’s health is heading?

Jason: Very. But I think we have to distinguish between momentum and progress.

There is more capital entering women’s health, more innovation, more scientific possibility, more political attention and more corporate interest. Those are all reasons for optimism.

But momentum becomes progress only when something actually changes for women: when research reaches patients, founders find capital, innovation is adopted, policy enables access, expertise reaches the organisations that need it, and conversations turn into collaborations.

A year ago, we said we were tired of repeating the same conversations. After thousands of conversations across the world, I think we’ve learned something important: the challenge isn’t simply starting more conversations. It’s connecting what happens next.

That is the next chapter for Women’s Health Horizons.

Join Women’s Health Horizons

The next chapter of WHH will unfold across three major summits this autumn, bringing together founders, investors, clinicians, researchers, policymakers, healthcare leaders and industry partners working to turn momentum in women’s health into measurable progress.

San Francisco Summit — September 1, 2026
UCSF Mission Bay, San Francisco
Purchase tickets

London Autumn Summit — September 22, 2026
Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), London
Purchase tickets

Washington, D.C. Summit — October 7, 2026
National Union Building, Washington, D.C.
Purchase tickets

Three cities. Three critical conversations. One shared objective: turning the momentum behind women’s health into meaningful, system-wide progress.

This article is part of a paid partnership with WHH.

Private equity money into menstrual health caught my eye this week, backing both a non-hormonal treatment for heavy menstrual bleeding ($30m!!) and also cycle care brand Rael. We’ve also seen Essity spend another $284 million on period care.

🌟 In this week’s briefing:

• 💰 PE-backed Series C reaches $30m for heavy menstrual bleeding

• 📈 TowerBrook invests in cycle care brand Rael

• 🩸 Essity agrees $284m period care acquisition in Brazil

• 🧪 NHS to send HPV home-testing kits to 1.5m women

Share your news: anna@futurefemhealth.com

💰 Capital flows

📌 US: Channel Medsystems reaches US$30 million in ongoing Series C for heavy menstrual bleeding treatment. It’s great to see this level of investment going into an area like heavy menstrual bleeding. Channel Medsystems is using the funding to expand Cerene, its non-hormonal cryotherapy treatment that takes just two-and-a-half minutes and can be performed without general anaesthesia. The company reports 90% of patients have normal, light or no periods afterwards and 86% see reduced cramping. The ongoing Series C is led by healthcare private equity investor InnovaHealth Partners. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📌 US: Private equity firm TowerBrook invests in cycle care brand Rael. A very different menstrual health PE bet to Channel Medsystems above. Founded around organic cotton period products in 2017, Rael now spans intimate care, skincare and hormonal wellness and is sold in more than 40,000 stores across the US and Korea. TowerBrook has invested alongside undisclosed co-investors to support further product and international expansion. No amount or ownership stake was disclosed. (Continue reading: TowerBrook)

📌 BRAZIL: Essity agrees US$284 million acquisition of Kenvue’s period care business. Another sizeable period care deal for Essity, which is buying Carefree, Sempre Livre and o.b. in Brazil - the world’s fourth-largest period and intimate care market. It follows Essity’s US$340 million acquisition of Edgewell’s North American period care business earlier this year, as it continues to consolidate established period care brands in major markets.(Continue reading: Essity)

🌟 Industry moves and strategic shifts

📌 US: Carrot becomes preferred fertility and family care benefit for more than 140,000 employees. Rather than winning employers one by one, Carrot is getting embedded into the benefits infrastructure. Healthcare Management Administrators, which manages health plans for self-funded employers across the Pacific Northwest and Michigan, has selected Carrot as its preferred fertility and family care provider. HMA will replace its existing maternity programme with Carrot’s broader offering spanning fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, adoption, surrogacy and menopause. (Continue reading: Carrot)

📌 US: Oura lawsuit puts wearable health claims under the spotlight. This isn’t specifically about Oura’s women’s health features, but it’s relevant to the growing number of wearables using sensor data to provide women’s health insights. A proposed class action accuses Oura of overstating the accuracy of its sleep tracking, including how its algorithms infer sleep stages from signals collected by the ring. The allegations have not been proven, but the case raises interesting questions for the wider wearable market about the claims made around sensor-derived insights. Oura disputes the allegations. (Continue reading: TechCrunch)

📌 US: Preventive health company Biograph launches dedicated women’s health programme. Another longevity/preventive health platform is building specifically for women. Biograph’s new programme combines reproductive history, hormone testing and menopause care with cardiovascular, metabolic, bone, cognitive and cancer risk assessment. It’s another example of the broader preventive health market recognising that women may need more than a slightly adapted version of care designed around men. (Continue reading: Biograph)

📌 US: Gotham FC adds fertility care to support for players, coaches and staff. Peak career years for female athletes can overlap directly with decisions about fertility and family building. Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York will now provide access to fertility assessments, egg freezing and IVF. It comes just a week after Chelsea FC Women launched a fertility fund for its players — another sign that fertility support is becoming part of how professional football clubs support female athletes.(Continue reading: Gotham FC / Chelsea FC Women)

🩸 Research and women’s health news

📌 UK: NHS England to send HPV home-testing kits to 1.5 million women. A major change to how cervical screening is delivered in England, with self-sampling kits set to be sent to women aged 25–64 who are overdue or have never been screened. Women can collect a vaginal sample at home and return it for HPV testing, moving part of the screening pathway out of clinics in an effort to reach those who aren’t attending appointments. (Continue reading: NHS England)

📌 US: FDA creates first device category for lenses designed to manage migraine-related light sensitivity. Avulux has received De Novo authorization for lenses that filter specific wavelengths of light for people with episodic migraine. Migraine disproportionately affects women, but the particularly interesting part is the regulatory precedent: the FDA decision creates a new device classification and pathway for similar products to follow. (Continue reading: Avulux)

That’s all for this week! If you’ve missed any previous newsletter issues catch them all at futurefemhealth.com and do make sure to follow us on LinkedIn and you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn.

Anna

Hello and welcome to FutureFemHealth Pro - our deeper analysis on the women’s health market.

As always, free subscribers receive a preview of this week’s analysis. Upgrade below to read the full article.

Something has changed in the women’s health reimbursement conversation this year.

Over the past few months, I’ve had a steady stream of founders and others in the ecosystem wanting to talk about why reimbursement is more important than ever. Some have secured reimbursement. Some are trying to work out how to get there. Others are questioning whether existing payment systems can accommodate what they’re building at all.

Reimbursement has always been central to healthcare, of course. But in women’s health, it feels as though the conversation has moved up the priority list in 2026 - and the message is getting through that it must begin much earlier in the company-building journey.

There are plenty of signals. Dedicated Women’s Health Reimbursement Summits in the US led by 51&’s Jodi Neuhauser. A new roadmap from the Milken Institute for women’s health innovators navigating coverage and reimbursement. And from January 2027, new US obstetric codes are due to replace the traditional bundled model, following years of advocacy from ACOG that the old structure no longer reflects how maternity care is delivered.

We can also look at reimbursement more broadly too. While, the mechanics of coding, coverage, payment and health system adoption are very different between the NHS, US insurers and other health systems, there are signs of similar spotlighting of the issue globally. In the UK, a new Parliamentary briefing out this month, for example has asked why more FemTech products are not yet ready for NHS adoption.

So, take away the word reimbursement and the theme underneath this is common wherever you are in the world: what does a product or service have to prove, become or fit into before somebody other than the patient will pay for it?

In this week’s FutureFemHealth Pro I take a look at what is changing - and what should women’s health founders and investors be thinking about now?

Read more

The US Government is asking for feedback on changes to how Medicare pays for healthcare - and women’s health companies are being urged to take part.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published its proposed 2027 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule last month, setting out changes to how physicians and other healthcare professionals could be paid from next year.

The consultation is a routine annual process. But this year it contains some potentially important questions for women’s health.

Alongside specific payment proposals, CMS is seeking feedback on the wider system used to code and value medical services - including whether the current process reflects modern clinical practice.

Jodi Neuhauser, who convened the Women’s Health Reimbursement Summit and who founded 51&, says the immediate opportunity is as much about getting the industry involved in the process as securing any one policy change.

Jodi told FutureFemHealth that established organisations including medical societies have traditionally submitted comments on the annual payment rules, but companies actually building and delivering new models of women’s healthcare have had far less of a collective presence.

“My goal with doing all this work around the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule is literally just to raise awareness,” she said.

“This happens every single year. The people who are submitting comments are the AMA, ACOG, all of the different medical societies and all the different organisations in DC. We as an industry need to understand that this is happening and start to have a voice in it.”

Why does this matter?

The US system relies on codes to describe medical services and procedures so they can be billed.

The American Medical Association maintains the CPT coding system, while an AMA-convened committee known as the RUC makes recommendations about the relative value of physician services. CMS then sets Medicare payment policy, with the system also influencing payment more widely across US healthcare.

The problem is that new types of care do not always fit neatly into that infrastructure.

Work led by Jodi Neuhauser and the Women’s Health Reimbursement Summit has identified more than 50 areas of women’s health that are not adequately represented in the existing coding system, including menopause management, PCOS and infertility counselling.

That matters for patients, clinicians and the companies trying to build businesses around new models of women’s healthcare. If a service cannot easily be described and billed within the existing system, then creating a sustainable route to reimbursement can be considerably harder.

Maternity care offers one example

One major change is already due to take effect next year. From January 2027, new obstetric CPT codes are set to replace the traditional system that bundles much of maternity care together into a single payment.

ACOG, which spent years advocating for the change, argues that the bundled system no longer reflects how maternity care is delivered, including telehealth, home monitoring and additional postpartum support. Under the new structure, prenatal visits, labour and delivery and postpartum care can be billed separately.

There is an interesting example here of how evidence can feed into these decisions. As Geri Stengel recently reported in Forbes, CMS has proposed valuing the new labour and delivery codes 15% higher than the AMA committee recommendation, after updated ACOG guidance provided evidence that one of the assumptions used to calculate their value had changed.

The transition is not completely settled. CMS is also considering alternative Medicare codes that would retain elements of the existing bundled approach, which ACOG opposes.

That makes maternity a useful case study in something that can otherwise sound very technical: how healthcare is coded and valued can affect what providers get paid to do - and potentially which new models of care can fit into the system.

An industry starting to organise

Jodi does not expect one comment period to transform women’s health reimbursement.

But she does want more of the people actually delivering and building women’s healthcare to understand that these decisions are being made - and start showing up when they are.

And she stresses that this is not about generating hundreds of identical responses. As she explained to Geri Stengel, a thousand identical form letters effectively count as one comment. Specific submissions backed by evidence and first-hand experience are much more useful.

That could mean evidence from a clinician about care they cannot adequately bill for, or from a company about where an existing code or payment model does not reflect the care it is delivering.

Comments on the proposed 2027 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule are open until September 14. View the CMS proposal and submit comments.

US women’s health medtech Channel Medsystems has announced it has reached $30m in its ongoing Series C funding as it looks to expand access to its treatment for heavy menstrual bleeding and period pain.

The financing was led by healthcare-focused private equity firm InnovaHealth Partners, which has backed the company since 2021.

Channel Medsystems will use the funding to expand the commercial rollout of Cerene, its non-hormonal endometrial cryotherapy treatment, following the product’s commercial relaunch.

Nelson Whistance, president and chief executive of Channel Medsystems, said the investment reflected growing confidence in the company’s commercial strategy and the market opportunity for Cerene.

“This Series C investment represents increasing investor confidence in our updated commercial strategy and the significant market opportunity that exists for our Cerene platform,” he said.

“We are encouraged by those in the investor community, and IHP in particular, who continue to recognize the significant opportunity in the women’s health sector to improve lives, and drive a significant return for all stakeholders.”

Expanding access to Cerene

Heavy menstrual bleeding can significantly affect quality of life, yet current treatment options can involve long-term medication including hormonal therapies, endometrial ablation or surgery depending on the underlying cause and severity.

Cerene is designed for premenopausal women experiencing heavy menstrual bleeding due to benign causes who have completed childbearing. The treatment uses cryotherapy to treat the lining of the uterus, with the aim of reducing menstrual bleeding and dysmenorrhea.

The incision-free procedure takes around two and a half minutes and can be carried out in an office or outpatient setting without general anaesthesia. According to the Cerene website, clinical outcomes include 90% of patients reporting normal, light, or no periods after Cerene and 86% reporting a reduction in cramping.

Channel Medsystems said the new funding will be used to grow its commercial team, increase awareness among physicians and patients and expand professional education and training. It will also support further clinical evidence generation and market development.

“Channel Medsystems is addressing a significant unmet need in women’s health through innovative technology backed by strong clinical evidence and an experienced leadership team,” said Mortimer “Tim” Berkowitz III, founder and managing partner of InnovaHealth Partners.

“We are excited to support the company’s continued growth and believe Cerene is the most advanced treatment option for women seeking a minimally invasive alternative for heavy menstrual bleeding and pain.”

A varied week this week, with a $275 million bet on an oral osteoporosis treatment, promising data for a new non-hormonal menopause drug, new routes to reimbursed fertility care, and questions over what’s really holding FemTech back from the NHS.

🌟 In this week’s briefing:

• 💊 $275m backs a potential oral alternative to injectable osteoporosis drugs

• 🔥 AbCellera’s menopause drug impresses in Phase II - with analysts modelling $2.3bn peak sales

• 💰 The Pentagon opens a new route to reimbursed fertility preservation

• 🏥 Is getting FemTech into the NHS solely an NHS problem?

Share your news: anna@futurefemhealth.com

💰 Capital flows

📌 ISRAEL: Entera Bio secures US$275 million to advance oral osteoporosis drug for postmenopausal women. Most bone-building osteoporosis drugs are given by injection, but Entera Bio is developing what it hopes will become the first once-daily oral alternative. Its lead candidate, EB613, is heading into Phase III trials in around 750 postmenopausal women, with this new financing expected to fund the programme through a potential FDA application. The oversubscribed private placement was led by existing investor BVF Partners, with participation from RA Capital, Venrock, Perceptive Advisors, Catalio and others. (Continue reading: Entera Bio)

📌 US: ChronicleBio reveals it has raised US$15 million to tackle POTS and other chronic diseases with AI. POTS is a condition that disproportionately affects women and co-founder Fidji Simo, a former OpenAI exec, has herself lived with it for seven years. ChronicleBio is betting that AI could help uncover different biological forms of POTS hidden behind the same diagnosis — and find drugs that work for each. It has already collected more than 3,500 tubes of patient blood and says it has identified five biologically distinct subgroups, with plans to start testing potential existing drugs in patients this year. (Continue reading: Fortune)

📌 US: Coyote Ventures backs Kiara Health to move fertility care upstream of IVF. Most fertility care still starts when someone is already trying to conceive or heading towards treatment. Kiara Health wants to intervene earlier, using AI to combine health history, lifestyle, biomarkers and lab results to help people understand and potentially improve their fertility before reaching expensive treatments such as IVF. Its platform then connects users with diagnostics, coaching, providers and products, with partnerships already including Mira, Levels and Natera. Investor Coyote Ventures sees an opportunity to build a much longer fertility journey spanning pre-IVF through to treatment and, eventually, pregnancy and menopause. No funding amounts disclosed for this pre-seed round. (Continue reading: Coyote Ventures)

ICYMI: I recently explored why the growing opportunity in fertility may be before IVF - exactly the part of the journey Kiara is targeting. (Read: What happens before IVF?)

🌟 Industry moves and strategic shifts

📌 CANADA: AbCellera reports promising Phase 2 results for non-hormonal menopause treatment. The hot flash treatment market is getting, well, hot, with a new challenger to Astellas and Bayer on the horizon. Even AbCellera’s execs seem surprised by how well its antibody treatment performed in Phase 2, with CEO Carl Hansen now calling ABCL635 a “potential best-in-class non-hormonal therapy”. AbCellera’s share price jumped 32% on the results, while analysts have modelled US$2.3 billion in peak sales if successfully developed. (Continue reading: Fierce Biotech)

📌 UK: Is getting FemTech into the NHS solely an NHS problem? We hear a lot about how difficult it is for women’s health innovators to get products adopted by the NHS. But a new UK Parliament briefing puts the spotlight on the other side of the equation, arguing that few FemTech products currently have enough evidence for national evaluation, funding or rollout. There’s an obvious chicken-and-egg problem though when generating that evidence is expensive, particularly for early-stage companies. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📌 US: Midi Health begins expansion beyond midlife into broader women’s healthcare. Midi has previously signalled plans to grow beyond menopause care, and that strategy is now taking shape. After treating more than 450,000 patients, it is expanding into initial areas including PMOS and metabolic health, with more services planned. There’s a fresh new brand too! (Continue reading: Midi Health)

📌 CANADA: GreenShield backs national menopause study as employers rethink hormonal health benefits. Canadian health insurer and benefits provider GreenShield has been building out its hormonal health offering for employers recently, including menopause care. Now it’s helping fund the evidence that could shape what employers cover next. This national Can-RISE study will examine how perimenopause and menopause affect women’s health, finances and working lives, including barriers to accessing care. It comes as menopause is estimated to cost the Canadian economy C$3.5 billion a year, while just 13% of employers are estimated to provide adequate hormonal health support. (Continue reading: Insurance Business Magazine)

📌 IRELAND: University College Cork spins out women’s microbiome company FemmeBiome. After more than two decades of research into the microbiome-gut-brain axis, UCC professor Siobhain O’Mahony is taking that work commercial with a new women’s health company. FemmeBiome is developing microbiome products around hormonal transitions, starting with MoreMe, a synbiotic supplement for perimenopause and menopause that will open for pre-sales in October. The company has received more than €700,000 in Enterprise Ireland grant funding and is now raising a seed round, expected to close by the end of the year. (Continue reading: UCC)

📌 US: OBstat takes temporary OB/GYN staffing model nationwide as maternity care gaps grow. Temporary staffing won’t solve the US maternity care shortage, but it is becoming one way hospitals are adapting to it. After providing more than 150,000 hours of temporary OB/GYN cover through Ob Hospitalist Group over the past two years, OBstat is now opening its service to hospitals nationwide. With more than a third of US counties already lacking a birthing facility or obstetric clinician, the expansion is another sign of how hospitals are adapting to a workforce problem that isn’t going away. (Obstat)

🩸 Research and women’s health news

📌 UK: Largest study to date maps how women’s testosterone levels change with age. Analysis of more than 5,000 women by Hertility found testosterone declines gradually throughout adult life, rather than dropping specifically at menopause, adding to previous research showing the same pattern. What’s new is the scale of the reference group and a year-by-year model of expected testosterone levels, which Hertility says could give clinicians more useful context when interpreting women’s hormone tests than broad age ranges. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📌 CANADA: New C$5 million research network will focus on how women recover after heart attacks and strokes. I always like seeing women’s heart and stroke research come across my desk because there still isn’t enough of it — and this one looks at a particularly overlooked part of the journey: recovery. Women are less likely than men to be referred to and take part in rehabilitation after major cardiovascular events, while recovery programmes often don’t account for factors such as menopause. The new five-year RENEW Network will look at how menopause, hormone changes and hormone therapy affect recovery, alongside mental health and barriers to accessing rehabilitation. (Continue reading: Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada)

📄 Policy watch

📌 US: New maternity payment changes highlight a wider women’s health reimbursement gap. Remember the new maternity billing codes coming in 2027 that will separate prenatal, delivery and postpartum care rather than bundle them together? Medicare has now proposed how it will pay for them, including increasing the value placed on labour and delivery after evidence showed the original assumptions were wrong. But the wider analysis is frustrating: menopause still has no dedicated billing code, meaning complex menopause care is generally paid for like a standard doctor’s visit. It’s another reminder that how women’s healthcare is coded can affect what care gets offered - and whether companies developing new solutions have a clear route to getting paid and building a sustainable business. That matters for investment too. As VC Mark Gannott puts it: “Payment visibility, not disease burden alone, governs investability.” (Continue reading: Forbes)

📌 US: Pentagon to reimburse fertility preservation for some service members. Military personnel facing hazardous deployments or more than six months away from their partners will soon be able to have some of the cost of freezing their eggs or sperm reimbursed by the Department of Defense. The three-year pilot will cover up to $10,000 a year for egg preservation and $500 for sperm, including through civilian fertility clinics. After years of military families largely paying for preservation themselves, it’s another example of fertility preservation moving from an out-of-pocket service towards reimbursed care. (Continue reading: Military Times)

📆 Save the date

Grounded: A meditation for the femtech community. Virtual, TODAY August 19.

The work of improving women’s health is meaningful - but it can also be demanding. Join this hour of guided meditation to pour a little back into yourself. Led by Lisbeth Garassino and Dr Brittany Barreto. No meditation experience needed.

🎟️ Register here

✅ Hiring now

📌 US: Vice President, Commercial Marketing, Midi Health

That’s all for this week! If you’ve missed any previous newsletter issues catch them all at futurefemhealth.com and do make sure to follow us on LinkedIn and you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn.

Anna

A study of 5,323 women has mapped how female testosterone levels change with age, finding that they decline steadily throughout adult life rather than falling sharply around menopause.

The research, led by UK & Ireland women’s health company Hertility and published in the Journal of Endocrinological Investigation, found testosterone declined by about 1.4% a year from a woman’s twenties onwards. The variation in levels between women also widened with age.

The findings add to previous research showing that testosterone declines progressively with age, rather than falling specifically at menopause. What the new study adds is a larger reference group and a model showing how the expected range changes year by year. Hormone test results are typically compared with reference ranges to help clinicians judge whether a result is unusual - but these can use broad age bands and relatively small populations.

“When a woman has a hormone test, she is looking for an answer about her own body,” said Dr Helen O’Neill, Hertility’s chief executive and an associate professor in reproductive and molecular genetics at UCL.

“What she receives is a comparison against an average, and too often an average drawn from a few dozen women, decades ago, grouped into age brackets so broad they are almost meaningless.”

A larger reference group

Researchers initially analysed data from 30,453 women who used Hertility’s at-home hormone testing service in England, Scotland and Wales between 2020 and 2025. They then excluded women with factors known to affect testosterone, including hormonal contraception, reproductive conditions, irregular cycles and BMI outside the study criteria, leaving 5,323 women aged 19 to 59 in the reference group.

That group is larger than those used in previous studies specifically designed to establish female testosterone reference ranges. Hertility argues that modelling levels continuously by age could give clinicians more useful context than broad age categories when interpreting an individual result.

“Precision medicine requires reference data of sufficient scale and rigour that an individual can be interpreted as an individual,” continued Dr O’Neill.

“Better reference ranges will never replace clinical judgement, but they change what clinical judgement has to work with, and set a standard for what should be expected before any hormone result is described as normal or abnormal for a woman.”

The study authors also acknowledge limitations. The women were a self-selected group who had paid for private hormone testing and may therefore differ from the wider population. They said further longitudinal research is needed to understand how testosterone changes within individual women over time.

Hirsutism linked with higher testosterone

The researchers separately analysed 2,338 women who reported hirsutism, or excess hair growth, and found they had higher testosterone levels than the reference group, particularly at younger ages. The finding supports hirsutism as a possible clinical sign of androgen excess that may warrant further investigation.

Hertility is now calling for laboratories and medical bodies to consider more age-specific reference ranges for female hormones. The researchers have published their age-specific testosterone tables alongside the study.

Ask a UK women’s health founder about selling into the NHS and you’ll probably hear a familiar story.

Getting an innovative product adopted can be slow, complicated and fragmented. Companies can find themselves navigating different NHS organisations, commissioning processes and technical requirements, even after they have built something that could potentially improve care.

But a new briefing from the UK Parliament offers a slightly different diagnosis of the problem.

Published last week, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) briefing looks at the evidence behind consumer FemTech, how products are regulated and what is stopping more of them being used by the NHS.

Citing the Government’s renewed Women’s Health Strategy, it says few FemTech products currently have “sufficient maturity of evidence to enable national evaluation, central funding, or supported rollout.”

In other words, while getting into the NHS may be difficult, the Government is also saying that too few products are yet giving it the evidence it needs for the NHS to buy them at scale.

The evidence problem

The briefing acknowledges many of the barriers companies regularly talk about. Developers report difficulties integrating their products with NHS digital systems, for example, while previous government work has acknowledged there is no single streamlined route for assessing digital health technologies and that adoption varies widely across the NHS.

But the report also spends considerable time examining the quality of evidence behind FemTech itself, concluding that high-quality evidence remains limited.

The briefing highlights studies based on self-reported data, populations that may not represent the women who eventually use a product, biased datasets and studies funded or conducted by the companies whose products are being evaluated.

The briefing gives the example of an NHS case study involving a pelvic-floor app, which reported how many times the app had been downloaded but did not report health outcomes.

Evidence isn’t the only concern

Clinical evidence isn’t the only issue the briefing raises. It also points to concerns around privacy, health inequalities and the censorship of women’s health companies online. Some companies shared how terms including “cervix”, “boobs”, “menopause” and “vulva” had resulted in content being restricted or shadow-banned - with some even saying investors subsequently questioned their limited social reach. In other words, the same companies being asked to build stronger evidence and sustainable businesses can also face structural barriers to reaching customers and raising capital.

There is a tension around data too. Women may turn to FemTech to fill gaps left by traditional healthcare, but that can mean sharing highly sensitive health information with commercial platforms. The briefing raises concerns about how that data is used and shared, as well as whether products built using insufficiently diverse datasets could worsen health inequalities. Previous Parliamentary work has even called for the NHS to provide not-for-profit alternatives to commercial FemTech, including period trackers.

But who pays to prove it works?

There is, however, an obvious chicken-and-egg problem since generating robust clinical evidence is expensive. Early-stage companies need capital to run studies, navigate regulation and demonstrate cost effectiveness - often before they have meaningful revenue.

The Parliamentary briefing acknowledges this too, and says that while a substantial proportion of European FemTech companies are based in the UK, stakeholders identified funding, evidence generation and regulation among the challenges facing the sector.

In fact, the briefing estimates that 32% of European FemTech startups are based in the UK and that the country’s 50 largest FemTech companies have raised £478 million between them.

Highlighting the recent growth in the sector, the briefing states that some 87% of all funding has been raised since 2020, while Flo Health alone accounts for 43% of the total. Twenty-three of those 50 companies remain at seed stage.

Is Government starting to tackle the gap?

The renewed Women’s Health Strategy announced a £1.5 million FemTech Healthcare Challenge specifically intended to help developers “generate the evidence needed to spread their products across the NHS.”

That sits alongside broader initiatives including the National HealthTech Access Programme, intended to help technologies become reimbursed and available through the NHS, and Innovator Passports, designed to reduce some of the barriers to adopting technologies that have already proved themselves.

It appears then that government policy is starting to build infrastructure intended to get companies to the point where the NHS can buy it. However, many have questioned whether £1.5 million is remotely enough to address that problem across an entire sector.

Industry stakeholders quoted in the Parliamentary briefing welcomed the funding as a useful signal, while pointing to substantially larger programmes elsewhere, including France.

Hello and welcome to FutureFemHealth Pro - our deeper analysis of the markets, categories and shifts shaping women’s health. Free subscribers receive a preview below. Upgrade to Pro to read the full analysis.

Women’s health companies have a habit of following their customers through life.

Take Flo and Clue, which both started life as period trackers. Years later, as some of their original users reached midlife, both have expanded into perimenopause - following their customers into a new life stage.

Which raises an interesting question about the current wave of menopause companies.

What happens when their customers get older?

Women can spend another 30 or 40 years living after menopause. Their health priorities don’t disappear when hot flashes stop: they broaden into bone and muscle health, cardiovascular and metabolic risk, cognition, sexual and genitourinary health, cancer screening, mobility and maintaining independence.

Yet despite the extraordinary growth of menopause as a women’s health category, there has been remarkably little equivalent company creation specifically around women in their 60s, 70s and beyond.

A few years ago, I started tracking Herself Health, which looked like an early signal of what might come next. The US primary care company launched specifically for women aged 65+, raising $7 million in seed funding and a $26 million Series A, both in 2023.

The backdrop to this was a huge demographic opportunity. There are already 664 million women aged 60+ globally, rising to a projected 1.13 billion by 2050.

Women already account for over half (54%) of the world’s 60+ population - and 62% of those aged 80+.

Except, since 2023, the wave of dedicated 65+ women’s health companies has never really followed.

The clinical need is still there. The demographic opportunity has only grown. So where is the market?

For this week’s FFH Pro, I spoke to Herself Health, midlife care platform Midi Health and a European post-menopause startup Silvie Health.

What they are each doing suggests the 65+ market may be developing quite differently from what we expected.

Read more