Issue 12: Elvie celebrates 10 years | jab-free IVF coming? | $1m boost for at-home pregnancy wearable
Your weekly women's health innovation and FemTech news round-up
Hi! How are you? Welcome to FutureFemHealth, the newsletter that brings you a weekly dose of news and inspiration about innovation in women’s health and FemTech.
I’m Anna and whether you’re a founder, an investor, someone who works in women’s health / FemTech or are simply a fan, I’m glad you’re here to join me.
Coming up in today’s issue we’ve got:
Ten years of the pioneers of women’s health tech, Elvie.
A $1m funding boost for at-home pregnancy monitoring wearable Kali Healthcare.
The biotech that could make IVF jab-free.
And lots more too.
Let’s start with the Elvie story…you might want to grab a coffee for this one 😊
🔥 The ‘Apple’ of women’s health: How Elvie paved the way for innovation in women’s health
The year’s 2013. The term ‘FemTech’ hasn’t even been coined yet.
And founder Tania Boler is pitching her product - a pelvic health trainer and app - to a room full of male investors.
She’s told, sorry, “products for the vagina are just too niche”
Well, the room was wrong.
Over the last ten years, Elvie has grown into one of the most recognisable brands in women’s health tech, with two products named in TIME Magazine’s 100 Best Inventions, sold out launches and multi-million dollar funding rounds.
And if you consider the fact that 60% of FemTech start-ups were founded in the last five years, the fact that Elvie has now been going for ten years (happy birthday Elvie!) is no mean feat.
Along the way, founder Tania Boler has led the way for the FemTech sector we see today: smashing taboos, reimagining the breast pump and pelvic health device categories, and ultimately proving to investors that women’s health products do sell.
Let’s take a look at how Elvie did it…
Like so many FemTech founders, Tania’s driving mission was to design products around the needs of women and to not accept the status quo.
“Most [products] have been made by men,” Tania told Vogue in 2020.
“Many of these men think that all women care about is the superficial. They think tech products have to be pink, or match the colour of our iPhones. Yes, women want things to look stylish, beautiful and aspirational – but they also want the best technology that is on offer.”
Tania’s first product was the Elvie Trainer - a pelvic health device that could be inserted into the vagina complete with workouts on an app and a biofeedback mechanism so you could actually know if your kegels were working.
She spent months researching pelvic floor issues, quit her charity job after successfully getting a government-backed Innovate UK grant for £100,000 and teamed up with entrepreneur Alexander Asseily.
Tania’s partnership with Alexander allowed her to tap into his expertise as a pioneer of wearable technology and he helped her develop the team of engineers that she needed.
With this product, Tania then set out to raise a seed round of $1.4 million in 2013, with no option but to try to convince the predominantly male investors that tech for women’s health would be in demand and a gap in the market.
It was tough.
“We had the door slammed in our face many times, we were told what we were doing was too niche” said Elvie CMO Aoife Nally.
Even eventual investors Octopus Ventures turned them down the first time.
But the Elvie team worked on their product, addressed the feedback they were given and secured the initial funding from Octopus, who have stayed with Elvie as investors throughout their journey.
A record first year for Elvie
The stage was set and within the first six months (in part due to a celebrity endorsement from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website), Elvie pulled in $1 million in sales and reached profitability by the following year.
With success building, Elvie then raised a series A of $6.5 million in 2017.
This new injection of cash allowed it to enter the previously undisrupted breast pump market.
The Elvie Pump was like nothing before it. Cordless, wifi-connected and wearable in your bra. Quiet, comfortable and discreet.
Contrast this to the noisy, cumbersome outdated plug-in breast pumps with wires and cords attached that were currently on the market at the time.
The Elvie was designed with women in mind and gave us back independence and freedom when breast pumping.
And that’s one of the things that I love about FemTech - the attitude of ‘we can do better than this’ when it comes to design that previously hasn’t been built around the user.
Blazing a trail
With both the pelvic trainer and the breast pump, Elvie turned functional into aspirational. When I had a baby in 2020 my group of mum friends wanted to buy an Elvie breast pump.
The packaging was sleek, smooth and had more in common with opening a box fresh iphone. Pumping breast milk didn’t feel so claustrophic anymore when we weren’t tied to a plug socket in order to do it.
Even my techie husband admired the app which told you how much milk you’d collected.
Proving a point
Over the last decade, Elvie has gone on to expand its range, markets and customer base.
In the first launch in the US for example, the breast pump sold out in eight minutes, and left 35,000 women on its waiting list.
Elvie combined excellent products and a brilliant founding team with a recognition of the broader work it had to do to educate, raise awareness and break down taboos.
Today’s FemTech has Elvie to thank for that.
It was one of the early companies to begin educating investors about women’s health innovation - and the potential and profitability.
And it helped to get people talking about the topics we hadn’t done before. At London Fashion Week in 2018 breastfeeding model Valeria Garcia walked down the runway wearing the Elvie breast pump.
Then in 2019 giant inflatable boobs were placed in London’s Shoreditch as part of a #FreeTheFeed campaign to try smash taboos about breastfeeding in public.
Elvie ahead
Covid didn’t slow Elvie down. In 2021 they secured another whopping £58 million in a Series C funding round with Tania Boler announcing that “this places Elvie in pole position to capitalise on the $50 billion femtech opportunity – and that’s only the beginning.”
Elvie now looks set to revolutionise smart tech at every stage of a woman’s life.
But a reminder, that it all started with a clear unwavering mission amidst rejection:
‘There was definitely a generation of older, male venture capital partners who were not going to be early adopters when it came to women’s health – but rather than feeling defeated I just accepted they weren’t the right fit for us.’ (UK Tech)
Congratulations to Elvie for ten years - here’s to ten more!
(PS - Elvie is also our campaign of the week this week, scroll to the bottom of the email for that one).
Now, onto the rest of this week’s newsletter:
🌟 FemTech in the news
Australia’s Kali Healthcare closes $1million for its pregnancy monitoring wearable.
This is a super useful innovation that enables home baby monitoring during pregnancy for regional and at-risk patients or anyone who doesn’t have easy, safe access to clinics. The device can be rented out by clinics. As CEO Dr Emerson Keenan explains: “The ultrasound was introduced in the 60s and it really hasn’t changed much. It straps on the body, you recline in a hospital bed and there’s not really much consideration for the person actually being monitored.”(Smart Company)
Belgian menstrual health startup Guud secures $1.7 million in seed funding.
Guud’s signature product is a line of clean, sustainable supplements. Funding will allow Guud to expand across Europe and increase its support for women with education too. (Forbes)
🩸 Research and women’s health news
The vagina has huge untapped medical potential. Here's how we can take advantage of it.
Dr Michelle Griffin explores how scientists are catching on to the many benefits of the vagina - from being an easy route to deliver medication, to using menstrual blood to detect diseases. The article also spotlights start-up Calla Lilly which is developing a leak-free, mess-free pessary which can then be prescribed as IVF medication or HRT among other uses. (Science Focus)
Celmatix announces breakthrough in oral fertility drug program.
Need IVF but hate injections? The average IVF cycle includes c. 60 injections that can leave you feeling like a bruised pin cushion. Biotech firm Celmatix aims to replace them all with oral pills instead. They’ve just announced that, while it’s early days and pre-clinical trials, they might have figured out how to stimulate the follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) with pills without affecting the very similar thyroid hormone receptor (TSHR) which has previously been the challenge to overcome.(Business Wire)
📌 Govt & policy news
The case for reinvestment in global sexual and reproductive health overseas.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) has released a new report claiming that cuts from the UK Government to overseas sexual and reproductive health have led to devastating consequences. This includes an estimated 4.3 million more unintended pregnancies, 1.4 million more unsafe abortions and a possible 8,000 more avoidable maternal deaths. (Full report: RCOG)
PS - July marks one year since the UK Government’s 10-year health strategy for women’s health was announced. Am hoping we’ll have some solid updates to share here over the coming weeks!
✅ Campaign of the week
This week’s campaign of the week features…Elvie!
Elvie has created another brilliant taboo-busting campaign. This one aims to normalise combination feeding by teaming up with formula company Bobbie to present both Bobbie’s formula and Elvie’s breast pumps within the same retail stand. Tapping into the insight that the usual narrative we hear about baby feeding is that it’s ‘either / or’ breast or formula, Elvie realised that actually 70% of formula feeding parents are combination feeding - but no-one is talking about it. (Business Wire)
That’s all for now. Until next time,
Anna
I had no idea about Elvie’s history as such a pioneer in FemTech! Loved this article!