💌 €800K for female urinal Lapee | US regulator approves AI embryo assessment tool | Menopause misinformation 'harming care'

The global weekly briefing on women's health innovation and FemTech

Sep 03, 2025

Welcome to FutureFemHealth, (w/c Sept 1 2025) — trusted by 8,500 investors, innovators and leaders to decode the funding flows, breakthrough ideas and policy shifts transforming women’s health and the FemTech sector.

Quick note: Thank you to the 100+ of you that have completed the FutureFemHealth reader survey so far - there’s still time this week to add your voice and help shape our future content. Take the 2 min survey to influence our direction. As you’ll see in this week’s issue, I’m already implementing some of your suggestions!!

🌟 In this week’s briefing:

💰 Danish female urinal startup Lapee secures €800K, with backing from the VC arm of alcohol brand Jägermeister.
❤️ Portfolia launches new women’s health fund IV, building on its 46-company women’s health portfolio.
✅ US regulator approves Fairtility’s AI-powered embryo assessment, paving way for more data-backed, transparent IVF.
📌 ’Menopause’ hormone tests are worthless, warn experts.

But first…

Beyond the gap - how FemTech can plug into broader ecosystems

Last week at TechBBQ in Copenhagen I found myself watching two parallel realities.

One one stage, a standing-room only audience for Anton Osika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable - the fastest growing startup in history reaching $100m in subscription revenue in just eight months.

He is literally mobbed at conferences and has investors queuing up for a piece of what he is building. And in the week since Tech BBQ Lovable has apparently received funding offers at an eyewatering $4bn valuation.

And then on another stage, a femtech panel wrestling with research gaps, whether saying vagina is still too taboo, and how still so many people consider the space to be ‘niche’.

The contrast is absurd: half the population waiting and yet we’re still explaining why it matters.

An ecosystem in its infancy

But here’s the thing: FemTech won’t grow by wallowing in the gap.

On stage on day one I’d heard Ulla Sommerfelt remind us that FemTech is an infant ecosystem. No exited founders sharing wisdom. No established playbook.

And the old adage rings true - you can’t compare your day one to someone else’s day 100.

Lovable may be relatively new (it was founded in 2022), but it is building on a mature tech ecosystem where the success model for SaaS is well established and is now being accelerated by AI with investors ready to sprint because of the patterns they can so easily spot.

Yes we face bias and a lack of understanding. But FemTech as a sector is also still laying the scaffolding.

Time to plug in

And maybe, here’s the opportunity. Rather than build in isolation let’s plug into that broader landscape.

Take research challenges into the AI space, take taboo-busting conversations into the consumer space. And as we report later in this week’s issue, there’s opportunity for capital to flow in from unexpected places too - like alcohol brand Jägermeister’s VC arm backing Danish urinal startup Lapee.

Borrow from what’s already built and the pattern-spotting of other ecosystems.

FemTech is not an old or tired industry. It’s really just getting started. And some of the challenges are simply a symptom of being young. Growing pains, if you will.

So for those building or backing the sector, the opportunity lies in borrowing the best of the established playbooks - while writing the first chapters of FemTech’s own. Because this isn’t a niche. We’re a whole new genre.

💰 Capital flows: where are investors placing bets?

📌 DENMARK: Lapee raises €800K with backing from Jägermeister’s VC arm. Copenhagen startup Lapee - makers of the viral pink urinals for women and gender-diverse people - has secured €800,000 to scale. The round was led by Best Nights VC, the venture arm of alcohol brand Jägermeister. That’s an adjacent but very strategic and fitting backer given Lapee’s growth via music festivals and live events. Six times faster than portable toilets, waterless and recyclable, Lapee already has a 95% user satisfaction rate and growing adoption across Europe. As the founders put it, “we’re breaking taboos by innovating in sanitation… not the typical ingredients for a VC-backed company.” We say: shorter toilet queues? Yes please! (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📌 UK: Salient Bio raises £2.35m to expand women’s health diagnostics. London-based Salient Bio closed this seed round, led by THENA Capital, to scale its SIGNAL platform - a microbiome-based, non-invasive diagnostic tool. While its first product targets inflammatory bowel disease, the bigger play is women’s health, where conditions like endometriosis and PCOS remain chronically under-diagnosed. Investors say the tech could make advanced testing radically more accessible. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📌 US: Portfolia launches women’s health fund IV, building on its 46-company women’s health portfolio. Portfolia is now the leading investor in women’s health in the US with a portfolio that includes Maven and Hera Biotech. It says this new fund will now target three major categories: women-specific conditions; conditions that affect women differently; and conditions that disproportionately affect women. Fertility biotech Gameto is the first to benefit from Fund IV. "At Portfolia, we activate women to invest in the health solutions that will enhance our lives," said Trish Costello, Founder & CEO of Portfolia. "Women's health is compromised daily when investment dollars are not available to fuel new women's health innovations.” (Continue reading: Portfolia)

PS - thank you to one of our survey respondents for the great idea of a mini poll each week. I’ll reveal the results in the next issue!

🌟 Industry moves and strategic shifts

📌 U.S / ISRAEL: Fairtility secures FDA clearance for AI-powered embryo assessment tool. Fairtility’s CHLOE Blast is now the first to gain FDA clearance, and as CEO Eran Eshed frames it “we are moving the industry from subjective and manual assessment to an objective, data-driven and automated one.” Of course, the bigger question is whether this shift can also drive down costs for patients and increase access for patients. Already cleared in Europe in 2022, CHLOE’s U.S approval opens the door to wider adoption across IVF clinics. (Continue reading: FutureFemHealth)

📌 GLOBAL: AOA Dx publishes milestone study on its ovarian cancer test. Diagnostics company AOA Dx has been working on a simple blood test to catch ovarian cancer earlier. It’s now published landmark results to back that up. In collaboration with researchers in the US and UK, the company has shown that its test detects ovarian cancer more accurately than diagnostics that have gone unchanged for the past 30 years. AOA’s test looks for two blood markers and combines that with machine learning to spot patterns humans couldn’t detect. The successful results, say AOA, will now inform the final design of the test, and a shot at a cost-effective diagnostic to change outcomes in a cancer where early detection is everything. (Continue reading: Manchester University)

📌 INDIA: ‘Lose weight’ or ‘get married’ to fix PCOS: Veera Health founders share their journey. When Shobhita Narain was told marriage could “fix” her PCOS, she realised how broken women’s healthcare in India truly was. Together with her sister Shashwata, she turned that frustration into Veera Health, a digital clinic founded in 2020 to tackle hormonal health with science-backed care and supplements. Early investors dismissed women’s health as a “niche” or reduced it to fertility, but Veera proved otherwise - raising $3M in 2021 and emerging as a standout startup in India’s fast-growing femtech market. (Continue reading: Mint)

🩸 Research and women’s health news

📌 UK: Menopause misinformation is harming care, warn experts. Expensive hormone panel tests for menopause, pushed by direct-to-consumer brands as ‘personalization’ are clinically useless, argues the The BMJ. Guidelines from NICE, ACOG and the British Menopause Society all agree: women over 45 should be diagnosed based on symptoms, not unreliable lab numbers. The bigger issue, the authors warn, is a drift away from evidence-based care and towards the commercialization of women’s health. My take? If women were better informed and supported via primary care about how diagnosis works, they’d be less vulnerable to slick marketing and unnecessary tests. (Continue reading: The BMJ)

📄 Policy watch: risks and opportunities

📌 UK: Menopausal women leaving work costs UK £1.5bn a year – Labour has a plan to stop it. Under the Government’s Employment Rights Bill, currently going through its final stages in Parliament, large firms of 250 employees or more will be legally obliged to introduce “menopause action plans” for its female staff from 2027. Smaller firms will be encouraged to introduce these plans but this will be voluntary. The shift will likely prompt more employers to turn to third-party partners and benefits providers for support in implementing. And, as we reported earlier this year, over in the U.S there’s early signs too - with Rhode Island becoming the first state to add new protections for menopause in the workplace. (Continue reading: i news)

📆 Save the date

2025 Tech4Eva Conference: Zurich and online, December 4 2025. Hear from experts and innovators about what it takes to launch a Femtech start-up and connect with 250+ stakeholders to discuss the current & future of technologies for women’s health. 📍Register
Women of Wearables - From Bones to Balance: A Whole-Person Approach to Menopause Solutions: Online, September 18 2025. Hosted in partnership with Journa Health, this free event is your chance to hear from some of the world’s leading experts, discover the latest innovations, and explore holistic tools designed to support a whole-person approach to menopause solutions.📍Register

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.

Anna

Before you go: FutureFemHealth reaches 8,500+ decision-makers and professionals in women’s health each week - from investors and founders to healthcare leaders and corporates. To explore partnership opportunities or request our media pack contact: anna@futurefemhealth.com