ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Women’s health has been the target of several enormous funding rounds recently. While focused on femtech, these deals are also about the power of technology, subscription-based business models, and new kinds of payors to solve problems in healthcare delivery as a whole.
Women’s health has historically been a backwater of investing, either deemed risky, in terms of surgical and other medical products for the treatment of the reproductive system, or consisting of products for non-reimbursable so-called “quality of life” problems like erratic periods and stress incontinence, with unclear avenues to payment and market. Traditionally considered, the market largely consists of products and services related to problems with periods, infertility, childbirth and its aftermath, leaving many women with other unaddressed health problems.
Hundreds of start-ups have developed one-off products to fill these gaps, but most face the challenge of raising market awareness as small companies offering piecemeal solutions in crowded categories that have unclear payment models.
