Why femtech startups still face huge challenges

I spent part of this week at Wired Health – which (again) was an excellent showcase of new digital health ideas, with wearables and consumer devices ever-present throughout the show.

One of the most interesting tracks was a panel featuring long-time connected health CEO Tania Boler of Elvie, Valentina Milanova of London-based gynae start-up Daye, and Eileen Burbidge of Fertifa.

The panel focused on the challenges of creating wearables and connected health services for women in the face of huge “data gaps,” and a dearth of clinical studies in the women’s health space – despite women making up 51% of the population.

Wareable

While we have seen an uptick in wearables and femtech this year, Milanova (above) said that her biggest fear was still the scarcity of funding for female research projects:

“There’s a valley of innovation death in gynecological health, so even if you have good ideas and get funding for them, a lot of great ideas die along the way.

“That’s my biggest fear about the femtech space, because most of the female founders I know are working under extreme scarcity because the funding isn’t available, and that will have an impact on the quality of the products,” she said.

Women's health tracking is still 'taboo'

Tania Boler also pointed to the “taboo and lack of education” around femtech, which largely tackles women’s sexual and reproductive health.

She explained how the purse strings for grants and funding have historically been held by men at tech companies who “won’t be thinking about women’s health and don’t have that in the front of their mind.”

The panel also discussed how studies are biased towards men due to a lack of females in clinical trials because “females are ‘vessels of life'“, and even biases in using male mice for tests for fear that menstrual cycle changes will “pollute the quality of clinical data,'“ said Milanova.

Wareable says:

We've seen such a range of women-focused features and products in wearables this year, that it's easy to get swept up in what's certainly a long-awaited movement.

We've seen Oura launch a range of female-focused features, and our 24 wearable trends piece also highlighted a move toward menopause tracking.

But the themes of this panel also show the challenge faced by founders in the femtech space, in terms of getting funding, and even tackling the huge dearth of clinical trial data.

That means that femtech products will have to spend more on trials to plug the gap in data – than male-focused products.

This was originally published as part of PULSE by Wareable – our weekly insider's newsletter. Subscribe now to get exclusive content to your inbox.