Dive Brief:
- More women are launching startups and investing in businesses — many of them digital — that are focused on female health, according to a Bloomberg report.
- That makes sense since women are the biggest users of healthcare, and make 80% of healthcare choices for their families, a fact sheet from the Department of Labor shows.
- However, the share of venture capital deals that involve companies with female founders is only at 18%, according to recent data from Pitchbook,
Dive Insight:
Jokingly referred to as bikini medicine, female health ventures are getting more attention from both men and women. For example, venture capital fund Rock Health, which is majority female-run, notes that $29 million a year earlier. All are focused on women’s health.
That’s still a fraction of the $4.5 billion raised for all digital health concerns.
But with their high rate of healthcare utilization, particularly reproductive, care, women see an opportunity to make a difference and grab a larger piece of the pie. “Obviously, women have unique health experiences that men don’t,” Rock Health co-founder and Columbia Business School adjunct professor Halle Tecco told Bloomberg.
Currently, less than 10% of investing partners at the top 100 venture capital firms are women, according to CrunchBase.
Examples of female-led startups include Clue, which tracks a woman’s menstrual and fertility cycles, Celmatix, which helps women improve their odds of conceiving using data analysis and genomics.
Sprout Pharmaceuticals founder Cindy Whitehead, who raised $100 million to get a female libido pill off the ground, then sold the company to Valeant Pharmaceuticals for $1 billion, has launched The Pink Ceiling to advise female-focused companies.