Every Monday we share a quick “best of” from the week that was with our Inner Circle members. What’s trending in the Femtech Insider community and beyond? We’ve got you covered! In this week's brief we talk about Clue & The State of Femtech in 2022, plus...
- Upcoming Event: Women's Health In the Middle East (with Nabta Health's Sophie Smith)
- A New VC Fund Focused on Telehealth
- Femtech Investment Round-up: January 2022
- Startup Spotlight: An Inclusive Beauty Marketplace, Breast health & The Smell-o-verse 🌟
- And more!
Clue's Evolution & The State of Femtech in 2022
Last week we wrote about Clue. The article was inspired by the company's recent €16M raise fo course and it's evolution from "consumer tech to medical device", but also the state of our inbox and also a particular paragraph in Sifted's coverage of Clue's latest round. And that paragraph was...
"However, the startup hasn’t seen huge growth in comparison to other femtech companies. In the eight years since its founding, Clue has raised €24.7m in funding. Meanwhile Elvie, a company known for its Kegel trainer and silent breast pumps, has raised €134.4m to date."
A few things to unpack here:
- Why are we comparing funding received by a hardware company to that of a software company just because they're both in the "femtech" category?
- Why is "capital raised" used as an indicator for growth in the first place?
We got questions and we also tried to find some answers in this recent opinion piece... 👇
Upcoming Events
THIS WEEK! February 3, 2022, 3pm GMT - Innovating Women's Health in the Middle East: Challenges and Opportunities
Historically, the Middle East, Africa and South Asia have been under-served by the established healthcare ecosystem, with 92% of clinical research and trials occurring in the U.S. and Europe. Nabta Health, a women's health startup, hopes to address some of the systemic gender and racial biases in healthcare by building a new model of healthcare specifically designed to cater for the needs of women in emerging markets.
Use Inner Circle promo code mena during check-out to claim your free ticket.
A VC Fund Focused on Telehealth
It's been a while since we've covered Swiftarc Ventures on Femtech Insider. In fact it was last August, when the team launched a $10M fund"aimed at women-led startups building the future of beauty and wellness".
Swiftarc is now back in our inbox and the news with the launch of a significantly larger $75M fund focused on telehealth, which has been covered by MobiHealthNews, Techcrunch, etc. last week. So what's this new fund all about?
Swiftarc Ventures Founder & Managing Partner Sid Jawahar explains in a statement: "We had not really been participating directly in healthcare deals, which all changed when we saw telehealth becoming the next frontier. That led to a really deep, exhaustive 14-month study of the industry. We really wanted to roll up our sleeves and talk to the folks that had been in it for a long time. There’s a lot of really interesting fragmented activity in telehealth. We looked at 15 health centers, everything from cardiology to neurology to dermatology to see how virtual care would fundamentally augment how healthcare was being performed. And where we landed was on these three use cases we thought were the most efficacious today: mental health, obesity, and pediatrics."
🤔 Our question (and maybe some of you want to weigh in!): Is a telehealth focused fund the right "messaging" as the healthcare space enters the "platform age"? Is focus on "how care is delivered" instead of "what outcomes care achieves" helpful? We've got questions!
And yes. Fully aware that it's not necessarily an "either/or" question, that some of this may very well be "PR speak", and I suppose all we're saying is that the news were grounds for some discussion at Femtech Insider HQ this week and Lisa Suennen's recent-ish post "It Has Technology and Stuff - Are We Done Saying Digital Health Yet" definitely came to mind.
Are we done saying "telehealth" yet? The jury is still out on that one I guess! 🤷♀️
Either way: We'll be watching closely as Swiftarc's new telehealth fund announces its first investments! Pause, a menopause focused skincare startup, received funding from Swiftarc's beauty fund recently, so we're expecting some women's health investments from the new telehealth fund as well. 👀
Femtech Investment Round-up: January 2022
As every month we share an overview of all the fundraising news we covered on Femtech Insider with you, our Inner Circle audience. Check out our January 2022 Femtech Investment Round-uphere or visit our Investment Round-up Archive in the Inner Circle Member Hub.
🌟Some Highlights:
Wellster raises $20M to compete in the pan-European women's health market.
Diana Health launches with $11M in Series A funding to redesign maternity & women's health programs at leading hospitals in the U.S.
Gameto raises $23M to redefine reproductive longevity with reprogrammed ovarian cells.
Startup Spotlight!
Wanna know which startups get us excited these days? Below are a few of our recent (femtech-healthtech-ish) discoveries!
👉 Pothos Beauty, the first fully inclusive beauty retailer, movement & society #anewkindofmarketplace
"Our mission is to change what beauty means and normalize diversity. Pothos Beauty has developed a social-commerce platform that empowers all and delivers beauty’s entire value chain to the consumer, including Brand Affinity Data powered by AI, curated content from top content creators, social engagement tools – all in one marketplace to make shopping for beauty easier and more enjoyable for all."
More to watch: Quite a few similarities with marketplaces like LatinX or Thirteen Lune. 👀
👉 My Lumps, a digital breast self-examination tracking tool #earlydetectionftw
"My Lumps provides a tool for women to annotate, log and track their breast self-exams and establish a baseline of what their breast normally feel like. It also create a simple repeatable process for conducting breast self-examinations by providing a visual representation of the breast, which allows users to map where they feel lumps and annotate descriptive information about those lumps"
👉 OVR Technology offers cartridge-based VR headset attachments#scentgoesvr
"OVR combines the benefits of mindfulness, meditation, breathwork, nature, and aroma-based interventions into a single experience harnessing the power of the limbic system."
Know of a company that should be on our radar? Let us know!
Tweet of the Week!
And that's a wrap for today! 'Till next week! 👋
