Healthy Pleasure Group (HPG), the global outfit dedicated solely to Sexual Health and Technology has announced the launch of Amboy Street Ventures (ASV), a capital fund focused on Sexual Health (for all genders) and women’s health technology startups. ASV also announced its first two investments in Dame Products, a leading female-focus ed sexual wellness brand and Gennev, the digital health platform for women going through menopause.
Amboy Street Ventures is named after the first ever US birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in NYC, which was opened in 1916 when prescribing and distributing information about birth control and contraception was illegal. This clinic marked a pivotal progression in the women’s health and sexual health space. A century later, this space is still vastly underdeveloped and Amboy Street Ventures is dedicated to supporting the vital innovation that will meet the women’s health and sexual health needs of today’s society.
Amboy Street Ventures seeks to cover all investment areas in the Sexual and Women’s Health industry across medtech, femtech, sextech, healthtech, telehealth and wellness. Focused is on Seed and Series A investments in America and Europe.
Dame and Gennev, along with other businesses in Amboy Street Ventures’ portfolio, benefit from the support of the broader HPG ecosystem. Having identified the pain points in growing a successful company in this stigmatized market, HPG CEO, Dominnique Karetsos and her leading Urologist Co-Founder, Dr Maria Peraza Godoy, have created an ecosystem of businesses dedicated to solving these issues.
ASV’s three Principals Carli Sapir, Dominnique Karetsos, and Dr. Maria Peraza Godoy are responsible for leading change in their respective fields. Together, they bring over 50 years of investment, commercial and medical experience to the Fund.
The HPG ecosystem is powered by five businesses that provide resources to support growth of the companies in the ASV portfolio: Healthy Pleasure Lab, the global commercial innovation Lab dedicated to developing the next generation of Sexual Health & Technology products; Healthy Pleasure Agency, a full service marketing agency committed to supporting and scaling brands across four continents; Healthy Pleasure Demand, the commercial multi-channel distribution business; HPG’s School, the education platform driving education about erotic intelligence; and now, Amboy Street Ventures, the world’s first venture capital fund dedicated to the industry.
Carli Sapir, founding partner of Amboy Street Ventures comments, “We believe billion dollar companies will emerge in order to bridge the gap between the underserved Sexual and Women’s Health Tech space and the needs of today’s society. We are female investors who are living through the issues facing women. We know the potential to help drive the market and make genuine change happen.”
Dominnique Karetsos, a principal of Amboy Street Ventures and CEO of HPG, who drives the Group’s commercial portfolio across 40 countries, adds, “From family planning to porn and the lack of anything in between, for too long our industry has been underserved. Amboy Street Ventures strives for consistency in education, innovation and investment in the often overlooked Sexual and Women’s Health Tech space. Our agenda is to bring about behavioral change and ultimately affect social change globally.”
