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...
- Highlights: Femtech Acquisitions in Europe & Hormone Health
- A Win for Sex and Gender Reporting in Research
- Startup Spotlight: Modern Age, Khyria & VSpot
- And more!
Highlights: What Got Us Talking Last Week
➡️ Femtech Acquisitions in Europe
It's been quite a week when it comes to women's health startup acquisitions in Europe: UK-based virtual fertility clinic Apricityacquired Spain-based fertility & menstruation tracking app and community platform WOOM, UK-based women's health startup Parla got acquired by health and wellness retailer Holland & Barrett. And the week before UK-based reproductive health platform company Hertilityacquired Netherlands-based hormone testing startup Grip. Lots of acquisition news in such a short period of time!
Our take: Given the overall fundraising climate and first anecdotal reports of femtech startups struggling to close their follow-on rounds we might be seeing more acquisitions over the next months (and years).
➡️ Hormone Health Startups
Two hormone health startups had fundraising news to share last week. Hormona announced a pre-seed £1.2M round and participation in Techstars L.A.'s accelerator program while Berlin-based hardware startup inne, known for its mini lab, added $10M in funding after struggling to make it through the pandemic due to supply chain issues as founder Eirini Rapti shared in an interview with TechCrunch. Other startups in this space we're watching right now include Feminade, Wile, and Eli as well as Hertility of course who we mentioned earlier.
A Win for Sex and Gender Reporting in Research
In case you missed it in last week's Thursday newsletter... Nature shared some BIG news, that could potentially be a game changer for gender equity in health research: Going forward the renowned publication will prompt authors to provide details on how sex and gender are considered in study design.
"Some journals have encouraged reporting of sex and gender analyses for years, and the number of research studies that include such data has increased substantially in the past decade. But gaps remain — especially insufficient reporting of data disaggregated by sex and gender.
To remedy this, from now on, researchers who submit papers to a subset of Nature Portfolio journals will be prompted to state whether and how sex and gender were considered in their study design, or to indicate that no sex and gender analyses were carried out, and clarify why. They should note in the title and/or abstract if findings apply to only one sex or gender."
Startup Spotlight
Wanna know which startups get us excited these days? Below are a few of our recent (femtech-healthtech-ish) discoveries. This week we want to share some companies we've seen that make us go "Oh. Well that's interesting!" 👀
Ivy Natal helps women who cannot have children except through the use of donor eggs to have genetic children for the first time, using a process which starts with a simple skin biopsy.
Modern Age is a health & wellness platform focused on aging that integrates skin, hair, bone & hormone health.
VSpot is a women health agency focusing on the sexual health of women by offering non-surgical sexual-enhancing treatments.
Khyria is creating a new evidence-based menopause program that integrates data from wearables to support women during the transition.
