At the start of each week 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...
- Spotlight: Mental Health Tech
- Virtual Panel: Marketing & Advocating for Femtech Brands in Times of Ad Bans & Stigmatization
- Startup Spotlight: Hormonella, FemXX Health & BabyFORTE
- And more!
Innovation in Women's Mental Health
Earlier this week Five Lives, a European digital health startup working on a digital therapeutic in the dementia prevention space, raised €3.7M in funding to invest in clinical validation and growth. The reason we covered this on Femtech Insider: On a global level women with dementia outnumber men 2 to 1, and brain scans have shown that brain cells are dying faster in the women’s than men’s brains.
Dementia is an example of a disease that although not just a women's health issue, affects women disproportionally and differently. This means that any company building in this space needs to pay close attention to gender differences during product development in order to create products and treatment protocols, that work for humans of all genders.
The news of Five Lives latest funding round inspired us to take a bit of a closer look at the mental health ecosystem this week.
👉 Mental Health Tech - An Overview
I stumbled upon an article by Stephen Hays, the founder of What If Ventures, a VC fund dedicated to innovation in mental health. Although written in 2020, I believe that the categorization of mental health startups can still be useful today, when thinking about how to best approach the market.
Mental Wellness Applications: Apps for sleep, meditation, and breathing, educational tools, and games that train you to have better mental health.
B2B Tools and Sourcing: Provider search engines, provider tools and back office resources, and B2B/corporate mental health programs and services such as EAP.
Measurement and Testing: Assessments, passive and active tracking or measurement of mood or other subjective parameters, mood journaling, screening or triage tools, and remote monitoring.
Telehealth: Remote engagement, treatment, or interaction with a clinician. Some telehealth companies appear to be measurement tools or meditation apps, but they are classified here if telehealth is their goal.
Non-Tech and Other: Medications, psychedelics, brick and mortar treatment centers and clinics, and just about anything that isn’t primarily a technology-based business (even though some do use technology within their businesses).
Digital Therapeutics: A resource that is used in conjunction with medication or behavioral interventions (or in place of either). You can think of digital therapeutics in this industry as a sort of “digital medicine.”
Peer to Peer: Fighting isolation, bringing people together to be vulnerable with each other, and creating connection for the purpose of well-being. We believe that the largest number of consumers will receive the most help via peer-to-peer solutions in the long run.
👉 Follow the Money!
To date health and wellness apps make up the bulk of the startups in the space, yet digital therapeutics have received the marjority of funding. This is partially driven by the capital-required to go through FDA approvals etc. versus building "just building an app".
Measurement and testing is another area where we see very little funding to date, but we see a lot of founders building tools and features. These tools and features are absolutely necessary, but often investors see these as “nice to have” features that should be part of a larger platform, therefore, less funding is available unless these features are part of a product road-map that leads to a platform opportunity. We've talked about the platform trend in this newsletter in the past and it seems like mental health tech is not exception when it comes to this trend.
👉 Women's Health x Mental Health
We've talked about the overall space, but of course this wouldn't be a Femtech Insider brief, if we didn't also touch on the areas at the intersection of women's health and mental health, that we believe are particularly underserved In my opinion these include:
- Chronic Migraines
- Depression
- Post-partum depression
- Anxiety
- Dementia
- Alzheimer's
- Stress
- Sleep
- Stroke
- Caregiver Stress
Anything you think we've missed? Let us know by replying to this email!
Despite the opportunity, the women's mental health space today remains largely underserved and I genuinly hope we see more startups across the spectrum (biotech, digital health, devices) step up, to address this urgent need and crisis.
Digital Helath Trends 2023
AboutDigitalHealth's Artur Olesch recently released his predictions for the future of digital health in 2023 and we think his piece (and the discussions around it) are worth a read!
"From patterns to conclusions. Instead of trendy buzzwords or fads that come and go, I took a closer look at technologies with purpose and the social changes driving their development. The result: 14 longitudinal trends—micro-disruptive technologies, incremental innovation, societal phenomena—carefully extracted from my interviews, observations and research conducted in recent months"
Great read! 10 out of 10 recommend. ;)
Startup Spotlight
Wanna know which startups get us excited these days? Below are a few of our recent (femtech-healthtech-ish) discoveries. 👀
Hormonella is a Germany-based company that has developed a line of supplements to support menstrual health. The company also offers consultations via telehealth.
FemXX Health helps women with endometriosis find insights of what has helped other patients like them. Community meets data.
BabyFORTE has developed a line of pregnancy and fertility supplements and currently serves the German market.
