Femtech funding gap persists despite huge market potential

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth 

Women's health startups receive only three percent of digital medtech funding and face issues around regulation and lack of standardisation, a panel of women leaders told an audience in Auckland.

At the Women in Health Tech breakfast held as part of HealthTech Week 2025, Prathima Chowdary, founder of a femtech startup developing a vaginal oestrogen delivery device, told the audience that just three percent of all digital medtech funding goes to women's health.

She said that despite investors generally not being keen on discussing women's health issues, the market potential is “huge”. Research showed that providing vaginal oestrogen to women in Washington D.C. alone saved one hospital $1.8 billion by preventing admissions for pyelonephritis caused by recurrent urinary tract infections.

"Money talks in healthcare, and if you can show significant market potential investors will listen," she said. 

"VCs might not want to fund women, but they want to make money."

Jennifer Kruger, chief executive and co-founder of JUNOFEM agreed that “the funding gap is real”, saying only 1–2 percent of digital medtech funding is invested in women’s medical technology specifically. This means half the population’s health needs continue to be underserved.

Kelly Burrowes, associate professor at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and founded The Femtech Revolution, which imports femtech products from overseas because many solutions are not available in New Zealand.

Femtech - short for female technology - encompasses various solutions for female-specific health issues, from at-home testing kits to wearable devices.

She said women were banned from clinical trials from the 1970s to early 1990s following the thalidomide crisis, leading to decades of medical research done mainly on men.

"Healthcare tech often assumes women are just smaller men with different reproductive organs,” she told the breakfast audience.

"Up to 80 percent of drugs that are withdrawn from the market is because of negative health effects on women, because they were not picked up during the trial phases.”

The panellists agreed that beyond just funding, femtech entrepreneurs face regulatory complexities that vary depending on whether products are classified as medical devices or pharmaceuticals. 

Chowdary's company is pursuing both pathways - drug approval through the FDA and device approval for other markets to accelerate market entry.

Kruger also highlighted issues around standardisation, saying that a search for pelvic floor training devices will discover 500 apps with no industry standards governing their development or accuracy.

"There are no standards across the industry, so you will find some of these will give you false positives, and some will be false negatives."

Marketing restrictions mean medical professionals cannot use terms like ‘cure’ or ‘fix’ in their marketing, while unregulated products can make all sorts of claims to attract consumers.

Despite these issues, all three women entrepreneurs said that women founders often achieve more with limited resources and female-start-ups do very well.

Image: Panellists; Kelly Burrowes, Prathima Chowdary, Jennifer Kruger and facilitator Ella Dixon (left to right)

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