Women’s health funding dipped in 2025. Silicon Valley Bank put venture investment in women’s health across the U.S. and Europe near $2 billion, down from a peak in 2024. In the U.S. alone, the pullback was roughly $1.2 billion. The coverage called it cooling interest, and to some, it looked like the end of the femtech boom.
What really changed was the bar. The market became more disciplined about the type of women’s health companies worth building.
For years, the conversation around femtech was dominated by a single metric: how much capital flowed into the sector. Funding reports celebrated record investment, unicorn valuations, and growing deal counts. For many, those numbers became proof that women’s health had finally arrived. Those milestones mattered because they showed that investors were finally paying attention to a market they’d overlooked for decades. But volume was never the goal. Building companies with lasting clinical and commercial value was.
Healthcare Still Plays by the Same Rules
Over the past year, investors have become more disciplined about what they’re willing to fund. That’s a healthy shift. The conversation has moved beyond excitement about the category toward a harder question: which companies can become indispensable to the healthcare system?
One thing I’ve learned after 25 years in medtech is that healthcare doesn’t make exceptions. Every technology has to prove itself. It has to earn the confidence of clinicians, fit into provider workflows, and demonstrate that it improves care.
I saw this up close with Neopenda, which I wrote about in Undervalued to Unavoidable. I met the company in 2021 while doing diligence for a fund investing in African healthcare, and I’ve followed it ever since. Their neonatal vital signs monitor exists because of a specific problem: in overcrowded neonatal wards, nurse-to-patient ratios make continuous monitoring impossible. Neopenda didn’t strip down a Western device and call it accessible. The company spent six years building the neoGuard with Ugandan clinicians, redesigning it around alarm fatigue, real nurse-to-baby ratios, and power that isn’t always reliable. That work adds up to 150,000 hours of monitoring and 4,500 infants who had a better chance of recovery because changes in vitals were caught in time. The neoGuard earned trust in the environment it was actually built for.
Those fundamentals became more important when venture markets tightened.
When I look at the companies that are still attracting capital, I see the same pattern again and again. They’re building diagnostics, regulated medical devices, clinical software, and AI tools that solve problems providers already face every day. They’re generating clinical evidence before they scale, thinking about reimbursement from day one, and designing products that fit naturally into clinical care. This is how healthcare has always scaled.
A lot of the early femtech companies ran the consumer technology playbook instead, and measured growth based on downloads, subscriptions, and direct-to-consumer adoption. Those companies helped normalize conversations around women’s health, and gave women access to information and care that had long been overlooked. But lasting enterprise value comes from earning clinical adoption, which is harder to earn because healthcare demands proof. Other industries scale on traction alone. Healthcare is built on evidence, regulation, reimbursement, and trust. The companies that build around those realities are more defensible businesses than those attempting to work around them.
The Best Investors Don’t Call It Women’s Health
One of the biggest shifts in the market is that many investors are increasingly seeing women’s health companies as part of mainstream healthcare investing, not a specialty category. Megan Scheffel, Head of Life Science and Healthcare at Silicon Valley Bank, put it well when she said investors often tell her they don’t invest in women’s health. Her response: “You actually do. I’ve seen your portfolio. You just don’t know it.”
Generalist healthcare investors are backing companies that solve problems affecting women because they’re good healthcare businesses. AOA Dx’s Follow the Exits analysis found more than $100 billion in realized exits from companies focused on conditions that affect women uniquely, differently, or disproportionately.
Think about this as lifespan healthcare. The investors who understand that evaluate opportunities through the same lens they’d apply to any other healthcare investment. They look at the clinical need, regulatory strategy, reimbursement potential, and whether the economics actually scale.
Founders need to pay attention to what the market is rewarding. The next generation of successful women’s health companies aren’t going to get there on clever branding or consumer engagement metrics. They’ll be defined by regulatory milestones, published evidence, payer adoption, and integration into the delivery of care. Those paths take longer, but they make those companies harder to displace. Once a technology is embedded in clinical practice, it stops being one more product competing for attention and becomes part of the system itself. That’s where lasting enterprise value is created.
The Correction Was the Signal
The real lesson from the past year is that investors got more selective. Their expectations matured. Instead of asking whether women’s health deserves investment, they’re asking which companies can become indispensable to modern healthcare. And that’s the right question.
The market has raised the bar, and it’s a benefit for everyone. It pushes founders to build stronger companies and gives investors a clearer framework for allocating capital. The future of women’s health will be built by companies that become part of healthcare’s infrastructure: regulated, reimbursable, evidence-based businesses that improve outcomes while fitting seamlessly into the way medicine is actually practiced. They’ll be the companies that quietly become impossible for healthcare to function without.