Friday Q&A: FemTech Focus’s Barreto discusses women’s health innovations, funding challenges

Friday Q&A: FemTech Focus’s Barreto discusses women’s health innovations, funding challenges

FemTech Concentration Executive Director Brittany Barreto is on a mission to increase women’s well being results by means of her function supporting expenditure and innovation in the FemTech sector. She sights the women’s well being room as ripe for financial commitment due to historic underfunding and underrepresentation in medical analysis and item improvement.

By means of her three-year-previous nonprofit corporation and the enterprise fund Coyote Ventures, which has elevated $10 million from traders which include Financial institution of The usa, the Ph.D. in molecular and human genetics is encouraging to develop an ecosystem focused to addressing conditions special to gals, females and women, or that have an affect on them disproportionately or in different ways.

This job interview has been edited for size and clarity. 

MedTech Dive: What just is FemTech?

Brittany Barreto: The term was coined by Ida Tin. She’s the founder of Clue, which is a period-monitoring app. She stated it at a convention in New York City in 2016 for the reason that she was making an attempt to describe how there are these special limitations to women’s health innovation. And so just calling it overall health tech is a disservice to it mainly because there are so a lot of exclusive caveats and obstacles we deal with that other medtech companies don’t have to deal with. Basically, she said, it truly is FemTech.

At FemTech Concentrate, we actually set up the definition in 2020 as alternatives to disorders that solely disproportionately or in a different way have an affect on females, gals and girls. And so, with that definition, you now consist of things like heart sickness, which manifests otherwise in our bodies, or autoimmune condition, which disproportionately impacts us.

Why is the timing proper for innovation in women’s overall health technological innovation?

We believe that there are 3 key good reasons why FemTech is on the rise now. The initial is that over 90{2f721a9a84cd1ef3e64bf507ea0c8ab2bc235122c146c2a4cbd42268917563c5} of our founders are woman. And that is a seriously fascinating statistic simply because it truly is not a prerequisite to be a woman to begin a women’s wellness firm. But it truly is predominantly women who are beginning these businesses. 

What we locate is that the increase of women of all ages in STEM and finance has led to an maximize in the quantities of women’s well being firms that are remaining developed. Most of our founders are engineers, or program coders or health care medical doctors, or investors or small business insight people today, gals who are exhausted of the status quo, and now have the talent sets to do anything about it.

And then the 2nd rationale, COVID definitely illuminated to all of us that not absolutely everyone receives the identical wellness treatment, based mostly on your race, your zip code. Then when we include in items like gender or intercourse, people have started off to say, “Oh, I’ve listened to of this,” and so it really is an much easier conversation to talk about in conditions of, you can wander into the exact same healthcare facility, but based on who you are, you have distinctive healthcare products and services offered to you.  

And then, historically, girls have been excluded from scientific exploration and healthcare innovation due to the justification of not getting able to compensate for their hormones. But now, we are living in a planet with AI drones on Mars, and we are capable of having hormone fluctuations into account.

What is FemTech Concentration executing to remedy this trouble?

We have two missions. The 1st is to elevate recognition of the will need for sex-particular health care innovation. And [the second] is to assistance the founders innovating in that space. We do that through 4 main mechanisms. We have a podcast, a virtual group, market place study experiences and functions. We have an once-a-year summit. I am usually requested to add some imagined leadership all-around the markets. And we have the major databases of FemTech startups and exits, and publish experiences on the sector size and pursuits and developments.

Portion of our mission of supporting the founders innovating in the area is connecting them to funding. So, producing those people heat introductions, teaching founders on fundraising technique, serving to them with their pitch decks, and also the marketplace exploration reports that we publish, are useful to founders even though they are fundraising. And then also beneficial for buyers to influence them that they need to be investing in FemTech.

Is there significantly funding out there for FemTech startups?