From Investor's Perspective: Investing in Femtech and Healthtech
New Year, new event series.
We are so excited to have started with our new event series From Investor’s Perspective last week. With more than 100 events (in less than four years) under our belt by now, we are proud and happy that we were able to help and support some amazing startup founders in some way, shape or form.
For us, events are a great opportunity to learn something new, to discuss and share with others, and to meet like minded people. And that’s why we always want them to be educational, inspiring, and useful.
Our meetup - Women Investing in Women took place in September last year, and we received amazing feedback from our community and based on those ideas we decided to start running From Investor’s Perspective series of events.
(Almost) every startup founder needs funding and access to investors. Whether it's advice on how to find investors or how to pitch them, what are they looking for in early stage companies they invest in, how they measure success and why good team is equally good (or even better) as a good product, those were all the questions we decided to address by organizing events where you will be able to hear investor’s perspective on certain topics and most importantly - meet them in person.
Last Wednesday was the first event from the series, From Investor’s Perspective: Investing in Femtech and Healthtech with Gian Seehra from Octopus Ventures, Victoria Perweiler from Digitalis Ventures, Toby Kress from Central Research Laboratory, and Nathan McNally from P4 Precision Medicine Accelerator.
A decade ago, just $23 million worth of venture capital was invested in the global femtech industry, according to PitchBook data. That figure grew at a modest pace until 2015, when there was a spike in funding that totaled $334 million. In 2017, VC investors participated in 49 deals in the femtech space, totaling $354 million. And 2019 has seen significantly more VC funding for companies in the industry than any year in the last decade: $391.5 million across 36 deals. Over the last decade, 365 VC investors have participated in deals in the space.
Global digital healthcare market is expected to surpass $234 billion by 2023, femtech ideas have received more than $1 billion in funding between 2015 and 2018, and the industry is poised to become a $50 billion market by 2025, according to Frost and Sullivan.
This is an industry where 35% of femtech patent families have women listed as inventors, which is significantly higher than other technology areas where women only make up about 19% of inventors cited on patents, study shows.
It is great and inspiring witnessing more and more women in the UK starting companies that help improve women’s health in many areas, from period, fertility, pregnancy, mental health and menopause.
Some of them have already secured big funding to help them scale their business like Elvie, which has raised $42 million investment, the largest female tech investment to date, women’s health startup Genneve has landed $4M to grow telemedicine service for menopause, while fertility benefits company Progyny filed to go public last year.
There are many more companies to follow and we can’t wait to see what trends the future will bring. Our panelists discussed whether that would be artificial intelligence or genomics, what they look for in companies and startup founders they invest in, benefits of an accelerator, industry overview and some exciting companies disrupting the market.
We made sure to leave enough time for questions from the audience and the question that kept repeating was around the data. There’s a real lack of data around women’s health, it actually wasn’t until 1994 that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandated the inclusion of women in clinical trials. Also, there are many companies in this space collecting our data, but not giving us some useful action points based on the data we get.
We continued with the conversation during networking time where our guests got to meet the panelists and ask the questions that were left unanswered.
We hope you enjoyed the event and we hope to see you at our next event Tech for women, by women in February.
Nothing would be possible without our brilliant panelists Victoria, Toby, Gian and Nathan, without Plus X, our venue partner, and Tenzing, our drinks sponsor for the night. Thank you all so much!
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If you would like to stay up to date with our future events and attend our upcoming meetups, then sign up to our newsletter or join our London meetup group.
If you’re interested in speaking at or sponsoring our events and meetups, then get in touch via email at hello@womenofwearables.com.
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OUR PANELISTS:
Gian Seehra, Octopus Ventures:
Gian Seehra focuses on health investments and splits his time on deal origination and assessment of investment opportunities. Prior to joining the Octopus Ventures team in 2018, Gian spent two years in Canada building a biotechnology company called Pebble Labs tackling vector-borne, animal and plant diseases, and Trait Biosciences within the cannabis industry.
Victoria Perweiler, Digitalis Ventures:
Victoria Perweiler is a Venture Partner at Digitalis Ventures, a venture capital group focused on early-stage healthcare investments. Whilst the rest of her team is based in NYC/SF, she’s focused on finding promising founders in Europe who are passionate about solving complex problems in health care. Prior to VC, Victoria led growth marketing and product strategy at a number of women’s health startups in the US (Nurx, Ava women), and knows first hand what it takes to scale a company to hundreds of thousands of customers.
Toby Kress, PlusX and CRL:
Toby Kress is Managing Director at CRL and Programme Director at PlusX. He has worked closely with startups for the past 10 years and designed and developed highly successful innovation programmes and accelerators for corporations, startups and scaleups. CRL is the UK's leading Accelerator and co-working space for hardware startups. Over the past 4 years CRL has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs launch and scale their companies offering support with product development, commercial strategy, 24/7 prototyping facilities, mentorship and access to a network of investors, mentors and partners.
Nathan McNally, P4 Precision Medicine Accelerator:
Nathan McNally is Co-Founder of P4 Precision Medicine Accelerator, creating a more coherent, connected pathway for AI enabled precision medicine companies by bringing together the key stakeholders and decision makers that will improve precision medicine adoption and more importantly improve patients lives.
ABOUT OUR VENUE PARTNER:
PlusX is a brand new enterprise, building Innovation Hubs with work space around the UK pioneering business support, innovation, curated collaboration, wellbeing and positive local impact. Website here for more info: https://plusx.space/
Plus X Brighton, the new innovation hub opening in March at Preston Barracks, Brighton aims to be the first building in the city to be accredited Platinum standard by the WELL Building Institute, with its design and fit out focused solely on the health and wellness of its future occupants.
PlusX have kindly allowed us to use the amazing event space belonging to their partners, property regeneration specialists, U+I, located in Victoria, London. More about PlusX to be revealed over the coming months!
DRINKS SPONSOR:
Tenzing is a naturally energising drink with a plant-based triple hit of natural caffeine, vitamin C and electrolytes. Inspired by the naturally energising brews used by Himalayan Sherpas, it gives you a much needed boost. Tenzing provides natural energy that is good for 'Mind, Body, Planet', and leaves no trace whilst doing so.
This blog was written by Anja Streicher, Chief Marketing Officer of Women of Wearables. She is passionate about women's health and supporting women in tech and business.