WoW Women in FemTech | Brittany Hawkins and Catherine Hendy, co-founders of Elanza Wellness

Interview by MarijaButkovic

ELANZA is building digital health tools that automate and augment parts of fertility treatment, enabling doctors to deliver better patient care. Their mission is to use new technologies to build a better fertility industry. We talked to the founders Catherine Hendy and Brittany Hawkins about their idea and entrepreneurial journey.

Catherine & Brittany, what is the idea behind Elanza Wellness and how did you come up with it?

ELANZA Wellness is a digital-first women’s health company revolutionizing the way fertility clinics deliver care.

We founded ELANZA on the conviction that fertility care should include 24/7 answers to important questions, lifestyle interventions known to have a clinical impact on outcomes, and proper psychosocial support. That wasn’t the way it worked during our own frustrating and isolating experiences with fertility treatment, so we decided to fix it.

Our platform merges medical and behavioral workflows to help doctors give radically better care in the comfort of the patient’s own home. We’re a turn-key solution so clinics can up-level to digital care capabilities literally overnight by connecting their patients with our AI-driven, evidence-based virtual fertility coach, vetted holistic telehealth services, and a caring community. We’re building our platform to bring together everything fertility patients need in one trusted place, bringing digital simplicity to a fragmented journey.

It’s our goal to make ELANZA the new standard of extended fertility care, so no patient ever again needs to feel like “just a number” or like they weren’t given the opportunity to optimize for their best possible outcomes. 

When did all start and do you have other members in your team? 

ELANZA was founded in 2018, around the time of our own fertility treatments. We researched and co-authored a book on fertility preservation, Everything Egg Freezing, in conjunction with a panel of over 25 experts from institutions like Stanford, Oxford, and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine - many of them have now become advisors and provide instrumental guidance to ELANZA.

In early 2020 we also brought on board our technical co-founder and CTO Ajay Juneja, who is also Brittany's friend of over a decade. Ajay studied computer science, robotics, and computational linguistics at Carnegie Mellon, which has been a world-leader in innovation since the inception of artificial intelligence. Ajay’s life's work has been centered around developing empathetic applications of AI, and he immediately felt like exactly the right engineering fit to help drive our vision forwards. 

We all come from medical families and find motivation in driving changes in healthcare - with our mix of digital and technical backgrounds we saw the opportunity to apply technology to fill gaps in clinical care. 

How long did it take you to be where you are now?

It took a couple of years of really understanding the market, building relationships with clinical teams, advisors, investors, and others, and making sure we were 100% sure we had found the right solution to the problem we were trying to fix. This has been an iterative process, which we think is the right approach - explore thoroughly, build fast, rather than the other way around.
What was the biggest obstacle?

Isn’t the biggest obstacle always money?! We managed to time our first fundraising to coincide with a global pandemic (!) so having to take all our investor meetings over video rather than meeting face to face has been a steep learning curve - both for founders and investors. Fundraising is essentially selling your vision, so as with all kinds of sales, it’s helpful to be in a room with someone and engage face-to-face.

FemTech is still a relatively new investment category, which means a lot of investors are still trying to figure out what it entails and what the opportunity/framework looks like. Partly for that reason, we’ve targeted investors that have a track record in the space, and those that clearly align with our values and mission.

The strategy seems to have worked out for us as, despite COVID, we’ve been inundated with interest, and have been really energised by the high caliber of female investors and pro-female male investors involved in our round.

What are your biggest achievements to date?

Without any doubt, our biggest achievement has been the tangible impact we’ve had on the lives of hundreds of women through our pilot program distributed in partnership with 11 fertility clinics. We get incredible fan mail from patients telling us how empowered and supported our platform made them feel and sharing their treatment successes.  That’s echoed by the fertility doctors, which is fantastic as it helps us confirm we’re on the right track and know we’re building the right solutions to enable us to transform more patient experiences as we grow. 

What are the challenges of being an entrepreneur in the niche you are in? How about being a female founder/entrepreneur?

Many funders are slow to adapt to the idea that digital health start-ups can be successfully devised and led by people without clinical backgrounds. 

But as more non-medical entrepreneurs breakthrough with healthcare innovations, the industry is evolving, fast. Translational health is about drawing on the best of expertise from a variety of professionals: our take is that of course any medical advice and pathways should be overseen by appropriately qualified clinicians and researchers, but successful product design, strategy, and distribution are often best led by entrepreneurs, engineers, and, increasingly, those with backgrounds that make them highly skilled in user engagement. That might mean team members drawn from the worlds of gaming, content, and entertainment, with expertise that can be applied to great effect to put the  ‘digital’ into health. Whilst regulation and safety are always front and center - and a clinical advisory is a requisite - the challenge can be in shifting the mindset of those stuck in healthcare industry dogmas to see that to make the next generation of digital health tools truly engaging and effective in real-world settings requires looking beyond the skills of clinical professionals and actively drawing on the best from many different disciplines. 

In terms of the challenges of being a female founder - despite the great efforts of many to level the playing field for female founders, there is still a tremendous amount of work that still needs to be done to chip away at deep-rooted biases. Even as the systems themselves evolve to provide more inclusive pathways to funding, subconscious inequalities take a lot longer to dismantle. 

As (relatively!) young female founders, we spend time thinking about things that would probably never cross the mind of a man in our shoes: how emotional is too emotional when articulating our mission? On video calls, should we put on our glasses and wipe off our lipgloss? We’ve also invested a lot of time in rain-proofing against the types of questions that data shows characterize the female funding process. (Namely, that VCs tend to ask men questions about the potential for gains and women about the potential for losses.) We’ve made sure our financial projections are far, far more detailed and sophisticated than typically required for startups at our stage of evolution and funding so that we can convincingly counter any questions that might imply we don’t know our TAM from our EBITDA!

What are the projects you are currently working on?

Expanding beta testing, building out the next phase of our product, and closing our first funding round. 

Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why? 

Yes, visible representation is absolutely essential to inspiring the next generation of women to take up the mantle and use tech to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Some of those founders will hopefully then turn into investors, and we’ll see more balance on the funding side of the table, with more investment in companies that are building products and services that benefit women.

Beyond that, we find hearing the lived experiences of others helps us to better manage our own relationships and systems: everyone has inherent biases around sex and gender, women included. We want to make sure that as we grow as a company we practice what we preach and create inclusive hiring policies and a culture that allows everyone to operate at their best.

What is the most important piece of advice you can give to all female founders and female entrepreneurs out there?

Acknowledge that being a female entrepreneur comes with additional challenges, but don’t let that define you, deter you, or make you a victim of your circumstances. It’s the system that has to change, not you, your ideas, or solutions. Now, more than ever, there are tailored resources and investment opportunities and a growing number of fellow female entrepreneurs and investors that are happy to help. We’ve been blown away by some of the phenomenal female investors, advisors, and community innovators we’ve connected with who are leaving the ladder down behind them and are energetically championing diversity. Also - pay it forward. Women supporting women run in both directions. Whatever your role, there’s always someone more junior you can guide and help open doors for. To action that, we work with a great organization called FLIK that links female founders and female apprentices for mentorship and structured, meaningful apprenticeships. 

What will be the key trends in the health tech and fem tech industry in the next 5 years and where do you see it heading?

Increasingly, we’re going to see digital health solutions that facilitate more personalized, preventative, and decentralized treatment, along with a shift to truly value-based care. We’re no longer going to be content with just treating symptoms or viewing in-person care as always the best option; COVID has accelerated these changes and opened Pandora’s box. Globally, health systems are adopting more holistic philosophies in terms of how the patient herself is treated, but also how each service interoperates. 

As part of this evolution, and as the healthcare industry’s old, broken systems are stripped away, we’re also going to see the patient step forward more as a partner in care, and a proactive consumer voice that can influence innovation. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be part of this industry! 

Who are your 3 inspirational women in health tech and fem tech?

It’s hard to whittle it down to 3!

Professor Lynn Westphal, Chief Medical Officer, Kindbody - as Director of the Fertility Preservation Program at Stanford, Dr. Lynn pioneered one of the first egg freezing programs in the US. She co-founded the Stanford Center for Health Research on Women and Sex Differences in Medicine. It’s not often you meet someone who is as warm and giving as they are incisive and accomplished - but Dr. Lynn is living proof you can rise to the top of your field and still take time to be a genuinely great person, helping foster the next generation of women health innovators.

Carol A. Curley, Chief Investment Officer of Charian Ventures, a Managing Director at Golden Seeds and a member of New York Angels - Carol is probably one of the wisest women we’ve ever sought counsel from. An hour with her is like downloading an MBA direct into your brain. She has been investing in and advising early-stage companies for over 20 years and, as an LP in a number of venture funds supporting women founders and funders she is absolutely committed to expanding opportunities for other women in practice as well as theory. Carol also writes about topics impacting angel investing in her blog: https://womeninvest.nyc 

Caroline Criado Perez, author ‘Invisible Women’, journalist, and campaigner - her work single-handedly highlighted the gender data gap and is going to change the female experience for generations to come. She’s inspired us to focus on ways ELANZA can contribute to more data diversity through our own research links - for instance, by disaggregating data on the side effects of fertility medications by parameters such as race. We hope over time that will mean we can contribute to a better understanding of differences in experience around reproductive health and fertility treatment between women of different ethnicities. Hers is the kind of work that makes you realise we are all responsible for doing better, and demanding better from the systems that govern our lives.

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This interview was conducted by Marija Butkovic, Digital Marketing and PR strategist, founder and CEO of Women of Wearables. She regularly writes and speaks on topics of wearable tech, fashion tech, IoT, entrepreneurship and diversity. Follow Marija on Twitter @MarijaButkovic.