Annabel de Gheldere: Enabling healthcare for female employees | 21/100 Interviews
TL;DR
Annabel de Gheldere is a co-founder of early-stage startup Womco , a digital hormone health clinic for female employees, is a groundbreaking startup that is helping companies boost performance through healthier workplaces. Their solution offers comprehensive care to women from their reproductive years until menopause, and is designed to help women understand and manage their hormones, which can have a significant impact on their overall health and well-being.
The Digital Health Market is GROWING!
Annabel met her co-founder at an incubator and bonded over their shared interest in women's health. Micol is trained in science while she had the business and data skills needed to kickstart a startup. They initially brainstormed ideas around menstrual health and hormonal health in the workplace, and eventually landed on the idea of creating a holistic solution that would help women improve their hormonal health through food, diet, and lifestyle changes.
She emphasizes that the product wasn’t an instantaneous idea but rather a long process of researching the market and existing solutions and thinking, “what can we do better?”
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Especially when the digital health market is growing exponentially, there are already plenty of apps available for fertility, menstrual cycles, gut health, diabetes, etc. Womco differentiates itself in this space in its ability to provide a personally digitized solution that focuses on the hormonal health niche that is specifically designed for corporations to implement for their employees.?
What can you offer when there are so many competitors?
Despite her team’s immense faith in their product, she also noted the hardships of building. Annabel entered the space around a year ago, and since then she has discovered that hundreds of other players exist.?
"Once you step into the arena, you quickly realise the abundance of competitors! It's easy to get lost in the crowd and feel like the market is oversaturated. But the crucial point for us is to stand out by offering unique value for both women and employers"
But she emphasizes that a market with a lot of competitors can also be a great sign that the idea and demand is validated. Annabel notes that especially femtech, where pain points such as learning to live with endometriosis and PCOS are so essential to the quality of life, there is ample room for many players. This is the space where competition encourages more attention, which attracts funding, which ultimately brings in greater and better solutions to women.
That is to say that the space still faces its own hurdles. Biotech and medtech startups tend to require a lot more R&D funding, and so overall funding is still insufficient in terms of operating and scaling quickly. She also feels that womens’ health is also still low in funding compared to other health tech med tech startups.
Another hurdle is the lack of cross-sector partnerships. Public organizations still hesitate in working with startups given its ‘risky’ reputation; Annabel notes that corporation, government, and startup cooperation and collaboration is essential, especially in terms of information and medical history access.?