Women's health has long been trivialized. These startups are making it impossible to ignore

Elaine Purcell and Adrianne Nickerson didn’t just launch a maternity care startup together — within two weeks of each other, they were also its first patients.

Their startup Oula , founded in early 2020, operates maternity care clinics in New York City with the philosophy that childbirth is a natural process that shouldn’t be overly medicalized. And it’s part of a new generation of ventures — founded by women, for women’s health concerns — that aim to address medical conditions that have long been misunderstood and ignored.?

These founders' personal experiences with the healthcare system are guiding their ventures. Purcell and Nickerson, for instance, built their company for expectant parents like themselves: health-conscious Millennials who prefer a low-intervention approach and are looking to incorporate alternative treatments into traditional healthcare.

Oula has been getting some buzz. It is no. 24 on this year’s list of LinkedIn's Top Startups, our annual ranking of young companies that have been rapidly adding headcount, attracting jobseeker interest and recruiting talent from our coveted Top Companies. (You can access the full list and methodology here .)

It is hardly alone.

For Kristina Saffran , it was her own difficult journey to recover from anorexia that ultimately led her to found Equip (no. 28 on the Top Startups list), which provides virtual treatment programs for eating disorders. (While Equip is not strictly a women’s health company, women make up the majority of eating disorder patients.)

Saffran received her anorexia diagnosis when she was just 10 years old, and had four hospitalizations by her sophomore year of high school before she finally started the treatment that would save her life.

She knew was one of the lucky ones. The condition is notoriously difficult to treat — with one of the highest mortality rates of any mental health disorder — and families can incur tremendous out-of-pocket costs. Patients often travel across states to find treatment centers.

Saffran and co-founder Erin Parks, Ph.D. , a neuropsychologist from the UC San Diego Health Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research , saw a need to create a program that was both evidence-based and accessible. They founded Equip in 2019.

They expected to get some pushback from investors about the size of the market, and sometimes they did.

But “more often than not — I would say 80% of the time — as we would pitch, someone in the room would be like, that’s my daughter, that’s my son, that was me,” Parks said. “I think that was a really, really pleasant surprise, how many people in these rooms understood what we were trying to do.”

The women’s health category includes both classic health concerns as well as those that affect women disproportionately or differently from men, said Dr. Clemens Freytag , a principal at consulting firm Oliver Wyman . These latter categories might include mental health conditions, autoimmune disorders and even weight loss.??

The space is attracting bigger dollars than ever before, with?investment in women’s health increasing more than 300% between 2018 and 2023 across sectors ranging from pharma to femtech.?

In digital health specifically, the trend has been less linear. Venture funding for women’s health startups peaked at $2.1 billion in 2021, capturing 7.1% of total investment value that year, according to Rock Health , a digital health research and advisory firm. But two years later, funding plummeted to just $283 million, and the category represented only 2.7% of deal value. Still, there are signs of improvement this year. In the second quarter alone, women’s health startups received as much funding as they did in all of 2023, and represented 9.5% of deal value.

Misconceptions still exist about women’s health, including the common refrain founders hear that it’s somehow “niche.”?

“It was not easy to get this company funded initially,” said Joanna Strober , CEO and founder of Midi Health (no. 30 on the Top Startups list), which provides virtual care for menopause and perimenopause. “A lot of people didn't really understand it quite honestly, but they also didn't see it as a big market.”

Strober needed to convince investors that Midi was doing more than just prescribing hormone replacement therapy (though increasing access to HRT remains a big part of her passion.) Instead, she had to educate them on all the ways menopause and perimenopause affect women — from weight gain to migraines to mental health disorders. “The opportunity is that women's health in their 40s and 50s is menopause,” she said.??

By 2025, 1 billion women will be experiencing menopause , making it one of the world's fastest-growing demographics. “Many women drop out of their working lives because of menopause symptoms,” Freytag said. “This has a huge economic impact.”

Employers are taking note, and fueling the category by offering benefits for menopause care. These days, nearly a quarter (or 24%) of respondents to 美世 ’s 2023 Health on Demand Survey said their companies offer menopause support and 45% said it would be helpful for them or their families.

Rather than being “niche,” the women’s health category is showing itself to be incredibly broad. And as it matures, companies in the space are rolling out offerings that are “more curated, more precise and more specific,” said Megan Zweig , president of Rock Health Advisory. She pointed to companies that offer specialized care like mental health treatment during pregnancy or virtual physical therapy for pelvic floor disorders.??

Startups that are succeeding in this space are paving the way for others, she added.

“A lot of these women's health companies are at a growth stage where they are looking for capital, not just to validate their solution,” she said. “They've already validated that women need it and really want it.”

Purcell at Oula credits an early-stage investment from Kate Ryder — founder of reproductive care company Maven Clinic , which reached a $1.3 billion valuation this year — for its ability to gain more attention and raise larger funding rounds.

The conversations Oula is having with investors have changed too, she added. While they once fell back on their own experiences with childbirth to guide their investment decisions, these days they want to talk about the financial data and the company’s growth trajectory.

Purcell, who became pregnant six months after launching Oula, laughs when asked whether she planned to be Oula’s first patient. Absolutely not, she says. But then she relents: it wasn’t entirely coincidental either. After all, she acknowledges, she and Nickerson founded Oula as newlyweds thinking about starting families themselves.?

“We looked at the system out there and said this is not really something that speaks to me nor does it feel as safe as it could be,” Purcell said. “There's something incredibly valuable about building a company around something that you get to experience and you value so wholly.”