Building the Future of Women’s Health
By: Bobbi Kline, MD | Edited by: Catherine Crowley
For decades, women’s health was too often treated as a specialty within healthcare rather than an enormous field of medicine, science, technology and human need. FemTech is helping change that equation.
The term FemTech was coined in 2016 by Ida Tin, co-founder of Clue, to describe technologies designed to support and advance women’s healthcare. What began largely around menstruation, fertility and reproductive health has expanded into menopause, cardiovascular disease, cancer, pelvic health, bone health, sexual wellness, mental health, pregnancy, maternal care, diagnostics, longevity and chronic disease.
From this movement comes another useful identity: the FemTechPreneur.
A FemTechPreneur is more than someone who owns a women’s health company. She—or he—is an entrepreneur, innovator, clinician, scientist or visionary who recognizes an unmet need in women’s health and develops a scalable way to address it. That solution might be an AI diagnostic platform, wearable sensor, medical device, digital health service, therapeutic, fertility technology, menopause program or entirely new model of care.
The essential qualification is not gender. It is mission combined with innovation.
What Goes Into a FemTech Trend?
A FemTech trend begins when an overlooked health problem collides with new scientific capability, technology, consumer demand and entrepreneurial imagination.
Consider menopause. For generations it received comparatively limited commercial and technological attention. Today, menopause platforms, hormone-management services, wearables, diagnostics and personalized care models represent an expanding innovation category. Similarly, hormonal health is moving toward at-home testing, continuous monitoring, biosensors and AI-assisted interpretation.Other major trends include AI-assisted diagnostics, fertility technologies, maternal-health monitoring, pelvic-floor devices, breast and gynecologic cancer technologies, cardiovascular monitoring, personalized genomics, sexual wellness, mental health, metabolic health and healthy aging.
The important word is need. The strongest FemTech trends do not begin by asking, What can we sell women? They begin by asking, What has medicine, research or technology failed to adequately solve for women?
That distinction represents the philosophy behind FemTech.
The Vision Behind FemTech
FemTech should ultimately be understood as a movement toward healthcare designed with women in mind from the beginning.
Women have historically been underrepresented in areas of medical research and innovation, creating gaps in knowledge, diagnosis and treatment. Modern FemTech offers an opportunity to reduce those gaps through technology, better data and more accessible care.Its future also extends well beyond reproductive medicine. Women age. They develop cardiovascular disease, cancer, osteoporosis, neurological disorders and metabolic conditions. They experience health differently across puberty, reproductive years, pregnancy, postpartum life, perimenopause, menopause and later life.
The next generation of FemTech therefore becomes whole-life women’s health innovation.
Who Belongs Among the Top FemTechPreneurs?
There should never be one permanent “Top 10.” Innovation changes too quickly. A meaningful ranking should evaluate originality, scientific credibility, unmet need, measurable impact, scalability, inclusivity, market traction, leadership, sustainability and the ability to change healthcare itself—criteria broadly consistent with how contemporary FemTech awards evaluate innovation.
Ten names and founder stories that illustrate the caliber such a list should recognize include:
- Ida Tin — Clue: The entrepreneur who coined FemTech and helped give an emerging industry an identity.
- Kate Ryder — Maven Clinic: Built a major digital women’s and family-health platform now serving millions of lives globally.
- Tania Boler — Elvie: Helped bring sophisticated consumer technology into pelvic-floor and maternal health.
- Elina Berglund — Natural Cycles: Applied physics, algorithms and physiological data to fertility and contraception technology.
- Alexandra Fine — Dame Products: Helped bring female sexual wellness into serious product innovation and health conversations.
- Amy Divaraniya — Oova: Represents the expanding frontier of at-home hormone monitoring and personalized hormonal-health data.
- Tammy Sun — Carrot Fertility: Represents the globalization and employer integration of fertility and family-building benefits.
- Jannine Versi — Elektra Health: Represents the emergence of menopause as a major digital-care and education category.
- Rhiannon White — Clue: Represents the next generation of leadership scaling established FemTech platforms and data-driven women’s health.
- Zhenya Lindgardt — Sera Prognostics: Represents the increasingly important intersection of women’s health, diagnostics, biotechnology and clinical prediction.
This is not presented as an official industry ranking, but as a model Top 10 illustrating what FemTech leadership can look like.
Where the FemTech World Meets
FemTech has also developed a growing conference ecosystem. Among the important gatherings are the Women’s Health Innovation Summit (WHIS), taking place October 13–15, 2026 in Boston and bringing together startups, healthcare systems, payers, investors, pharma, MedTech, nonprofits and policymakers.
HLTH USA, November 15–18, 2026 in Las Vegas, now features a dedicated Women’s Health Area encompassing FemTech platforms, fertility, menopause, AI diagnostics, cardiovascular health, maternal health and investment. CES has similarly expanded its digital-health programming to include women’s health, AI and wearables. Women’s Health Horizons operates an international summit series, while the Femtech Innovation Summit is connecting founders, investors and health systems with an emphasis on commercialization and capital.
These gatherings demonstrate something important: FemTech is becoming an ecosystem, not simply a product category.
The FemTechPreneur stands at the center of that ecosystem—not merely inventing another device or launching another company, but asking a larger question: What would healthcare look like if women’s needs were no longer an afterthought, but a starting point for innovation? That may ultimately be the most important FemTech trend of all.
References
- Warty RR, Smith V, Patabendige M, Fox D, Mol BW. Clarifying the unmet clinical need during medical device innovation in women's health—a narrative review. Health Care Women Int. 2024;45(7):811-839. doi:10.1080/07399332.2023.2190983.
- Karim JL, Wan R, Tabet RS, Chiu DS, Talhouk A. Person-generated health data in women's health: scoping review. J Med Internet Res. 2024;26. doi:10.2196/26110.
- Johnson C, Tafuto B. Connecting the dots on female digital health education: a systematic review. Semin Reprod Med. 2024;42(2):151-162. doi:10.1055/s-0044-1791535.
- Kemble E, Pérez L, Sartori V, Tolub G, Zheng A. The dawn of the FemTech revolution. McKinsey & Company. Published February 14, 2022. Accessed August 24, 2026.
- Ellingrud K, Pérez L, Petersen A, Sartori V. Closing the women's health gap: a $1 trillion opportunity to improve lives and economies. McKinsey Health Institute. Published January 17, 2024. Accessed August 24, 2026.
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Improving Representation in Clinical Trials and Research: Building Research Equity for Women and Underrepresented Groups. National Academies Press; 2022.
- Funding research on women's health. Nat Rev Bioeng. 2024;2:797-798. doi:10.1038/s44222-024-00253-7




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