Written by Caroline Babisz, edited by Natasha Barrow
In this interview I spoke to the wonderful Karina and Katia, co-founders of ‘FemTechLab’. We spoke all about how ‘FemTechLab’ started, how it works and how it grows the FemTech ecosystem. Before we begin, what is FemTech? This specific term has not been around long, and it was only about 5 years ago that Ida Tin, the founder of Clue, used the term to describe the sector her company fell into. FemTech, is now a major category of the health technology sector that focuses on supporting women’s health and can be anything that is designed to improve women’s health and wellness (see Image 1).
FemTech has a lot of parallels with HealthTech and Biotech, so why do we need a unique sector just for products that fall into the category of solving issues with women’s health? It has been estimated that women spend $500 billion on medical expenses annually, however only 4% of healthcare research is specifically targeted at solving women’s health concerns. Karina and Katia explain how women have different needs and experience health issues differently to men and so require tailored solutions that are more effective for women. It has been predicted in the ‘FemTech Landscape Report” that the total global market for all industries that fall under women’s health will be worth $1.186 Trillion by 2027 and so FemTech is worth keeping an eye on.
The FemTech sector needs support to be able to flourish and ‘FemTechLab’ have set out to do exactly that. 80% of FemTech start-ups have female founders and the FemTech Landscape report has shown that female founders experience more difficulties at every stage of getting their start-up going, compared with their male counterparts. These difficulties include issues with funding, accessibility, advertising, and research. For example, Karina and Katia brought up the issue of censorship of FemTech products advertising on social media. ‘FemTechLab’ have built a wonderful community of specialists that know exactly how to deal with such issues and can support FemTech start-ups to overcome such bumps in the road.
In this article, Karina and Katia kindly answered my questions about ‘FemTechLab’ and showed me just how necessary and amazing they are in giving FemTech start-ups the support they deserve so that they can begin their journey on equal ground with other HealthTech counterparts.
Let’s begin the interview.
How did ‘FemTechLab’ form and what are your goals?
Karina
Katia and I have known each other for quite a long time, we’ve been on the tech scene for many years. We have been working with tech companies and building digital products for years. I heard about FemTech as a new sector and was just obsessed with all the different products that were emerging in the space. Both of us were looking for the next big thing and a mission-driven business to work on. We had a very inspiring chat over a lot of champagne about the future of the world, about women in the world and where it's all going. That’s how ‘FemTechLab’ started.
And about our goals. Even though our trading name is ‘FemTechLab’, actually our company name is “Balanced Ventures”. Ultimately our big mission is to make the world a more balanced place through doing so for women. The whole premise of FemTech as a sector and the innovation of Women's Health right now is the fact that the balance hasn't been there. Most products, services and systems have been built by men and for men. In health and wellness, at the very least, there are so many things that are different about the female body and there is research coming out now that highlights this. This is true for not just reproductive health but also things like cardiovascular and auto-immune diseases, women experience these completely differently, have symptoms in a different way and therefore need treatment that is different. When you have trials that have been done on just a male demographic, how could you possibly be addressing that difference? So, the whole idea is that if we support more start-ups that recognise that women are different and need different solutions to issues then everyone will benefit. We will build better companies; we’ll make the planet a better place and we’ll innovate in a more sustainable way than what we've been doing so far. So, it doesn't just help women, it helps everyone.
What sort of impact do you think a company like yours has on the FemTech ecosystem?
Katia
We are kind of creating an ecosystem. When we started this a year ago, FemTech was even smaller than it is today. We kind of stepped into something that hadn't quite existed, that hadn't at the time defined itself properly and yet it felt like there was loads of potential because FemTech sits right on top of the two major trends of female empowerment on one hand and digital health on the other hand. It hasn't quite become the norm yet but we're hoping it will become the mainstream. Apart from the accelerator we also have a media company “femtech.live”, we also have a community of interested people, kind of “wannabe” founders as we call them, people who would like to create a product but they haven't quite done it yet. We are also hopefully going to raise the funds soon to be able to support the whole start-up ecosystem financially .
What sort of support do you offer for FemTech start-ups and what do you think is the most important support that they need?
Katia
A network
A community they can rely on if they need advice and some form of expertise on pretty much everything.
Help with funding
We connect start-ups with our hundred-strong investor networks to help with this.
Defining and finalising the product
We have a product module on our programme that helps with this. They also need help with their go-to-market strategy, because a lot of the time you have a good product, but you may have no idea how to put it onto the market.
Wellbeing
We have a fourth module, it's called “Entrepreneurial Wellbeing”. It is for the founder’s well-being, so it is targeting founders as people most of all. It helps them develop as very resilient leaders, people who can sustain their ups and downs and not lose motivation, know how to build culture, know how to build teams and all these kinds of small-scale kinds of things. This also includes working on oneself because people grow through entrepreneurial journeys on a personal level.
Why do you think it’s important for start-ups to have a specialised community they can reach out to?
Karina
First of all, HealthTech is a sector where there are just different challenges in a way where specific investors just address the particular sector, there's go-to-market approaches that are quite specific versus fintech for example. Also, CEOs within the sector can give valuable advice about their sector-specific experiences and knowledge. For example, when you are trying to advertise on social media and Facebook is banning your ads because it’s mentioning sex and or something that relates to menstruation. These are issues that a non-FemTech focussed network would not understand and it’s not something that other entrepreneurs would relate to so I guess the subject matter focus in our network does matter in that regard.
Katia
The fact that FemTech founders are predominantly female is unique and, interestingly, most of them are first-time entrepreneurs. So, everything we do targets female founders; we build around the needs that most of our founders have. We find first time founders are less experienced, less confident, they need a bit more encouragement. As women usually do, they doubt themselves a lot.
Karina
Women just build businesses differently; they focus on different things. I like that women obsess over the end user; I don’t think we have a single female founder that doesn’t know some of their key users by name! Interestingly, when I worked on products in FinTech or LegalTech with male founders, you often don't have a problem with pitching a big vision or selling a confident story. However, they will forget about getting feedback from the end user and implement features without first running and validating them. Often getting feedback from the end user will be forgotten. I am of course generalising but there are massive gender differences in terms of what founders focus on.
What do you think are some of the biggest challenges that female CEOs face?
Katia
I think it is all the same challenges mostly, getting funding, getting the story right, pitching to predominantly male investors about female products. We try to immediately address that men are not your enemies, that is the opposite of what a balanced world should be. We shouldn’t be polarising the world but bringing it together.
Have you got an example of a FemTech success story you could share?
Karina
We have one called “LactApp”, it’s a breastfeeding phone app that helps women with any lactation advice they need, and it's used by 25% of all mothers in Spain, a very big reach. It's a fascinating company, they went through our spring cohort. They got a lot of interest from investors to raise funding through the programme and they have this big mission. There are two founders, a male and female founder, and when you hear the story of the female founder, which we actually published on femtech.live, her motivation is that every woman gets access to this solution because she herself went through a lot of struggles when she was breastfeeding. It is a very powerful mission and now she wants all other women to have that good experience, the story gives you goosebumps. It's a massively mission-driven company and investors feel that and want to be a part of it.
Do you observe that a lot of FemTech start-ups are mission-driven and have a powerful story behind them?
Katia
Women start companies to solve the world's problems, men start companies to achieve some form of results. It’s different reasons, I think. It’s how me and Karina started our company; we wanted to solve this bigger, broader issue. Maria started “LactApp” because she realised, after a very traumatic experience, that breastfeeding is very important for the world, and she believed every woman needed to have her product in their life. Likewise, the founders from “Fertility Circle” had some horrendous experiences with fertility and wanted to change women’s fertility experiences so that every woman suffered less. It is very powerful however it is hard to explain to VCs.
Top three FemTech’s to watch today?
Is it to select companies for your accelerator programme?
Karina
Of course! Because so many founders in FemTech are so mission-driven it is very difficult to say no; we want to take everybody in and help everyone. We do have some criteria in terms of product traction and what stage the company is at. If they are in too early a stage, we usually keep working with them and get them engaged in start-up clubs to support them until they are ready for the accelerator.
Where will FemTechLab go next?
Katia
We are currently raising another round of angel funding for our accelerator because that's how we are funded. We are talking to a number of corporates to support us so that we can provide funds for single founders but also to be able to provide grants for all the promising crazy start-ups. I probably should just fund one gold crazy idea a year. Ultimately, we've now had one cohort in our accelerator, the next one is starting on the 1st of September and already we're going to have 20 companies in our alumni network. It is very important for the ecosystem to have start-ups that participate so that we can connect people that can support each other and share experiences.
Thank you! We look forward to seeing FemTechLab grow and watching all the FemTech start-up’s grow.
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