women’s health
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Startups should look to state-of-the-art tech to tackle diseases affecting women
Startups devoted to reproductive and women’s health are on the rise. However, most of them deal with women’s fertility: birth control, ovulation and the inability to conceive. The broader field of women’s health remains neglected.
Historically, most of our understanding of ailments comes from the perspective of men and is overwhelmingly based on studies using male patients. Until the early 1990s, women of childbearing age were kept out of drug trial studies, and the resulting bias has been an ongoing issue in healthcare. Other issues include underrepresentation of women in health studies, trivialization of women’s physical complaints (which is relevant to the misdiagnosis of endometriosis, among other conditions), and gender bias in the funding of research, especially in research grants.
For example, several studies have shown that when we look at National Institutes of Health funding, a disproportionate share of its resources goes to diseases that primarily affect men — at the expense of those that primarily affect women. In 2019, studies of NIH funding based on disease burden (as estimated by the number of years lost due to an illness) showed that male-favored diseases were funded at twice the rate of female-favored diseases.
Let’s take endometriosis as an example. Endometriosis is a disease where endometrial-like tissue (‘‘lesions’’) can be found outside the uterus. Endometriosis is a condition that only occurs in individuals with uteruses and has been less funded and less studied than many other conditions. It can cause chronic pain, fatigue, painful intercourse and infertility. Although the disease may affect one out of 10 women, diagnosis is still very slow, and the disease is confirmed only by surgery.
There is no non-invasive test available. In many cases, a woman is diagnosed only due to her infertility, and the diagnosis can take up to 10 years. Even after diagnosis, the understanding of disease biology and progression is poor, as well as the understanding of the relationships to other lesion diseases, such as adenomyosis. Current treatments include surgical removal of lesions and drugs that suppress ovarian hormone (mainly estrogen) production.
However, there are changes in the works. The NIH created the women’s health research category in 1994 for annual budgeting purposes and, in 2019, it was updated to include research that is relevant to women only. In acknowledging the widespread male bias in both human and animal studies, the NIH mandated in 2016 that grant applicants would be required to recruit male and female participants in their protocols. These changes are slow, and if we look at endometriosis, it received just $7 million in NIH funding in the fiscal year 2018, putting it near the very bottom of NIH’s 285 disease/research areas.
It is interesting to note that critical changes are coming from other sources, and not so much from the funding agencies or the pharmaceutical industry. The push is coming from patients and physicians themselves that meet the diseases regularly. We see pharmaceutical companies (such as Eli Lilly and AbbVie) in the women’s healthcare space following the lead of their patients and slowly expanding their R&D base and doubling efforts to expand beyond reproductive health into other key women’s health areas.
New technological innovations targeting endometriosis are being funded via private sources. In 2020, women’s health finally emerged as one of the most promising areas of investment. These include (not an exhaustive list by any means) diagnostics companies such as NextGen Jane, which raised a $9 million Series A in April 2021 for its “smart tampon,” and DotLab, a non-invasive endometriosis testing startup, which raised $10 million from investors last July. Other notable advances include the research-study app Phendo that tracks endometriosis, and Gynica, a company focused on cannabis-based treatments for gynecological issues.
The complexity of endometriosis is such that any single biotech startup may find it challenging to go it alone. One approach to tackle this is through collaborations. Two companies, Polaris Quantum Biotech and Auransa, have teamed up to tackle the endometriosis challenge and other women’s specific diseases.
Using data, algorithms and quantum computing, this collaboration between two female-led AI companies integrates the understanding of disease biology with chemistry. Moreover, they are not stopping at in silico; rather, this collaboration aims to bring therapeutics to patients.
New partnerships can majorly impact how fast a field like women’s health can advance. Without such concerted efforts, women-centric diseases such as endometriosis, triple-negative breast cancer and ovarian cancer, to name a few, may remain neglected and result in much-needed therapeutics not moving into clinics promptly.
Using state-of-the-art technologies on complex women’s diseases will allow the field to advance much faster and can put drug candidates into clinics in a few short years, especially with the help of patient advocacy groups, research organizations, physicians and out-of-the-box funding approaches such as crowdfunding from the patients themselves.
We believe that going after the women’s health market is a win-win for the patients as well as from the business perspective, as the global market for endometriosis drugs alone is expected to reach $2.2 billion in the next six years.
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The Pill Club takes on primary care with $41.9M in fresh funding
In January, former Uber executive Liz Meyerdirk announced that she took over as chief executive of The Pill Club. The company, which offers an online birth control prescription and delivery service to hundreds of thousands of women, had hit record revenues, crossing $100 million in annual run rate for the first time in its four-year history.
She found the bridge between ride-sharing to healthcare to be smoother than some might expect, saying that she focused on how to apply technology “to logistics for an everyday use case, [to know] how that simplifies your everyday life.”
Now, six months into her new job, Meyerdirk announced that her company has raised more capital to capitalize on the momentum in women’s health right now. The Pill Club announced today that it has raised a $41.9 million Series B extension round led by Base 10. Existing investors, including ACME, Base10, GV, Shasta Ventures and VMG, participated in the round, as well as new investors, including Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi and Honey’s George Ruan and iGlobe.
The extension round comes over two years after the company announced its initial Series B investment, a $51 million financing led by VMG Partners. After reportedly being valued at $250 million, the company declined to provide its latest valuation, other than saying that the extension was an up-round.
When a customer joins The Pill Club, they are given a medical questionnaire and a digital form to input personal information. The company gives them a sense of how much the service will cost, and if the price works, it connects them to a nurse either live or via text.
“In a happy case, you can see a nurse immediately,” she said. “Obviously if it’s midnight, we haven’t figured that out yet.” The nurse walks though different options, since, Meyerdirk added, “contraception is not one size fits all.”
Once a customer makes a decision, The Pill Club can then prescribe birth control through their own pharmacy, which will be delivered to their door within two or three days.
The Pill Club launched in 2016 with an at-home delivery service of birth control. Between 2016 and January 2021, it launched in 43 states plus the District of Columbia. It has added five states in the past six months, and plans to get to 50 states by the end of 2021.
The company makes money from medical visits, insurance reimbursement for prescription drugs and cash patients who aren’t covered by insurance.
The chief executive views a big part of its value proposition as embedding with existing insurance plans of its customers, including Medi-CAL and Family PACT. In the last three months, 16% of The Pill Clubs’ new patients were on Medicaid.
“You’ve got companies like Oscar [Health] that are reimagining health insurance, and you’ve got Ro, Hims and Hers, who are [taking] cash as a primary…way to serve…patients,” she said. “That’s fantastic for those who can afford it, but for us, because so much of our value system is around access to equity, we believe everyone should have the right to get access to birth control.”
The company believes that it has to work within the system of insurance to have true innovation.
“Telemedicine that ignores the reality of insurance is always going to have a limited piece of the pie,” a spokesperson from the company said said. “Cash-only systems simply aren’t a product built for a scale. A truly innovative healthcare platform exists within the realities of the system.”
By women, for women
Long-term, The Pill Club wants to replace the old model of going to a primary care provider for annual visits with ongoing care for women.
“I’m generally healthy [but] I actually do have questions on mammograms…colonoscopies, or anything,” Meyerdirk said. “And being able to have a person other than my mom” to talk to that doesn’t require a trip to the doctor or urgent care is the gap that The Pill Club wants to fill.
“We think it’s too good to be true, when we actually get what we deserve,” Meyerdirk said when describing women’s health. Part of her goal going forward is to think bigger, beyond contraception, and figure out how The Pill Club could bring a digital refresh to other areas of women’s health.
In March, the company launched a dermatology pilot, and also expanded its 2020 period care pilot. A portion of the new capital is earmarked toward launching new services for its members.
The Pill Club also shared the diversity metrics of its 350-person staff as part of its announcement.
The Pill Club has 72% of employees identifying as women, and 28% of employees identifying as male. The executive leadership similarly sees predominantly women, with the ratio being 62.5% women and 37.5% male. As for racial diversity, the overall company identifies as 33% white, 19% Asian, 16% Hispanic or Latino and 14% Black or African American; 13% of employees declined to identify.
“We’re by women for women,” Meyerdirk said. “It’s very, very different when you’re by men, for women.” Her appointment came as The Pill Club’s founder and former chief executive officer Nick Chang stepped down from day to day operations. He didn’t take a board seat, but does still have shares in the company.
Liz Meyerdirk, chief executive of The Pill Club. Image Credits: The Pill Club
The wave of prescription, for-delivery medication is only getting bigger, with The Pill Club joined by startups such as Nurx and SimpleHealth, and bigger corporations such as Walmart and Amazon.
“The idea of creating more choice and flexibility across healthcare is long overdue,” she said. “Everyone deserves to have great options when they consider who can best address their daily needs.”
Editor’s note: A prior version of this story noted that The Pill Club does birth control for pick up. This is incorrect. It delivers birth control through its own pharmacies. A correction has been made to reflect this change.
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Hormonal health is a massive opportunity: Where are the unicorns?
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse, but Elizabeth Ruzzo says she experienced it firsthand after telling a doctor that she suffered from suicidal ideation after taking birth control pills.
Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.
Ruzzo’s doctor told her there was no connection between birth control and self-harm, but she decided to stop taking the pill to see if her mental health improved. When it did, Ruzzo grasped the disconnect between women’s unique hormonal makeup and blanket-statement practices from medicine today.
Her realization led her to found Adyn Health, a startup that proactively helps women make health decisions that complement their hormonal state and background. The company started with, of course, helping people pick more personalized birth control.
Ruzzo is part of a group of growing entrepreneurs who are betting that hormonal health is the key wedge into the digital health boom. Hormones are fluctuating, ever-evolving and diverse — but these founders say they’re also key to solving many health conditions that disproportionately impact women, from diabetes to infertility to mental health challenges.
Many believe it’s that complexity that underscores the opportunity. Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.
Still, as funding for women’s health startups drops and stigma continues to impact where venture dollars go, it’s unclear whether the sector will remain in its infancy or hit a true inflection point.
The future is proactive
Ruzzo views Adyn as a precision medicine startup. Its main product is an at-home test that tracks hormone levels, assesses genetic risk for specific side effects, and then gives recommendations for which birth control methods best suits the customer with the fewest side effects.
By Ruzzo’s estimates, 98% of sexually active women use birth control for 30 years of their life. That sort of lifetime value proposition made the company look like a sweet deal to founders, and Adyn raised a $2.5 million seed in April 2021 in a round co-led by Lux Capital and M13.
The moonshot, though, is using that as a way to become a trusted partner in a woman’s life, helping understand baseline hormone levels throughout those 30 years.
“My hope is that we can use precision medicine approaches, including looking at genetic markers to identify reliable diagnostic criteria, that can remove that uncertainty and pain and diagnostic odyssey that people have to go through,” Ruzzo said.
If Adyn becomes a trusted partner with teenage women, it could reach a point where it can detect changes in hormone levels over time.
“The hormone reference ranges that are used [in labs] are too broad to be personalized, let alone prescriptive,” she said. “And so what we’re hoping to do is correct for things that we know affect hormone levels like age, weight, ethnicity and compare you to your own expectations.”
If the first wave of digital health was a company like Ro, which answers consumers when they have a condition such as erectile dysfunction or hair loss, the second wave will look more like Adyn, which helps consumers navigate their health before getting diagnosed with a condition or experiencing issues.
The industry standard is still to wait for consumers to realize they have a condition, and then go to the doctor to manage their symptoms or look for a cure. A new startup that recently graduated from Y Combinator is finding its way into hormonal health through that angle.
One-tenth of all women are impacted by a hormonal condition
Veera Health is a startup that wants to help women in India manage polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. The hormonal condition can cause irregular periods, infertility or gestational diabetes in women, as well as acne, weight gain and excessive hair growth. Plus, PCOS is far from rare, impacting one in 10 women.
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What top VCs look for in women’s fertility startups
A number of promising women’s health tech companies have popped up in the last few years, from fertility apps to ovulation bracelets — even Apple has jumped into the subject with the addition of period tracking built into the latest edition of the watch. But there hasn’t been much in the way of innovation in women’s sexual health for decades.
In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is now a 40-year-old invention and even the top pharmaceutical companies have spent a pittance on research and development. Subjects like polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis and menopause have taken a backseat to other, more fatal concerns. Fertility is itself oftentimes a mysterious black box as well, though a full 10% of the female population in the United States has difficulty getting or staying pregnant.
That’s all starting to change as startups are now bringing in millions in venture capital to gather and treat women’s health. While it’s early days (no unicorns just yet) interest in the subject has been jumping steadily higher each year.
To shine a better light on the importance of tech’s role in spurring more innovation for women’s fertility, we asked five VCs passionate about the space for their investment strategies, including Sarah Cone (Social Impact Capital), Vanessa Larco (NEA), Anu Duggal (Female Founders Fund), Jess Lee (Sequoia) and Nancy Brown (Oak HC/FT).
Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital
Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital
We’re interested in companies that create large data sets in women’s health and fertility, enabling personalized medicine, clinical trial virtualization, better patient outcomes, and the application of modern AI/ML techniques to generate hypotheses that discover new targets and molecules.
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Femtech’s billion-dollar year
There are a lot of people who never thought they’d see the day venture capitalists would funnel millions into femtech businesses, direct-to-consumer tampon retailers no less. But that’s our new reality and Cora is proof.
San Francisco-based Cora, which develops and sells organic tampons, pads and other personal care products, has just closed a $7.5 million Series A led by Harbinger Ventures. Cora is one of many femtech startups to raise funding this week alone, in what is turning out to be a red-hot year for VC investment in the space.
Femtech, defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health, has attracted at least $241 million in VC funding so far this year, according to PitchBook. That puts the sector on pace to secure nearly $1 billion in investment by year-end, greatly surpassing last year’s record of $650 million. For more historical context, startups in the space brought in only $62 million in 2012, $225 million in 2014 and $231 million in 2016.
“Investors have realized there is a huge pent-up demand in the market for healthier products for women,” Cora co-founder Molly Hayward tells TechCrunch. “The way in which the VC world is structured, there just has not been a lot of representation. It’s really difficult to understand the value of a product you aren’t ever going to use or to understand a problem you aren’t ever going to have, particularly around period care. This isn’t something we were talking about as a society five years ago.”
The four-year-old startup operates a little differently than your run-of-the-mill D2C company. Like TOMS, the popular footwear brand, Cora donates a month’s supply of products for every month’s supply sold. To date, Cora has donated 5 million pads to girls in India and Kenya and 100,000 products to women in the U.S.
“To me, [Cora] was this incredible, holistic opportunity to change the way that women experience their period,” Hayward said.
Investors must be excited about Cora’s growth. Though she didn’t disclose specific numbers, Hayward says the brand has expanded 400 percent year-over-year, a metric they are expecting to sustain with this new bout of funding. Cora’s products are sold on a subscription basis, with prices ranging from $8 per month for six tampons to $16 per month for 24. For those unfamiliar with the costs of such products, $8 for six tampons comes at quite the premium. A box of 50 Playtex tampons, for example, retails for around $9.
In Cora’s case, customers are shelling out extra cash for millennial-inspired branding, a soothing unboxing experience and a general ease of access to its products, as well as Cora’s organic, hypoallergenic and compostable materials, which aren’t characteristic of many similar products on the market.
Cora plans to use the capital to put more of its items in Target stores, where it already sells its tampons and pads, and expand its portfolio of products. As part of the funding, Cora has added two more women to its board of directors: Lisa Bougie, the former GM of Stitch Fix, and Andrea Freedman, the former chief financial officer of Method. Its board is now 80 percent female.
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Tia launches a clinic that places the menstrual cycle at the center of care
Tia, the company that launched with an app providing health advice and period tracking for women, has launched its first clinic.
From its first location in New York, the two founders of Tia hope they can build a network of care facilities that integrate all of the information their app collects with the benefits of having in-person consultations with physicians that have a holistic view of their patients’ health.
For founders Carolyn Witte and Felicity Yost, the hurdles women need to overcome to receive adequate treatment aren’t theoretical — they’ve faced them directly.
Witte and Yost met a decade ago in college and remained friends ever since. It was when Witte had to diagnose herself with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), a condition that affects nearly one in 10 women, that she first realized how broken the healthcare system was for more than half of the U.S. population.
“It’s one of those classic issues in healthcare that’s really difficult to diagnose… I spent three years seeing gynecologists, who were treating the symptom and failing to connect the dots,” Witte recalls. “I found myself at age 25 at a fertility specialist in NYC after I diagnosed myself on the internet… and got this really unfortunate diagnosis.”
As someone who worked at Google and had access to what was supposed to be the best healthcare services in the world, Witte realized there were significant gaps between the understanding of healthcare for men and women. “Here I am feeling completely alone and confused… that was the moment for me when I said there has to be a better way.”
Witte moved back to San Francisco and moved in with Yost and began working on what would become the Tia app.
Initially the app was focused on providing advice to women around sexual health and gynecological issues, eventually expanding to include a period tracker and other tools. Now, with the expansion into the clinical space, Tia’s founders see it as the culmination of their evolution as a company.
“I wanted to build a brand company that makes women feel heard,” says Witte. “We wanted to build a one-stop-shop solution that solves the lack of soul in healthcare.”
With that mission accomplished, the next step is to grow.
Growth at the kind of scale that Witte and Yost envision requires capital, which the two women have received in the form of $6 million in capital commitments from a slew of some of venture capital’s best investors, including John Doerr, Homebrew, Combine, Compound, Torch Capital, Canaan Partners and Define Ventures (Lynne Chou O’Keefe from Kleiner Perkins).
“Tia is a revolutionary company that is changing the way women view and access healthcare. Now, with the launch of the first Tia Clinic, they’re introducing a new model of women’s care that will shift the landscape with convenience, compassion, and personalization,” said Lynne Chou O’Keefe, in a statement.
That sentiment is bound up in the branding of the business. Although neither woman is Latinx, they called their company Tia after the Spanish word for aunt — which, can be expanded to include any trusted relationship among women (whether or not they’re actually related), according to Witte.
The decision to expand from an application into physical clinics was bound up in the use cases the two women saw when they launched their service. “We found very quickly after launching the product that women were hacking Tia and bringing their phones into their gynecologist’s office,” Witte says.
At the newly launched Tia clinic, which opens today at its first location in New York near Madison Square Park, the company is providing full-stack care delivery, including gynecological exams, primary care and wellness.
The company charges a $150 membership fee, but its services are covered under insurance. Tia currently accepts Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Oscar, United Oxford/United Healthcare and Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Treatment at the Tia Clinic is informed by the data that the company’s application collects on its users, both Witte and Yost say. Women can come to the clinic for services ranging from holistic annual exams to IUD insertions to treatment for chronic migraines, alongside more mundane services like flu shots and strep throat treatments.
If Tia users track their cycle and daily health and wellness through the app, that can be shared with their Tia Clinic physicians to inform care. The medical service at this point doesn’t integrate other period-tracking apps into its health data.
At the center of Tia’s clinical care is the notion that the menstrual cycle is broadly associated with physiological and emotional manifestations that can inform and effect treatment.
Tia isn’t the only company that is trying to bring information and data specific to women’s health into a clinical setting. In Oakland, NextGen Jane is using tampons embedded with sensors to diagnose severe health problems, like endometriosis.
And investors are pouring money into period-tracking and fertility apps and services around the country and around the world.
As we wrote earlier this month:
Femtech, a term coined by Ida Tin, the founder of another period and ovulation-tracking app Clue, is defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health. Femtech, and more specifically the businesses in the fertility and contraception lanes, hasn’t made headlines as often as AI or blockchain technology has, for example. Probably because companies in the sector haven’t closed as many notable venture deals. That’s changing.
The global fertility services market is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020, according to Technavio. Meanwhile, private investment in the femtech space surpassed $400 million in 2018 after reaching a high of $354 million the previous year, per data collected from PitchBook and Crunchbase. This year already several companies have inked venture deals, including men’s fertility business Dadi and Extend Fertility, which helps women freeze their eggs.
“In the last three to six months, it feels like investor interest has gone through the roof,” Jake Anderson-Bialis, co-founder of FertilityIQ and a former investor at Sequoia Capital, told TechCrunch. “It’s three to four emails a day; people are coming out of the woodwork. It feels like somebody shook the snow globe here and it just hasn’t stopped for months now.”
For Tia, the benefits of understanding menstrual health extend far beyond fertility.
“Women’s health is cyclic and changes every single day of a woman’s cycle,” says Yost. With that said, the company is only just now starting to do clinical research to test the validity of its thesis. “For us to be able to do any sort of clinical research on women is very, very challenging,” says Yost. “All of these things can take a really long time because it takes so much information to diagnose.”
For investors like Homebrew’s Hunter Walk, companies like Tia sit at the intersection of a few promising trends — but the investment was driven by the passion the founders expressed for the mission they were on.
“Women and specifically millennial women and younger are increasingly becoming targeted by venture-backed companies,” says Walk. “For years and years and years that audience was unrecognized and underserved… [But with Tia] what we saw was a checkbox on the founders and their abilities. They checked the box on the audience… and because they were going not just with generic women’s health but cycle-targeted women’s care, we thought that was the right and differentiated approach thinking about healthcare for women.”
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It’s a new era for fertility tech
Women’s health has long been devoid of technological innovation, but when it comes to fertility options, that’s starting to change. Startups in the space are securing hundreds of millions in venture capital investment, a significant increase to the dearth of funding collected in previous years.
Fertility entrepreneurs are focused on a growing market: couples are choosing to reproduce later in life, an increasing number of female breadwinners are able to make their own decisions about when and how to reproduce, and overall, around 10% of women in the US today have trouble conceiving, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Startups, as a result, are working to improve various pain points in a women’s fertility journey, whether that be with new-age brick-and-mortar clinics, information platforms, mobile applications, wearables, direct-to-consumer medical tests or otherwise.
Although the investment numbers are still relatively small (compared to, say, scooters), the trend is up — here’s the latest from founders and investors in the space.
VCs want to help you get pregnant
Clue, a period and ovulation-tracking app, co-founder and CEO Ida Tin talks at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2017 (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
This fall, TechCrunch received a tip that SoftBank, a prolific venture capital firm known for its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund, was investing in Glow, a period-tracking app meant to help women get pregnant. Max Levchin, Glow’s co-founder and a well-known member of the PayPal mafia, succinctly responded to a TechCrunch inquiry regarding the deal via e-mail: “Fairly sure you got this particular story wrong,” he wrote. Glow co-founder and chief executive officer Mike Huang did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the time.
Needless to say, some semblance of a SoftBank fertility deal got this reporter interested in a space that seldom populates tech blogs.
Femtech, a term coined by Ida Tin, the founder of another period and ovulation-tracking app Clue, is defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health. Femtech, and more specifically the businesses in the fertility and contraception lanes, hasn’t made headlines as often as AI or blockchain technology has, for example. Probably because companies in the sector haven’t closed as many notable venture deals. That’s changing.
The global fertility services market is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020, according to Technavio. Meanwhile, private investment in the femtech space surpassed $400 million in 2018 after reaching a high of $354 million the previous year, per data collected from PitchBook and Crunchbase. This year already several companies have inked venture deals, including men’s fertility business Dadi and Extend Fertility, which helps women freeze their eggs.
“In the last three to six months, it feels like investor interest has gone through the roof,” Jake Anderson-Bialis, co-founder of FertilityIQ and a former investor at Sequoia Capital, told TechCrunch. “It’s three to four emails a day; people are coming out of the woodwork. It feels like somebody shook the snow globe here and it just hasn’t stopped for months now.”
Dadi, Extend Fertility and FertilityIQ are among a growing list of startups in the fertility space to crop up in recent years. FertilityIQ, for its part, provides a digital platform for fertility patients to research and review doctors and clinics. The company also collects data and issues reports, like this one, which ranked businesses by fertility benefits. Anderson-Bialis launched the platform with his wife, co-founder Deborah Anderson-Bialis, in 2016 after the pair overcame their own set of infertility issues.
Anderson-Bialis said he has recently fielded requests from seed, Series A and growth-stage investors interested in exploring the growing fertility market. His company, however, has yet to raise any outside capital. Why? He doesn’t see FertilityIQ as a venture-scale business, but rather a passion project, and he’s skeptical of the true market opportunity for other businesses in the space.
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Serious privacy flaws discovered in Glow fertility tracker app
There are scores of startups making fertility tracker and family planning apps today, but a Consumer Reports investigation has singled out Glow Inc. for serious security and privacy flaws. First, Consumer Reports’ team was able to access very personal information including data and comments about users’ sex lives, history of miscarriages, abortions and more, through a privacy… Read More
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