The Capital Exists. It Rarely Reaches Women's Health.

By Roswitha Verwer, Founder and CEO of YON E

Less than 0.5% of healthcare venture capital is currently allocated to women's health. That figure comes from research cited in the strategic framework that my team and I published earlier this year in Frontiers in Global Women's Health. It reflects a documented allocation gap and raises a methodological question worth taking seriously: what happens to the quality of validation work when the capital behind it is so constrained?

Our publication, "Aligning Femtech Innovation With Equity: A Strategic Framework for Real-World Impact," is organized around four pillars. The first three deal with validation, data infrastructure, and co-design. The fourth addresses how the sector funds itself and how that funding relates to the evidence a company can generate. This pillar is a recommendation, not a regulatory requirement. No agency mandates how a femtech company structures its capital or partnerships. Drawing on existing literature on funding disparities in women's health research, the framework proposes structural changes the sector could adopt to close this gap.

What the framework recommends

The fourth pillar calls for two things to work together. The first is more diverse funding mechanisms: capital structures that combine private investment with public health funding and philanthropic capital willing to underwrite longer validation timelines, rather than relying solely on venture models built around faster return horizons. The second is strategic partnerships: formal collaborations among femtech companies, academic research institutions, and clinical networks, so the cost of rigorous validation is distributed rather than borne entirely by a single early-stage company.

Why does this connect to the science?

This pillar is not separate from the validation standards described in Pillar 1. Multi-site, demographically representative validation is more expensive and takes longer than single-site studies. Funding structures built around short return horizons create pressure to validate quickly and narrowly, which can limit external validity and the generalizability of results across populations. Shared infrastructure and longer-horizon capital are two of the more direct ways to reduce that pressure. Framed this way, the funding gap is not only a commercial concern; it can also influence how rigorously a technology is validated before reaching clinicians and patients.

Why this matters for investment

The 0.5% figure may be read as a pricing inefficiency: a category with significant unmet need in which capital allocation has not kept pace with the scientific case. Companies that can access diversified, longer-horizon capital are better positioned to complete the kind of validation work that strengthens trust among clinicians and regulators. Companies that cannot face a harder tradeoff between the speed of their evidence generation and its rigor.

At YON E, this is not an abstract concern. We are a clinical-stage company building continuous physiological monitoring technology, and the pace and depth of our validation work depend on the structure of the capital behind us. We built this pillar into the framework because it reflects our own approach: designing for global, representative validation from the outset, and building the evidence base to support that from day one.

For an investor evaluating this space, the strength of the science is one part of the picture. The other is whether the capital behind a company gives it room to properly validate that science. That is the connection our framework tries to make explicit. If it resonates with how you evaluate this category, I would welcome the conversation.

Roswitha Verwer 

Founder & CEO YON E 

This post is part of a series based on our publication "Aligning Femtech Innovation With Equity: A Strategic Framework for Real World Impact," published in Frontiers in Global Women's Health (2026).

Read the full publication in Frontiers in Global Women's Health here.