The Funding Gap Killing Women's Health Innovation

By Roswitha Verwer, Founder and CEO of YON E

Women's health investment is projected to grow in 2026. That headline hides a harder number: the rate at which promising companies survive long enough to reach patients.

New data from Silicon Valley Bank, featured in Geri Stengel's Women's Health and Market Visibility newsletter and shared by Rachel Braun Scherl, points to a problem beneath the fundraising totals. The numbers are specific. Among seed-stage women's health companies, the share advancing to Series A dropped from 27 percent in the 2020 cohort to 13 percent in the 2023 cohort. Of every ten women's health companies that reached Series A in 2019, four went on to raise a Series B. For the 2023 cohort, only two have. Women's health deal share fell from 7.4 percent of all healthcare venture capital in 2023 to 5.7 percent in 2025, and dollar share dropped further, to 3.1 percent, as late-stage financing slowed.

As Megan Scheffel of Silicon Valley Bank put it, the tightening is happening across healthcare broadly. Investors are asking for clinical evidence, longer runway, and clear milestone achievement before committing further capital. That bar applies across healthcare broadly. In a sector that has historically operated with less capital and less institutional track record, clearing it takes longer and costs more.

I think about this every time someone frames women's health as a funding story. The industry has made real progress getting first checks written. The harder problem is the path from that first check to a company that can generate the clinical evidence investors now require at every subsequent stage. Getting funded and staying funded have become two different problems.

That gap is where we built NOÉ by YON E. We asked ourselves what would it take for a women's health company to survive its own Series B? Based on the data above, the answer is infrastructure, not a stronger pitch deck. Longitudinal datasets that compound over successive funding rounds. Regulatory positioning built early, not retrofitted under pressure. Clinical relationships that generate real-world evidence before a term sheet demands it.

Sequencing is why this matters. Clinical credibility has to precede commercial scale. A continuous monitoring platform earns the extended runway Scheffel describes only when the evidence behind it is already solid before the next raise begins. Publications, clinical partnerships, and proprietary datasets are what let a company clear the bar that eliminated 87 percent of the 2023 seed cohort.

The broader implication is worth sitting with. If graduation rates keep falling, the companies that survive will be the ones that treated evidence generation as core infrastructure from day one. That changes what "investable" looks like in this category. It rewards founders who build for the milestone before the milestone is asked for.

Women's health needs companies built to clear the second raise, and the one after that. That is the case we are building at YON E. It is also the case the entire sector needs to make more visible if the progress in early-stage funding is going to translate into companies that actually reach patients.

If you are an investor thinking about where women's health goes next, I would rather talk about our data than our deck. Reach out, and I will walk you through what we have built.

Roswitha Verwer 

Founder & CEO YON E