At a time when allocators reaffirmed their commitment to innovation, inclusion, and long-horizon investing, capital flows told a different story.

In 2023, just 2.8% of global venture capital went to all-female founding teams¹. Less than 5% of digital health funding targeted innovations focused on women². And only 1.7% of global health R&D was directed at female-specific conditions³.

These aren’t niche markets. They are multibillion-dollar sectors, shaped by unmet demand, outdated systems, and decades of underdiagnosis. And yet they remain underfunded.

The Friction at the Start of the Chain

In private markets, friction at the top of the funnel compounds downstream. 

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Founders in women’s health; those working on menopause, maternal health, chronic pain, or reproductive longevity, don’t always match the archetypes investors are trained to back. The categories often feel unfamiliar. The decks have fewer comps. The sectors lack clear analogies.

Some call this bias. But it’s more than that. It’s bandwidth. It’s sector literacy. It’s a filtering function that’s built into how risk is assessed. Investors reach for what they recognize.

Which means valuable signals are filtered out before they reach the boardroom.

The Missing Middle

Even when early signals are strong; product traction, regulatory milestones, patient need, the capital often vanishes by Series B. According to SVB’s 2025 Innovation in Women’s Health report, 70% of deals in this sector stall at the seed or Series A stage⁴.

That’s not inherently problematic. Early-stage dominance is expected in new or evolving markets. But the problem isn’t at the start. It’s what happens next.

Because what begins with promise often hits a wall. The drop-off from early conviction to growth-stage commitment is stark. Not because the companies fail, but because the capital stack isn’t built to support scale in unfamiliar sectors.

Institutional Inertia

Many allocators aren’t ignoring women’s health. They are just waiting for validation. A track record. An exit. A category-defining success. But if every link in the capital chain is waiting for someone else to move first, we are not managing risk. We are reinforcing stasis.

The challenge isn’t just a lack of conviction. It’s a structural delay in when and how capital shows up.

Institutional capital often requires someone else to underwrite the unknown. But in markets like women’s health, that “someone else” is often family offices, angels, or first-time managers. Investors willing to move early, before the story fits the mould.

When institutions discount the conviction of early backers; angels, family offices, first-time fund managers, they miss signals that could have validated the opportunity and accelerated capital flow.

The Weakest Link Is the Opportunity

This isn’t about relaxing investment discipline. It’s about evolving the frameworks we use to define readiness and price risk. Allocators could play a defining role at this middle stage, precisely where the chain breaks:

• By structuring co-investment sleeves into growth-stage women’s health companies that show clinical traction but lack traditional benchmarks.
   
• By treating early capital from angels and family offices as a source of validation, not noise.
   
• By evolving portfolio mandates to reflect new categories of value creation particularly in healthtech, diagnostics, and care infrastructure built for historically underserved populations.

Opportunities may lie in less obvious or underserved sectors. And too often, that means just past the point where legacy filters give out.

Looking ahead

This is just one link in a longer story. In the next piece, we will examine how the retreat of public funding is reshaping the innovation landscape and what it means when private capital is asked to carry breakthroughs across a chasm it was never designed to span alone.

The insight that “investors reach for what they recognize” will reappear, especially when we examine how public sector withdrawal reshapes what gets validated, and when.

For now, the takeaway is clear: if we want more scalable innovation in women’s health, we don’t just need more capital. We need smarter capital chains.

Maryann Umoren Selfe is a strategist and investor focused on capital design for the future of health. Through FemmeHealth Ventures Alliance, she explores how overlooked sectors like women’s health become investable.

The views expressed are solely those of the author in their personal capacity and do not constitute investment advice or an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the views of Institutional Investor.

¹ _{PitchBook. (2024). VC Funding to All-Female Founding Teams, Global, 2023. Retrieved from: https://pitchbook.com/news/reports/q4-2023-pitchbook-nvca-venture-monitor}

² _{Rock Health. (2024). 2023 Year-End Digital Health Funding Report. Retrieved from: https://rockhealth.com/insights/2023-year-end-digital-health-funding}

³ _{Global Health 50/50. (2023). Health Research by and for Women: Tracking Gender in Global Health R&D. Retrieved from: https://globalhealth5050.org}

⁴ _{SVB. (2025). Innovation in Women’s Health: Market Trends and Investment Landscape. Retrieved from: https://www.svb.com/trends-insights/reports/womens-health-report/}