Catherine Magee is the co-founder and CEO of Playground, a sexual wellness brand she launched in 2022 with product developer Sandy Vukovic and pop star Christina Aguilera. After more than 15 years building aspirational beauty brands at companies like bareMinerals, Buxom, Rodan + Fields and theBalm Cosmetics, Magee set out to give intimate care the same skincare-grade performance and cosmetic-level joy that the beauty aisle had long enjoyed. Under her leadership Playground reached Target, Urban Outfitters and Amazon, raised roughly $2 million in seed funding, generated billions of social impressions, and landed Magee on Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
Hasti Nazem is the Co-CEO and Head of Product and Education at Kindra, a New York-based, science-backed women's health brand building estrogen-free solutions for menopause, vaginal health and intimate care. With roughly a decade at the intersection of life sciences, consumer brand-building and wellness, she co-leads the company alongside Afshan Dosani, grounding products in 160+ clinical studies and patent-pending peptide technology. She came to the work through a winding path: a family of physicians, a pre-med start, a detour into finance before the 2008 crash, and a return to school that led her to build wellness companies focused on sleep and, later, women's health.
Michelle Katics is the co-founder and CEO of BankersLab and PortfolioQuest, SaaS simulation platforms she describes as flight simulators for bankers. After two decades inside the machinery of global finance - the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the IMF, Fair Isaac (FICO), and Standard Chartered - she decided the best way to teach risk was to let people lose fake money first. Her platforms run synthetic loan portfolios with more than a trillion possible outcomes, training bankers in over 45 countries. A fixture of the Singapore and Southeast Asian fintech scene, she has been named to the Women in FinTech Power List and recognized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Roberta Sotomaior is the co-founder and CEO of Bloom Care, a Sao Paulo digital health platform for women and families that she built after walking away from a career in international diplomacy. She spent roughly six years studying conflict resolution in Boston, decided prevention beat firefighting, and turned that conviction into a B2B2C company now embedded as a corporate benefit at hundreds of Brazilian employers including Natura, Sanofi and SulAmerica. She raised a R$3M pre-seed in 2021, drew angel checks from the presidents and ex-CEOs of Novartis and Gympass, and made CB Insights' global list of promising digital health startups as the only one founded entirely by women.
Sarah Oreck is a Columbia-trained reproductive psychiatrist who co-founded and runs Mavida Health, a virtual platform built around a simple, long-ignored idea: women's mental health and their hormones are inseparable. From a private LA practice she scaled a clinical care model across four states - covering PMDD, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause - through individual, group, and couples therapy plus medication management. In June 2026 Mavida was acquired by WPS, with Oreck staying on as co-founder.
Sujay Suresh Kumar is the cofounder and co-CEO of Lilu, a New York women's health hardware company building smart wearable tech for new mothers. An electrical engineer trained at the University of Pennsylvania, he designed circuits for CERN's ATLAS experiment, helped launch 4G in India at Reliance Jio, and spent two years on factory floors in Shenzhen turning a robotics-class side project into shipping products. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022.
Susan Sly is an award-winning AI entrepreneur, two-time tech founder, keynote speaker, and bestselling author based in Phoenix, Arizona. She is Founder and CEO of The Pause Technologies, an AI platform for women's care, and previously co-founded and co-led RadiusAI, a computer vision company whose work won VentureBeat's 2022 AI Innovator at The Edge award against finalists like Boston Dynamics and Ford. A graduate of MIT executive programs, she hosts the globally downloaded podcast Raw and Real Entrepreneurship and has been named among the top women to watch in real-time AI.
Tara Raffi is the founder and CEO of Almond ObGyn, a venture-backed, tech-enabled women's health practice she co-founded with Carly Allen in 2021. A former McKinsey consultant who built the firm's $50M internal tech incubator and was an early operations and marketing hire at the location-data company Factual, she started Almond after years of frustrating personal experiences trying to book gynecological care. Backed by Y Combinator (S22), True Ventures and others with a $7M seed round, Almond pitches itself as 'One Medical for women's health,' combining in-person LA clinics with telehealth. Raffi and Allen were named to Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
Granata Bio is a Boston-based biopharmaceutical company building a portfolio of fertility and reproductive-health therapies. Founded in 2018, it in-licenses and develops medications used in IVF outside the US, runs its own clinical programs, and is expanding into ovarian biology. Its lead asset is an investigational human menopausal gonadotropin in the pivotal Phase III GRACE study, and its 2025 acquisition of Oviva Therapeutics added a first-in-class therapeutic aimed at extending ovarian function. The company targets the multi-billion-dollar global infertility medication market with the goal of expanding patient access and improving IVF outcomes.
Amelia Degenkolb is the CEO and co-founder of Novocuff, a Mountain View medical device company building the Cervical Control System, a device designed to stabilize the cervix, retain amniotic fluid and prolong pregnancies threatened by preterm premature rupture of membranes. A biomedical engineer who spent seven years as the first employee and lead engineer at Alydia Health, she helped bring the Jada System for postpartum hemorrhage to market before that company's $240M acquisition by Organon. In July 2024 she raised an oversubscribed $26M Series A to fund a U.S. pivotal trial aimed at reducing preterm births, the leading cause of infant mortality worldwide.
Angela Rastegar is the co-founder and CEO of Sunfish, a Los Angeles fertility-finance company that treats the cost of building a family as a problem worth engineering around. After a 2016 egg-freezing attempt left her facing a confusing, expensive and isolating bill with no insurance to lean on, she went to work inside the fertility industry, watched patients drain 401(k)s and sell engagement rings, and then built a platform of loans, grants, guidance and a money-back IVF Success Program priced off a patient's own biodata. A two-time founder with a Stanford biology degree and a Stanford MBA, she raised a $10M Series A in early 2025 and put a refund guarantee at the center of an industry that has long charged for attempts rather than outcomes.
Carine Carmy is the co-founder and CEO of Origin, a women's health company that has turned pelvic floor and whole-body physical therapy into insurance-covered care available in person across seven states and virtually in all 50. A former go-to-market leader at Amino and Shapeways, she built Origin out of her own decade-long struggle to find treatment, and in January 2026 raised a Series B to scale the model and an AI clinical product, Athena, trained on 39 million patient interactions.
Novocuff, Inc. is a clinical-stage maternal health medical device company based in Mountain View, California, building the Novocuff Cervical Control System (CCS) - a device designed to stabilize and close the cervix, retain amniotic fluid, and extend pregnancy in cases of preterm prelabor rupture of membranes (PPROM) and cervical shortening. Founded in 2021 by Amelia Degenkolb and Donald Lee, the company raised an oversubscribed $26M Series A in 2024 (about $28M total) to fund its U.S. multicenter pivotal RETAIN trial, for which it secured FDA IDE approval in September 2025.
Origin is a women's health company that makes insurance-covered pelvic floor and whole-body physical therapy widely accessible through a hybrid model of nationwide virtual care and in-person clinics. Founded in 2020 by Carine Carmy, Nona Farahnik Yadegar, and David Yadegar, Origin treats conditions across pregnancy, postpartum, menopause, sexual health, and musculoskeletal pain, and has served over 50,000 patients while shifting pelvic care from a $200-300 cash-pay model to in-network visits that cost most patients under $36.
Samphire Neuroscience is a London-based neurotechnology company building drug-free, hormone-free wearables for women's health. Its flagship product, Nettle, is a headband that uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to gently modulate the brain regions tied to mood and pain, worn 20 minutes a day in the run-up to menstruation. Marketed as the first EU-cleared (CE-certified) neuromodulation device for women's health, Nettle targets PMS, PMDD, menstrual pain and related hormonal conditions. Founded in 2021 by neuroscientist Emilė Radytė and IP lawyer Alex Cook, the company has raised roughly $7.77M across pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds.
Emilė Radytė is a Harvard- and Oxford-trained neuroscientist and the co-founder and CEO of Samphire Neuroscience, a London-based neurotech company building drug-free, hormone-free wearable devices for menstrual health. Her flagship product, Nettle, is a head-worn device using non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to target the neurological drivers of menstrual pain and mood symptoms. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list in 2024, she came up through emergency medicine at Harvard and a PhD in psychiatry and engineering at Oxford, and reframes conditions like PMS and PMDD as questions of brain circuitry rather than hormones alone.
Sunfish is a Los Angeles fertility fintech that helps people pay for and navigate IVF, egg freezing, surrogacy and donor journeys. It pairs a loan marketplace and all-inclusive, flat-fee treatment bundles with a partial money-back guarantee, an AI model that predicts cycle cost and outcomes from patient biodata, and human and emotional support. Founded in 2022 by Angela Rastegar after her own isolating fertility experience, the company has supported over $200 million in loan applications across all 50 states and works with 70+ clinic locations.
Monica Molenaar is the co-founder and co-CEO of Alloy Health, a direct-to-consumer digital health company she launched in 2020 with former Marie Claire editor-in-chief Anne Fulenwider to bring credible, science-backed menopause care to women. A Stanford MBA and serial entrepreneur, Molenaar first built Seed + Mill, the artisanal tahini and halva business in New York's Chelsea Market, before turning to women's health. Alloy has raised $21.3 million in total funding, including a $16 million Series A in November 2024, and serves more than 70,000 customers. Molenaar and Fulenwider were named to Inc. Magazine's 2026 Female Founders 500.
Raydiant Oximetry is a clinical-stage medical device company building Lumerah, a noninvasive, transabdominal fetal pulse oximeter that measures a baby's blood-oxygen levels during labor. By giving obstetricians a direct read on fetal oxygenation - rather than the coin-flip guesswork of conventional fetal heart-rate monitors - the company aims to cut unnecessary C-sections and reduce maternal and neonatal harm. It holds FDA Breakthrough Device designation and is partnered with GE HealthCare.
Alloy Health is a direct-to-consumer women's telehealth company built to fix how medicine treats menopause. Founded by Anne Fulenwider and Monica Molenaar, Alloy connects women in perimenopause and menopause with menopause-trained doctors and a full menu of FDA-approved, science-backed treatments - hormone replacement therapy, vaginal estrogen, plus hair, skin, sexual-wellness, gut and weight solutions - delivered to the door via an asynchronous platform with a flat $50 annual membership. The company raised a $16M Series A in November 2024 and reached profitability while serving women historically dismissed by the healthcare system.
DeepLook Medical is a Scottsdale, Arizona medical imaging company whose FDA-cleared software, DL Precise, helps radiologists see and measure suspicious lesions that hide inside dense breast tissue. Using proprietary shape-recognition algorithms that overlay directly on existing imaging systems, the tool delivers single-click segmentation across mammography, ultrasound, CT and MRI. Led by CEO Marissa Fayer, the company is in commercial use at major U.S. health systems and closed a Series A led by Xcellerant Ventures in 2024.
Evvy is a precision women's health company building the first AI-powered vaginal healthcare platform around a CLIA-certified, at-home metagenomic vaginal microbiome test. Founded in 2021 by Stanford alums Priyanka Jain and Laine Bruzek, Evvy pairs state-of-the-art testing that screens for 700+ bacteria and fungi with clinician-reviewed results, personalized prescription treatment, and one-on-one health coaching. By generating one of the largest datasets on female biomarkers, Evvy aims to close the gender health gap - starting with conditions like bacterial vaginosis that have been chronically under-researched.
Oula is a modern maternity and gynecology clinic that blends midwifery with obstetrics in a single, collaborative care model. Founded in New York in 2019 and opening its first Brooklyn clinic in 2021, Oula pairs in-person visits with virtual check-ins and care navigators to deliver personalized, evidence-based pregnancy, postpartum, and women's health care. The company reports outcomes that beat NYC benchmarks across race and payer type, accepts insurance and Medicaid, and is expanding beyond New York City after raising a $28M Series B in 2024.
SimpliFed is a virtual maternal health company based in Ithaca, New York, that helps families through pregnancy, postpartum, and baby feeding. Founded by biomedical engineer Andrea Ippolito in 2019, it began as insurance-covered virtual lactation support and has grown into a broader 'Maternal Health Operating System' (mOS) that pairs IBCLC lactation consultants and care navigators with prenatal and postpartum virtual OB services. Working in-network with most major commercial plans and Medicaid in multiple states, SimpliFed partners with health systems and OB clinics to extend judgment-free, evidence-based care into the home.
Adrianne Nickerson is the co-founder and CEO of Oula, a New York maternity company that fuses midwives, OB-GYNs and technology into one hybrid clinic built to give pregnant patients a calmer, more personal, evidence-based birth experience. A Columbia biology grad with a Harvard master's in global health, she decided she could help patients more by not becoming a doctor - and instead builds the systems doctors and midwives work inside. She co-founded Oula in 2019, opened it while pregnant alongside two pregnant co-executives, and has raised tens of millions to expand care that reduces unnecessary C-sections and centers patient voices.
Andrea Ippolito is the founder and CEO of SimpliFed, an Ithaca, New York company building a maternal health operating system that delivers virtual breastfeeding, infant nutrition and OB support to families in all 50 states at no cost through health plans. A biomedical engineer by training, she co-directed MIT Hacking Medicine, co-founded Smart Scheduling (acquired by athenahealth in 2016), served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the White House, and ran the VA's Innovators Network before turning her own postpartum struggle into a company that now partners with 300-plus health systems and raised an oversubscribed $10.8M Series A in 2026.
Anne Fulenwider spent 25 years turning sentences into magazine covers, capped by eight years as editor-in-chief of Marie Claire. Then she walked away from the masthead to co-found Alloy Women's Health, a digital company that connects women in perimenopause and menopause to menopause-trained physicians and doctor-prescribed treatment delivered to the door. She runs it as co-CEO alongside Monica Molenaar, applying an editor's instinct for storytelling to one of medicine's most overlooked subjects.
Marissa Fayer is a 25-year medtech executive who runs DeepLook Medical, an AI diagnostics company that helps radiologists spot breast cancer earlier in women with dense breast tissue, which she took from concept through FDA clearance into global commercialization. She is also the founder of HERhealthEQ, a nonprofit that has reached over 128,000 women across 12 countries by deploying medical devices for cancers, maternal health, and cardiovascular disease. A partner at women's-health fund Goddess Gaia Ventures and author of the forthcoming book 'Undervalued to Unavoidable,' she argues women's health is not a charitable cause but economic infrastructure that has been systematically underestimated.
Priyanka Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Evvy, a New York precision women's health company building the largest dataset on the vaginal microbiome. A former Head of Product at AI hiring startup pymetrics and a Stanford Mayfield Fellow, she pivoted from making hiring fairer to closing the gender health gap. Under her leadership Evvy launched the first CLIA/CAP/CLEP-certified at-home metagenomic vaginal microbiome test, raised a $14M Series A, and landed Jain on Forbes 30 Under 30 and Inc.'s Female Founders lists.
Midi Health is a national virtual care clinic built specifically for women in perimenopause, menopause, and the long midlife stretch that mainstream medicine has historically ignored. Founded by Joanna Strober after her own frustrating search for symptom relief, Midi pairs clinicians trained in menopause medicine with an insurance-covered telehealth platform that treats hot flashes, sleep problems, weight changes, mood swings, and long-term hormone health. Now valued above $1 billion after a $100M Series D in February 2026, Midi serves more than 230,000 patients across all 50 states.