femtech
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Anna Luisa Schaffgotsch Bet on the Signal Between the Snapshots
A forgotten key card sent Anna Luisa Schaffgotsch looking beneath the surface. Seven years, two countries and one formidable pivot later, she is building Impli around a simple idea: the most useful signal may be the one hiding between measurements.
Holly Rockweiler Built a Company Around the Problem Everyone Else Called a Niche
She left a comfortable research career to put the patient back in the room. Twelve years, dozens of patents and one pivotal trial later, Holly Rockweiler's method is still disarmingly simple: listen first, then build.
Sarah O'Leary
Sarah O'Leary is the CEO of Willow Innovations, the Mountain View company that built the first fully in-bra wearable breast pump. She joined Willow in 2019 as VP of Growth, climbed through CMO and Chief Commercial Officer roles, and was named CEO in December 2023. Under her, Willow moved from an e-commerce breakthrough to an omnichannel maternal-health brand, and in 2025 acquired UK femtech rival Elvie to build a scaled global platform. A mother of two who started her career in consulting, she is known for a 'mothers first' philosophy that treats the new mother as the person products should be built around.
Senan Ebrahim
Senan Ebrahim is the founder and CEO of Delfina, a San Francisco digital health company using AI and data science to improve pregnancy care and close gaps in maternal health. A physician-scientist with an MD and a PhD in computational neuroscience from Harvard, he founded Delfina after witnessing a preventable stillbirth during medical training. He earlier founded Hikma Health, a nonprofit building free health-data tools for refugee and low-income patients. Delfina raised a $17M Series A in early 2025 led by U.S. Venture Partners.
Tracy MacNeal
Tracy MacNeal is a chemical engineer turned healthcare executive who serves as President and CEO of Materna Medical, a women's health technology company in Mountain View, California. With more than 25 years across pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, digital health and medical devices, and six transactions to her name, she has built a career on commercializing hard-to-define products and opening markets that others overlook. She sits on the board of AdvaMed and chairs its Women's Executive Network, and she is known for pairing engineering rigor with a storyteller's instinct for building trust with clinicians, investors and customers.
Adrianne Nickerson
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.
Jenna Parker
Jenna Parker is a former world-ranked professional triathlete turned actress, writer and health-tech operator. A Harvard psychology graduate who once ranked No. 1 in the USA and No. 17 in the world, she won the 2013 New York City Triathlon, represented the U.S. at the 2012 Olympic Trials, then reinvented herself in front of the camera and, later, inside the startup room. Today she works in New York's health-technology scene, having served as Chief of Staff at Healthie and been listed as chief executive at fertility-focused startup Dandi Fertility, bringing an endurance athlete's discipline to building companies.
Lauren Berson Sugarman
Lauren Berson Sugarman is the founder and CEO of Conceive, a 24/7 fertility and pregnancy care platform she launched in 2021 after her own three-year journey to motherhood. An executive-turned-entrepreneur, she previously held senior roles at Andreessen Horowitz, WeightWatchers, Google, and Citi, and runs Sugarman Ventures as an angel investor with 15+ company investments.
Aagya Mathur
Aagya Mathur is the co-founder and CEO of Aavia, a Brooklyn-based hormone health company whose app helps people with ovaries understand how their cycle shapes their energy, mood, sleep and focus. A University of Virginia neuroscientist turned MIT Sloan MBA and ex-Deloitte consultant, she co-built Aavia out of an MIT bootcamp into a top-charting wellness app that has reached hundreds of thousands of users on organic growth alone, with backers ranging from MIT delta v to a $9.7M+ funding base.
Catherine Magee
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Amelia Degenkolb
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
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
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.
Emilė Radytė
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.
Monica Molenaar
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.
Andrea Ippolito
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
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
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
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.
Michelle Longmire
Dr. Michelle Longmire is the co-founder and CEO of Medable, the leading platform for agentic AI in clinical development. A Stanford-trained physician-scientist who grew up in a Los Alamos nuclear-research family, she pivoted from dermatology to founding Medable in 2015 after hitting enrollment walls in her own clinical research. Under her leadership, Medable has raised over $500 million in venture capital, deployed its platform in roughly 400 trials across 70 countries in 120 languages, and served more than one million patients globally - transforming how the world runs clinical trials.
Bill Evans
Bill Evans is the founder and general partner of Rock Health Capital, a San Francisco fund backing pre-seed through Series A entrepreneurs at the intersection of healthcare and technology. A former Goldman Sachs analyst turned 1990s software engineer turned biotech operator, he led Rock Health as CEO and managing director before spinning out the venture vehicle in 2022.
Eric Dy
Eric Dy, PhD is the co-founder and CEO of Bloomlife, a San Francisco-based women's health company building connected care solutions for maternal and fetal monitoring. A biomedical engineer by training (Cornell BSc, UCLA MSc and PhD), Dy spent four years at IMEC - Europe's leading R&D institute - establishing 17 partnerships worth $25M+ in revenue before launching Bloomlife in 2014. His personal experience watching his wife navigate a high-risk pregnancy - gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, placental complications, preterm labor, and a son who spent his first month in the NICU - drove him to attack the most underserved gap in American healthcare. Bloomlife's FDA-cleared MFM-Pro wearable lets high-risk pregnant patients be monitored at home, replacing the endless clinic visits that define the current broken system. The company raised a $12.2M Series A in September 2024 and has secured reimbursement across 18 payers.
Neda Razavi
Neda Razavi is the CEO and Chairwoman of the Board at iSono Health, a South San Francisco medtech company building the world's first wearable, automated, portable FDA-cleared 3D breast ultrasound system. With 25 years of experience launching 65 products across six global platforms and generating over $9 billion in cumulative revenue at companies including Abbott, Roche, Medtronic, and Natera, Razavi joined iSono Health as an early investor and advisor before taking the helm in November 2023 to lead commercialization of the ATUSA system — a 2-minute, hands-free breast imaging device that pairs robotics, AI, and cloud analytics to make early breast cancer detection accessible to OB/GYNs and primary care providers without requiring a trained sonographer.