A period tracker grew into a subscription business used by 80 million people a month. Its next chapter runs through perimenopause, medical research and the difficult business of earning trust with intimate data.
Most fertility businesses sell a treatment after something goes wrong. Onto Health is trying to sell clarity earlier - then use clinics, software and a $20 million Series A to carry patients through what comes next.
A CERN physicist built the hormone-free contraceptive she wanted for herself. The result became a regulated subscription used by millions - and a case study in why health-tech founders must sell the caveats as carefully as the convenience.
A fertility-clinic nurse kept getting asked the same question about vitamins she couldn't answer well. So she built the answer - a personalized supplement company with a clinician on the other end of the chat.
The company started with a five-minute birth-control intake. Its bigger bet is that accepting Medicaid, stitching care to insurance and staying useful after the first prescription can turn a commodity telehealth visit into a durable women’s-health platform.
Alfasigma USA sits in the narrow lane between prescription medicine and everyday nutrition. Its advantage is not one miracle ingredient, but control of the route from formulation and factory floor to clinician and customer.
How a fertility website became a Nasdaq-listed benefits company covering millions of employees - and why big employers hand it the hardest part of their health plan.
Carrot Fertility is a global fertility and family-building benefits platform that employers and health plans offer to their people. It covers the full journey - fertility preservation, IVF and IUI, pregnancy, adoption, surrogacy, low-testosterone care and menopause - with an expert Care Team, a global provider network, and the Carrot Card payment platform. Founded in 2016 after co-founder Tammy Sun faced a five-figure out-of-pocket egg-freezing bill, Carrot serves members in more than 195 countries and positions itself as a data-driven, outcomes-focused alternative to leaving fertility care to employees to navigate alone.
Joshua Abram was a serial entrepreneur and investor who spent two decades building category-defining, venture-backed companies across technology, hospitality, and life sciences. With his longtime partner Alan Murray, he co-founded Integral Ad Science, the workplace brand NeueHouse, the data-science firm Dstillery, and the fertility-technology companies TMRW Life Sciences and Conceivable Life Sciences. At Conceivable he set out to build the world's first fully automated IVF laboratory, AURA, with the aim of turning a Nobel Prize-winning therapy into a population-scale, lower-cost solution. He was named to Goldman Sachs' list of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs in 2021 and died in August 2025 at age 62.
Antiva Biosciences is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in South San Francisco developing topical, self-administered antiviral therapeutics for diseases caused by human papillomavirus (HPV). Its lead candidate, ABI-2280, is a vaginal tablet designed to clear high-risk HPV infection and treat pre-cancerous cervical lesions (CIN 2,3) without surgery - an approach aimed at preserving reproductive health and supporting the WHO's goal of eliminating cervical cancer.
Almond ObGyn is a Los Angeles-based, tech-enabled obstetrics and gynecology practice that set out to be the 'One Medical for women's health.' Founded in 2021 by Tara Raffi and Carly Allen and backed by a $7M seed round out of Y Combinator's S22 batch, Almond blended in-person clinic visits with telehealth, 24/7 text access to clinicians, and membership pricing to cover the full arc of reproductive care - from birth control and annual exams to PCOS, fertility, group pregnancy care, and menopause.
Conceive is a New York-based virtual fertility company that acts as an always-on care layer wrapped around the fertility and pregnancy journey. Founded in 2021 by Lauren Berson after her own three-year struggle with infertility, it pairs 24/7 nurse and coach support with cohort-based community and evidence-based education. Members reach a real person - a nurse, coach, or dietitian - in minutes rather than waiting weeks for a clinic callback, and the company sells both direct-to-consumer subscriptions and a B2B layer to fertility clinics.
Dandi Fertility is a New York-based femtech company that makes the physical and emotional grind of IVF a little less lonely. Its patent-pending IVF Care Kit - a heating pad, cooling pad, shot targets, a hands-free supply belt and a massage ball - is paired with a virtual care platform staffed by registered fertility nurses licensed across all 50 states. Founded in 2021 by fertility nurse Leyla Bilali and CEO Jake Kent, Dandi sells directly to patients and to fertility clinics, and its Care Kit was named one of TIME's 200 Best Inventions of 2024.
Pandia Health is a doctor-founded, women-led telehealth company that prescribes and delivers birth control, acne treatment, and menopause hormone therapy across the United States. Founded in 2016 by Stanford-affiliated physician Dr. Sophia Yen and a team of clinicians and operators, the company built its business on a simple bet: most American women still struggle to get continuous access to hormonal medication, and a recurring, mail-order subscription paired with a board-certified physician network can fix it.
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.
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.
Maternova is a woman-owned, woman-run social enterprise based in Providence, Rhode Island that curates, evaluates, and distributes evidence-based medical devices and diagnostics for maternal, neonatal, and reproductive health in low- and middle-income countries. Founded in 2009 as the first e-commerce marketplace for global health technologies, it connects inventors and manufacturers who lack distribution with the governments, NGOs, hospitals, and clinicians who need life-saving tools - aggregating small orders to unlock manufacturing runs and accelerate access to innovations that prevent maternal and infant deaths.
Evan Sussman is the co-founder and CEO of Granata Bio, a Boston-based biopharma company expanding access to fertility care by in-licensing IVF medications proven abroad and bringing them through U.S. clinical development and commercialization. A former fertility business unit head at EMD Serono, he built Granata to be revenue-positive early through a fee-for-service model, then raised a $14M Series A led by GV (Google Ventures), extended it, acquired ovarian-aging biotech Oviva Therapeutics, and struck a strategic investment and co-development deal with Gedeon Richter.
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.
Alife Health is a San Francisco-based health technology company building AI-powered software for IVF clinics. Its platform helps embryologists grade embryos, helps reproductive endocrinologists time ovarian stimulation, and helps clinics streamline scheduling and patient communication - all aimed at improving outcomes and lowering the cost of fertility care.
Mira is a women's health company that built the first at-home hormone monitor with lab-grade accuracy. Its connected device, single-use wands and AI-powered app measure FSH, LH, estrogen (E3G) and PdG so users can map fertility windows, manage PCOS, navigate menopause and share clinical-grade data with their doctors.
Orchid is a reproductive genetics company offering the first commercially available whole-genome sequencing test for IVF embryos. Founded by Noor Siddiqui in 2019, Orchid reads more than 99% of an embryo's genome before implantation and screens for over 1,200 monogenic conditions, chromosomal abnormalities, de novo mutations, and polygenic disease risk - so prospective parents can make informed choices before pregnancy begins.
Dr. Sophia Yen, MD, MPH is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pandia Health, the only women-founded, women-led, doctor-founded, physician-led birth control and menopause telemedicine and medication delivery service in the United States. A Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford Medical School with 20+ years in medicine, she brings MIT engineering instincts, UCSF medical training, and UC Berkeley public health expertise to the problem of making prescription contraceptives and hormonal care radically more accessible for women. She co-founded SheHeroes.org to inspire girls in STEM and has been a nationally recognized voice on reproductive rights, menstrual equity, and women's health innovation.
Sylvia Kang is the CEO and co-founder of Mira (Miracare), the company behind the world's first FDA and CE-registered comprehensive at-home hormone monitoring platform. A former concert pianist who pivoted to biomedical engineering, she built Mira from her kitchen table into a 140-person company with 200,000+ users worldwide and over 50,000 women helped to conceive naturally. Named to Inc. Magazine's 2024 Female Founders 250 list and Femtech World's Leader of the Year, Kang holds an MS in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia and an MBA from Cornell, and used her own product to conceive after age 35.
Paxton Maeder-York is the founder of Alife Health, an AI platform for IVF clinics that has raised $31.5M and raised the standard for data-driven fertility care. A Harvard-trained biomedical engineer and MBA, he previously helped build surgical robotics at Auris Health (acquired by J&J for $3.4B) and worked in product at Google X. In 2020, driven in part by the fact that his younger brother is an IVF baby, he founded Alife to apply machine learning to embryo selection, hormone dosing, and lab scheduling. By 2024 the company had launched five products, earned recognition from Fast Company and the World Economic Forum, and achieved a leadership transition - Paxton stepping into a board role as Melissa Teran took the CEO seat.