The Golden Age of FemTech
And I try to unpack an odd new DTC retail strategy.
Good morning.
Do any of you work at hotels? If so can we work together? I want to go on vacation 😡 🌴
Menopause is being turned into an investment opportunity. Since God created woman, woman has gone through menopause. Only recently, however, did this fact of life become a lucrative consumer category. “Femtech” as a category is nothing new. CoFertility was founded this year by Uber alum, and is based on a model that if you donate half your eggs, you freeze for free!!! What a STEAL (they’ve raised $5M). Carrot Fertility is a B2B fertility benefits company that targets employers and health plans (they’ve raised $114.2M). Clue is a free period and fertility tracking app that uses each user’s data to provide them with predictions about their cycle (they’ve raised $50M). This week, The New York Times wrote about what they’re coining the “menopause gold rush”. The market is flooding with high-profile, well-funded menopause-related beauty products and telemedicine start-ups, as well as a growing roster of celebrities willing to admit it’s happening to them. There’s the potential not only for a big cultural shift to happen, but for some number of people to profit off it. For most of these femtech companies, data — whether genetic or menstrual tracking — is the business model. For others I mentioned, your physical eggs are the business model. . Earlier this year, a review published the data security of the 23 most downloaded and highest-rated femtech apps (more than half were cycle tracking or pregnancy-related). It found that:
85% (20) of these apps shared data with third parties
69% (16) displayed a privacy policy, and
Only 52% (12) requested consent from users.
This is all to say that menopause care isn’t turning into something that is being more democratized or accessible by healthcare companies, but instead being categorized as another opportunity to be “cured” “alleviated” and marketed towards. Get ready to shell out cash for vitamin packs and cooling strips, and data for men and medical companies to sell you shit. There’s also a $ issue here because most of these startups are not designed to use insurance or medicare/medicaid, which means these shiny, *sparkly* cures to menopause are only accessible if you have cashhhhh.