Although women make up half of the population, women’s health companies only receive about 2% of healthcare venture capital funding. A new initiative recently launched by the nonprofit Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM) aims to change that.
WHAM is focused on increasing awareness and funding for women’s health research. Its new initiative introduced this month is called the Innovator’s Circle and joins leaders from women’s health-focused funds.
The founding members include AHA Go Red for Women Venture Fund, Amboy Street Ventures, Avestria, Catalytic Impact Foundation, Coyote Ventures, Cross Border Impact Ventures, Digital DX Ventures, Emmeline Ventures, Foreground Capital, Goddess Gaia Ventures, Kaya Ventures, Kidron Capital, March of Dimes, Next Ventures, NextBlue, Seae Ventures, Swizzle Ventures, The Sparrow Fund, US Fertility and Zeal Capital Partners.
The network has four main priorities, according to Carolee Lee, founder and CEO of WHAM:
- Accelerating early-stage innovation in women’s health
- Strengthening women’s health funding through partnerships with later-stage capital partners
- Identifying breakthroughs in areas that “differently, disproportionately or exclusively impact women,” such as cardiovascular disease, neuroscience or autoimmune disease
- Creating a more “coordinated investment pipeline that connects early innovation with scaled investment and broader market deployment”
“By creating the Innovator’s Circle, WHAM is bringing together a cohort of early-stage investors to catalyze discovery, build stronger pipelines, and forge strategic investment pathways in this high-potential sector,” Lee said in an email. “Our goal is to advance the capital, connectivity, and coordination required to transform the women’s health investment landscape.”
Naseem Sayani, operating advisor of How Women Invest and advisor at Tower Capital, will be the director of the Innovator’s Circle.
“This is the pipeline engine,” Sayani said in a statement. “The Innovator’s Circle brings together the investors best positioned to recognize early innovation and builds the bridge to capital scale.”
WHAM has several other collaborative initiatives. These include the WHAM Research Collaborative, which is a global network of researchers and clinicians; the WHAM Investment Collaborative, a coalition of investment leaders focused on increasing private investment in women’s health; and the WHAM Life Sciences Collaborative, a group of industry leaders promoting the inclusion of sex-based biology across all stages of product development.
Although women’s health has long been underinvested in, it is beginning to attract more interest from venture capitalists. At the MedCity INVEST conference held in Chicago last week, Raffi Boyajian, investor and principal at Cigna Ventures, spoke on a panel about women’s health being a priority for the firm, specifically chronic conditions affecting women.
“I think women’s health is kind of a misnomer,” he said. “It’s like half the population. It’s just health. Cigna focuses … a lot on the commercial population. So when we think of women in the workplace, what chronic conditions are associated with that, especially to keep them working, to keep them healthy?”
Photo: asnidamarwani, Getty Images
