In the same quarter that the women's health menopause space achieved its first unicorn (≥$1B valuation), the NIH started scanning new grant applications for the word "gender." Private capital is hitting record highs while federal research funding and reproductive policy are moving the other way.
The women’s health market is maturing past fertility apps into menopause, primary care, oncology, and biopharma. At the same time, abortion bans are bending OB/GYN, primary care, and internal medicine training pipelines and worsening maternal outcomes in states that already had the worst numbers.
A lot moving in opposite directions at once.
As I do every May, here's the update on the women’s health space, touching on VC funding, policy, research, and what comes next.
Women’s Health Venture Capital Funding
Historically, women’s health funding has been concentrated in reproductive and maternal health, since these are conditions that uniquely affect women.
However, there are major areas of unmet need where women carry a higher burden and prevalence, including:
Cardiovascular disease
Osteoporosis
Menopause
Alzheimer’s disease
Boston Consulting Group estimates that closing the gap on these four areas alone could unlock a $100B+ market by 2030. And yet, despite women being half the population, women's health still receives only 4–6% of total healthcare VC dollars.
The 4–6% problem. Half the population. Driving the majority of healthcare decisions. Receiving 4–6% of healthcare VC. The World Economic Forum's January 2026 Women's Health Investment Outlook called this a structural mispricing, not a rounding error.
Silicon Valley Bank's Innovation in Women's Health 2025 report found women's health funding more than tripled from 2019 to 2024, outpacing healthcare overall. However, funding fell—or recalibrated—in 2025, to $1.5B, around where it was in 2023.
Here's how the past three years stack up:
Year | Core women's health VC | What's in the number |
|---|---|---|
2024 | $2.6B (+55% YoY) | $10.7B if you expand the definition to include autoimmune, Alzheimer's, behavioral health, and certain cancers. |
2025 | $1.58B | Deal counts fell. Median early-stage valuations hit their highest mark since SVB started tracking in 2019, pulled up by biopharma rounds. |
2026 Q1 | Record pace | Midi Health and Pomelo Care alone made up roughly half of women's health VC dollars after both crossed unicorn status in the same quarter. |
Hottest Sub-markets
Five sub-markets are pulling the most attention from investors and acquirers right now:
Maternal and women's primary care platforms. Value-based, virtual-first, payer-contracted models expanding past maternity into the full female lifecycle. Pomelo Care, for example, raised a $92M Series C at a $1.7B valuation in January 2026. The expansion plan moves from maternity into pediatrics, hormonal health, perimenopause, and preventive care. Pomelo now supports about 7% of U.S. births. The thesis is that a value-based, virtual-first, payer-contracted model can both improve outcomes and prove ROI — and right now it's the most-funded thesis in the category.
Fertility and reproductive health. Moving past consumer cycle tracking into therapeutics, IVF lab automation, and ecosystem benefit deals. Carrot Fertility, for example, has raised $116M and signed three big partnerships in late 2025: BCBS Global Solutions plus Oura and Dexcom. Those deals are how Carrot is building a moat — fertility benefit + ring + CGM as one stack. Underneath, the category itself is shifting from consumer apps into therapeutics, lab automation, and diagnostics (ReproNovo, Gameto, Conceivable Life Sciences, Inito).
Women's oncology. PwC names oncology as the second-fastest-growing core women's health segment after menopause through 2030.
Cardio-metabolic health. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women, and the category is finally drawing female-specific dollars.
Autoimmune health. Women carry roughly 80% of the U.S. autoimmune disease burden, and biopharma is leaning in.
Hottest Companies
Below I highlight some of the hottest companies in the press, whether it be for general news, expansion, partnerships, or fundraising.
fundraising.
Company | Sub-market | Why they're in the news |
|---|---|---|
Midi Health | Menopause | First menopause unicorn (Feb 2026). $100M Series D at $1B+. CEO Joanna Strober has reframed the public narrative as "AI company that happens to do menopause." |
Pomelo Care | Maternal / women's primary care | $92M Series C at $1.7B (Jan 2026). Expanding the maternity playbook into women's + children's full lifecycle. Now covers ~7% of U.S. births. Marta Bralic Kerns building a value-based care juggernaut. |
Carrot Fertility | Fertility benefits | Ecosystem deals with BCBS Global, Oura, and Dexcom in Q4 2025. The reference fertility-benefits platform for global employers. |
Maven Clinic | Women's + family virtual care | Still the largest virtual women's and family health unicorn. Expanding into clinical research. |
Hologic | Diagnostics & devices | $18.3B take-private by Blackstone and TPG in late 2025 — the largest femtech M&A on record. Resets diagnostic-side valuations. |
Hims & Hers | DTC menopause | Entered menopause in late 2025 plus a $1B convertible debt offering, bringing mass-market DTC distribution into women's midlife care. |
Gameto | Fertility biopharma | Cellular engineering for fertility (Fertilo IVM product). Raised $44M Series C in August 2025. One of the most-watched biopharma plays in the category. |
ReproNovo, Conceivable Life Sciences, Inito | Fertility therapeutics, lab automation, diagnostics | Names to watch as fertility moves from consumer tracking into therapeutics, lab automation, and diagnostics. |
Allara, Alloy, Evernow, Teal Health | Specialty virtual care | Continued momentum in PCOS, menopause weight care, hormone testing, and at-home cervical cancer screening. |
Eleven Health, Gennev | Menopause virtual care | Menopause-specific virtual care expansion. |
Overture Life | IVF lab automation | $20.6M raise in April 2025 for robotic embryology. |
The common thread: companies getting the most coverage are the ones with either a category-defining unicorn moment (Midi, Pomelo), a category-resetting M&A (Hologic), or a credible AI/automation angle (Gameto, Overture, Midi).
U.S. Policy on Women's Health and Research Funding
The private market is being asked to absorb work that the federal research apparatus used to do, and there's a limit to how far that can go. NIH-funded longitudinal cohort studies—the Women's Health Initiative being the canonical example—are not the kind of science venture capital steps in to fund.
The 2024 Biden buildup put real money on the table:
An executive order created the Fund for Women's Health Research at NIH, with more than $200M proposed for FY2025 and a long-term $12B ask to Congress.
ARPA-H launched the Sprint for Women's Health in February 2024 with $100M committed— the first White House initiative dedicated to women's health R&D.
The Gates Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Wellcome pledged $300M over three years for global health equity, including women's health.
Bipartisan menopause bills advanced, including the Menopause Research and Equity Act and the Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women's Health Act.
The second Trump administration has reversed most of that posture. The NIH canceled hundreds of grants covering reproductive health, fibroids, vaccine safety in pregnancy, and autoimmune disease. The CDC was instructed to remove terms like "pregnant person" from internal reports. In April 2025, HHS announced it would terminate the Women's Health Initiative Regional Center contracts and the Clinical Coordinating Center. After significant public backlash, HHS reversed course 24 hours later. The reversal stuck, but the researchers I follow describe a lasting chill on what they will actually propose.
Per April 2026 New York Times reporting, NIH is no longer canceling grants en masse. They’re now using a computational text analysis tool that flags applications mentioning terms like "gender" before approval. NIH grant spending is roughly $1B behind historical pace, per a Washington Post analysis, and women, cancer, and mental health have absorbed the steepest drop in new awards. In February 2026, reports surfaced that the administration was winding down ARPA-H's Investor Catalyst Hub in Cambridge—home of the Sprint for Women's Health infrastructure.
Net effect: federal funding for women's health research is flat to down in real dollars, narrower in scope, and politically volatile. Private capital can supplement that work, but it cannot replace it.
IVF serves as a great case study for what strong funding and scientific innovation can do for women’s health, by driving demand and building policy support. As highlighted in the World Economic Forum, IVF—a once-stigmatized experiment—is now a multibillion-dollar industry. The graph below tracks IVF investment and deal count from 1978 through 2025 alongside the major scientific breakthroughs (sorry, you may have to enlarge the image, I tried my best!).
Four Years Post Dobbs
We're nearly four years out from Dobbs. Thirteen states enforce total abortion bans, and another 28 have gestational-age limits of varying severity.
Total U.S. abortions have actually risen post-Dobbs. In 2023, the country saw an 11% increase compared to 2020, driven largely by telehealth medication abortion. Medication abortion accounted for roughly 63% of all abortions in the U.S., with many delivered via telehealth and supported by shield laws in 22 states and D.C.
That mail-based access is now in active jeopardy:
October 2025: Louisiana sued the FDA to roll back the 2023 REMS revision that allowed mifepristone to be mailed and dispensed at retail pharmacies.
May 1, 2026: the Fifth Circuit sided with Louisiana and reinstated the in-person dispensing requirement nationwide, effective immediately.
May 4, 2026: Justice Alito issued a one-week administrative stay through May 11 while Danco and GenBioPro's emergency appeal sits with the Supreme Court.
If SCOTUS lets the Fifth Circuit ruling stand, mail-based mifepristone collapses overnight in every state. Providers will likely fall back to misoprostol-only regimens, which are relatively less effective effective compared to ~99% for the combination protocol, with more pain, bleeding, and GI side effects.
The FDA's posture complicates things. Under pressure from state attorneys general and anti-abortion groups, the Trump-era FDA announced in September 2025 that it was conducting a comprehensive review of the 2023 REMS, and the Fifth Circuit cited that announcement as the agency conceding its earlier decision was procedurally flawed.
States aren't waiting on SCOTUS. Mississippi's HB1613, effective July 1, 2026, makes manufacturing, distributing, dispensing, or prescribing abortion medication a felony punishable by up to 10 years. Louisiana has reclassified mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances. Texas's HB7 lets private citizens sue providers and mailers. Whichever way SCOTUS rules this month, the federal scaffolding around medication abortion looks a lot less stable than it did six months ago.
Impact on Trainees
The OB/GYN training pipeline is bending around the abortion ban map. In the first post-Dobbs match cycle (2022 to 2023), OB/GYN applications to programs in ban states dropped about 10.5%, double the decline in states without bans. The 2023–2024 cycle widened the gap to 6.7% in ban states versus +0.4% in legal states, and internal medicine applications in ban states fell more than five times faster than in legal states.
Training quality has eroded alongside the application drop. ACOG’s 2025 position statement found that about 1 in 6 OB/GYN residency programs has lost local abortion training, even though ACGME still requires it.
Idaho already lost roughly 22% of its practicing obstetricians between August 2022 and November 2023. Since 57% of physicians practice in the state where they trained, today's application gap is tomorrow's maternity-care desert. Ban-state programs are still filling their slots because the U.S. match has more applicants than seats overall, which masks a meaningful decline in program competitiveness.
For internists, hospitalists, and EM physicians in ban states, this is your future consult bench shrinking. The same states with the worst maternal mortality numbers are losing the OB/GYN, MFM, and family medicine OB colleagues you'd call from the wards or the ED.
Source: McEachern JE, Traylor TA, Roman D. Change in Number of OB/GYN Physicians Practicing Obstetrics After the Dobbs Decision. JAMA Netw Open. 2025;8(7):e2524893. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.24893
Dashevsky’s Dissection
As a resident, I read this story two ways at the same time. The VC numbers tell me women’s health is finally a category investors take seriously, and the products/services my future patients will use are getting funded faster than ever. The policy story tells me the federal infrastructure that generates the evidence base behind that care is contracting at the same time. Both are true, and they’re happening to the same patients.
VC dollars cannot fund a Women’s Health Initiative. Thirty-year cohort studies, registries, long-tail safety data on pregnancy and autoimmune disease—none of that has a five-year exit. As NIH narrows what it will support and ARPA-H’s Investor Catalyst Hub winds down, the evidence pipeline behind future women’s health products gets thinner while the products themselves get richer.
From the IM side of the wards (and my future critical care ICU), the trainee data is what I keep coming back to. I’ll be admitting OB/GYN patients, co-managing peripartum cardiomyopathy, and calling MFM for consults for my whole career. A 22% drop in Idaho’s practicing obstetricians shows up on my pager as a future consult that goes unanswered. Residents who choose programs outside ban states are also choosing to avoid the legal ambiguity around miscarriage management, ectopic care, and a malpractice posture none of us were trained to navigate.
Three things I’m watching over the next 90 days:
SCOTUS on Louisiana v. FDA. Whichever way the Court rules, the FDA will look like an unstable regulator on this drug class for the rest of the year.
FY2027 NIH appropriations. That’s the cycle where the gender-flag text-screening posture either becomes permanent or gets walked back.
Late-stage women’s health rounds. If Series B and late-C deals don’t unfreeze in 2026 H2, the Q1 unicorn pop was a top, not a turn.
In summary, women’s health is getting its biggest private-capital tailwind to date, while the federal research and regulatory infrastructure behind women’s care is contracting and getting more politically volatile. For us clinicians, that combination shows up as faster product adoption with a thinner evidence base, and a training pipeline that is already bending around abortion policy and will reshape who can practice where over the next decade.
